Joanie

Andrew, your tree doesn't make me uneasy mainly because your heaviest/lowest branch is on the left. So it reads as flowing. The tree that Hans used had a larger gap on the left and more weight on the right. The comfort of having the weight on the left, flowing to the largest part, and then empty space on the right is better.

Just like a sentence, bringing it back to the topic...

A sentence can taper off to the right and you don't mind....

.................................................. ..........................But start a sentence farther in and we tend to want to impart meaning to that. We want to know why it starts there. Now you could also consider that as a dynamic element, because sometimes making the viewer uncomfortable is what you as an artist are striving for. Knowing WHY it works is an advantage.

I wonder, too, how much is tied up in people and reading. Because people who read a LOT are able to "hear" the text and interpret clues (like where the sentence starts) on a more unconscious level. That's why the nonstandard fonts tend to bother some people, I think... they really do "hear" it on a lower level, subsonic as it were, rather than people to whom reading is not as innate. Focus on nuance and small detail will cause a person to be more troubled by such things on a very deep level. Just a guess.

Joanie

__________________