Decorative Elements & Ornaments

Decorative elements: ornament as punctuation, and how much of it to use

Ornament and type look like two separate crafts now, one drawn and one set, but for most of the history of printing they were handled the same way by the same person, and that is still the most useful way to think about what these elements are doing on a page.

The oldest of them is the ivy leaf, or hedera, which in Greek and Latin texts was set into the line to divide one passage from the next, so it worked mostly as punctuation. When printing came along, fleurons were cast as individual pieces of metal type and dropped into the line beside the letters and numbers, which meant a printer could close a chapter, break up a list, or build an entire border out of repeats without having to commission any artwork at all. Aldus Manutius started using a vine leaf in his editions around 1501, and that shape has been known as the Aldine leaf ever since.

None of that has really changed apart from the tools. An ornament still earns its place by marking something, e.g., a break, an ending, a corner that needs a bit of weight, and it gets judged against the type it sits with. It also stops working as soon as it turns up everywhere, since a mark that appears under every single heading is no longer marking anything in particular.

Where ornament still earns the space

• Book interiors: chapter openers, section breaks, drop caps and tailpieces.
• Certificates, diplomas and official documents.
• Wedding stationery, orders of service and event menus.
• Wine, whisky and heritage packaging, often as foil or an embossed panel.
• Restaurant identities and hand-painted style signage.
• Monograms, crests and quality marks.
• Editorial pull quotes and long-read layouts that need a break with some weight to it.

Using ornament so it means something

Make every ornament mark something, and take out the ones that do not. A flourish closing a section is earning its place, but put the same flourish under all the headings, and it turns into wallpaper. The bigger problem is that ornament compounds, so a decorated initial, a rule, corner pieces, and a bordered panel all land on one page, each canceling the others, and you finish with no emphasis anywhere despite having tried multiple times.

Size it against the type it sits with, not against the space you have. Find the size where the heaviest stroke in the ornament looks about as heavy as the text, then nudge it into place by eye against the x-height, because the visual center of a flourish is rarely where the bounding box says it is. Center it on the coordinates and it will look right at 400% and slightly off at actual size, which is the only size anybody sees it at.

And remember that this material comes with a date attached, whether the brief wanted one or not. Baroque scrollwork puts the work somewhere, Art Deco geometry puts it somewhere else, folk motifs somewhere else again, and the client who asked for timeless will read that period before they read anything you actually designed. Where you do not want the reference, a plain rule will break the page just as well and say nothing at all.

Where the ornament in these sets comes from

• Folk art. Regional motifs, e.g., birds, flowers, animals, geometric bands, flattened into vector. Symmetrical by tradition and built to repeat.
• Period ornament. Baroque scrollwork, Art Deco geometry and classical detailing, redrawn from printed sources. Each one dates a design fairly precisely.
• Ancient and archaeological. Motifs lifted from Egyptian and other early decorative systems, where the shapes were originally symbols.
• Botanical elements. Leaves, stems, and flower shapes reduced to simple silhouettes.
• Painted ornament. Watercolor sprigs and decorative marks, raster and fixed in size.