Break the patterns

Drawing the attention of the viewer has always been important, no matter if you are working on the web or preparing a print brochure/catalog.

If you are using a pattern in your work, then you can achieve this fairly easily. You can simply break the pattern, allowing the viewer's eye to immediately recognize differences, no matter how subtle they are. This technique can be used everywhere.

Here are some examples:

On the squares pattern we can see, that one black square is missing, which immediately disturbs the eye flow. If we just rotated/moved/scaled the square, we would have achieved the same effect.

The arrows pattern shows one slightly rotated arrow, which is pointing in a different direction. In this case it's easy to see.

The dots pattern has one dot, which is only slightly bigger than the others, but that's enough for the eye to find it.

The polygon pattern is very subtle, and perhaps it's hard to see where it's broken. One polygon simply has six sides instead of five, but is exactly as high as the others.