Jewelry Design Composition: Playing With Building Blocks Called Design Elements

Jewelry making is a constructive process of expression. The language of expression begins with the idea of design elements. Design elements are the smallest meaningful units of design. Design elements function in a similar way as vowels and consonants in a language. They have form. They have meaning. They have expression. Some can stand alone, and others are dependent and must be clustered together. Strong jewelry designers are aware of and can decode these expressive aspects of design elements and how they are included within any piece. This is one part of learning a disciplinary literacy in design. This literacy begins with a process of decoding and builds to an intuitive fluency in design. This article focuses on this process of decoding.