There are twelve basic principles of design: Contrast, Emphasis, Proportion, Balance, Hierarchy, Movement, Repetition, Rhythm, Pattern, White Space, Variety, and Unity. These principles work together to create visually appealing and functional designs that engage and make sense to their target audiences.
Below we are going to discuss what these principles mean and how you can easily integrate them into your design work.
Contrast and Emphasis
Contrast is the use of colour and shades to accentuate important design elements, in turn creating Emphasis on certain design elements, such as important information and headings, or product images – Essentially the information you want your audience to see primarily.
Proportion, Balance and Hierarchy
Proportion indicates how much room an individual element takes up. A group of elements then needs to be “Balanced” across the entire design.
Usually, elements are proportioned and balanced based on the Hierarchy of information dictated by the design brief and the target audience. Hierarchy essentially means that the primary and most important information and imagery would have the largest proportions and the least important information and imagery would have the smallest proportions.
How Repetition, Rhythm, Pattern influence Movement
The proportioned elements then need to be balanced together using the principles of Repetition, Rhythm and Pattern to form a kind of “visual story” to lead the audiences’ eye through the artwork following the hierarchy that has been outlined – This “visual story” is a principle of its’ own, known as the Movement.
Repetition is used to set out ‘rules’ for your audience so they can understand better what they’re looking at on your design, or recognise your brand at a glance. This can apply to both graphics or text.
For example: Headings use the font Josefin Sans, bold weight and a size of 18pt and have a bold purple underline that sits right against the base of the text. Subheadings – Josefin Sans, regular weight at a size of 14pt.
Audiences would be able to quickly find the information they’re looking for because they can quickly identify the repetitive heading and subheading ‘rule’.
Rhythm is used to emulate emotion in your overall design. A more regular rhythm of elements shows a calm and more informational emotion. This style would suit something like a product brochure or service information page. A rhythm that is more erratic and irregular shows more excitement, enthusiasm and is typically more eye catching. This style suits designs for events, time-sensitive promotions, or new products.
Patterns can, for obvious reasons, be confused with repetition as they both deal with repeated elements. But the similarities end there. A pattern is usually made up of a set of graphical elements, much like you would see on gift wrapping paper. Patterns are generally used as backgrounds for sections of your artwork, and as a general ‘rule’ only graphic elements should be used, text used in patterns tends to give people headaches.
White Space
While patterns can be useful for filling spaces within your designs, you never want to overcomplicate designs. This is where White Space comes into play. White Space is also known as negative space, and this refers to the areas that have no design elements within it. These spaces keep the design from becoming cluttered and disrupting the Movement or “visual story” of the design. White space also allows the audience’s eye to rest and easily concentrate on one element at a time. This gives them time to digest the information that the design gives them.
Variety
Another useful principle to keep your audience engaged is Variety. Variety is the use of any/all types of design elements like; typography, colour, image/photography, patterns/textures etc. It prevents the design from becoming monotonous and boring, which in turn loses the engagement of your audience. However, much like many of the other principles within this blog, effective use of Variety requires the use of other principles such as Balance, Movement, Proportion and very importantly, White Space. Remember; sometimes less is more.
Unity
Unity is the final, and probably most important principle. Unity is the relationship of all the other principles working together to deliver the audience a design that communicates a clear concise message, while also looking 10/10 in terms of aesthetics.
In all the visually designed work that we produce at Wildfire, we implement these principles to communicate clear and concise messages to the audiences of our clients’.
For more information on our design services please contact us today.