A good doctor prescribes medicines whose effects he knows for sure. In the same way, a designer must be guided by principles he understands. It’s one thing to mix colors intuitively, but it’s another to understand the psychological nuances behind it.
Such knowledge helps to clearly convey thought and create a design that one will want to copy. And in a conversation with a client, it’s easier to explain why a design looks this way and not the other way around. Talent is great, but talent dressed in knowledge is better.
Equilibrium
This is the state in a composition when the elements are balanced with each other. To understand balance, imagine that each design element – text box, figure, and image – has a visual weight. Hence the concept of balance: design elements should balance each other and evoke an intuitive sense of completeness in what you see.
Alignment and modular grids
Needed to create an orderly and coherent composition in which elements are aligned with each other.
Color
Colors are a designer’s main friends. Color affects our mood and brings to us an intuitive meaning common to a culture. Color affects us on an unconscious level, so it’s great when a designer knows the psychology of color.
For example, hot colors – red and yellow – have the longest wavelength, which means that their perception requires a significant amount of energy. Such colors increase the pulse rate and breathing, they are associated with active and offensive actions: knowing these nuances, the designer already with the help of color will create the desired association.
Contrast
Contrast directs attention to key design elements. It preserves the differences between similar elements in the design, thereby improving the overall readability of the image. In short, contrast helps the design “catch the eye”.
Hierarchy and scale
Designers tell visual stories in which elements are arranged in order of importance. The most important element has more visual weight: the eye lingers on it first, then glides over less important objects. This ordering of elements is the visual hierarchy. Examples of how to achieve it:
- use a large or bold font for the headline;
- place key information above other design elements;
- emphasize large, bright or centered elements – they weigh more visually than dull and less clear images.
Repetition
Repetition helps to tie individual elements together. It’s a key element of branding, but it’s also used in “one-off” designs. Also, repetition is the basis of patterns and textures.
Think of Coca-Cola or Apple: their logos and color schemes immediately flash in your mind. It’s all about repetition: it creates a consistent brand image and ties the elements together.
Direction
Since design is made for people, it’s important to understand how the “flow” of the user’s attention moves. In what order do his eyes explore the page? How does a person understand where to look next?
Researchers at Nielsen Norman Group have identified some eye movement patterns. Test subjects browsed web pages while scientists recorded the direction of gaze to reveal patterns of content “consumption.” The results, in the form of heat maps, are summarized above.
The research discovered standard patterns of gaze movement: in the form of the letters “F” and “E”. Therefore, maximum attention is concentrated in the top left corner of the page, and it dissipates smoothly as you move downward.
Typography
The right font, like color, sets the emotional tone of the design.
Many fonts were designed for specific purposes, so just learn which ones are used for what.
Negative space
This is the empty space around or between objects. It is an important design element that:
- gives “breathing room” to the elements of the image,
- helps to distinguish them,
- creates hidden images (and the brain loves puzzles!).
There are certainly more than ten principles of visual design. We hope that the topic has interested you and motivated you to further intellectual pursuits. Or, for example, to attend UX Mind School courses. In all our courses, we go through both practice and theory in detail: no intuitive poking, but working cases and scientifically proven principles of visual design.