If you go through Amazon, or a book store and find their art and design section, you can find lots of books on design. Some may have 6, 8, or even a dozen different design principles.
Most of those books are designed for designers, who are looking to making something look nice.
I want to focus on something much simple. Making it so you can have a nice looking web site, but also something that properly allows you to communicate your message – what ever that is.
To do so, we’ll focus on 4 basic design principles:
- Contrast
- Alignment
- Proximity
- Repetition
Contrast
Contrast is the idea of making something look different than the rest of the elements around it. Because it looks different, a user’s eye is going to be drawn to it. Think about a black and white photo, where one element is in color.
There are several ways we can create contrast:
- Vary the size
- Make text bold(er) – technically called font weight
- Use a color
- Use white space so there’s only one element on the screen.
When you contrast, you want to make the change noticeable. Subtly is not your friend. If the change is too small, it is said to conflict with your design.
Alignment
Aligning items isn’t just making sure your text paragraphs are in alignment. It’s also about making sure that photos align, and maybe they need to be cropped or resized to align them with text, or other photos.
I can’t tell you how many times I see a series of 4 or 5 photos, and each one is slightly different in size, and causes the photos to not line up compared to one another.
Proximity
Proximity is the idea of the distance between elements, helping to define the relationship between them.
The closer they are, the closer the relationship. We do this in real life – the closer we stand to someone, the more we trust them, or are related to them, either through familial or friendship. We naturally expect that to carry through with other aspects of our life.
Repetition
Now repetition might seem to be the opposite of contrast, however, without repeating the design elements, how would you know something is going to stand out.
We want to make sure everything from the size of our fonts and images, the colors we use, and the type face we use is consistent through our designs. Otherwise it looks like different people designed something, and people may wonder if they’ve left the site and are on a website which is supposed to mimic the first site – a potential security hazard or breech.
Improving Visual Communication through Simple Design Principles was originally found on Access 2 Learn
