The Art of Distortion. Shape-related effects

Any shape not consisting of straight lines, or curved lines whose curvature is constant or changing according to a simple rule, are perceived as shapeless clouds by the human eye.  Such forms are useful in cases when adding any crisp, geometric form would contradict to the existing ensemble of forms in the composition.  For example, amorphous cloudy shapes are great for relatively large background images, those that partly underlie other elements of the page and therefore do not need to honor their linear boundaries.

Thus, the most common shape editing technique is an irregular fade-out at the edges, a fuzzy cropping resulting in a shape which is not only non-linear but hardly discernible at all.  This effect is directly related to the blur themes we've discussed in the previous section (for example, it is most often used with photographic images, while hand-drawn or abstract geometric shapes usually look less satisfying with this sort of figuration), although it's not the image itself that is blurred in this case, but instead the image's transparency mask.  Modern design would suffer very much without this simple effect, just as modern music would not survive without the primitive volume fade-out finalizing the great majority of pop and rock songs.

Another common technique with photographs is cutting them out of the background---without a gradual fade-out, but with a complex irregular shape (corresponding to that of the portrayed object) as a result.  Quite naturally, while blurred edges are more often used with relatively large images, simple cut-outs work better for small, icon-sized images.

It is not a good idea to force an amorphous image to "hang in the air" without any sort of support.  Most often, such images abut against straight lines or linear elements surrounding them.  Such adjoining intensifies the contrast of amorphism and geometry---which is unavoidable anyway, if only because the amorphous shape has no place to linger on other than a Web page with its outward rectangular frame.

For a conclusion, what I would like to stress once again is that your main goal is to create a solid, coherent, tightly bound composition, rather than exercise your newest and coolest plug-ins on each of its elements. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this integrity goal can be effectively achieved by the most basic effects, either non-texturizing or the simplest texturizing ones. Most other effects have a too strong personality and feel uneasy in a composition unless they have an absolutely dominating role in it.