Relations are everywhere, and they dictate the way we perceive things. Visual objects relate to the audience who views them, to the format on which they have been arranged, and also with the other objects within the composition. To further explain this idea better, I found this illustration of several birds.
So first of all, these visual objects (the different bird heads) all relate to the viewer. Myself as the viewer, personally I was able to quickly identify what these objects were and I can relate to them because they were all easily recognizable to me. But they are also in relation to the format of the page, and to each other. Each object is spread evenly apart and they are structured in a 2 by 3 grid. How would they relate to one another if they weren’t spaced evenly apart, or instead of being centered on the composition they were overlapping or in a more random arrangement? This would change their relations and it would change the visual meaning.
Visual Communication 