Here’s What You Should Learn
- Design plays a critical role in user decision making
- Successful design has some guidelines to follow: Balance, Alignment, Proximity, Repetition, and Contrast
- Design should be brief but meaningful
When I was a young boy, I had a natural inclination toward being creative. I would spend hours drawing my favorite action figures, fighting dinosaurs, futuristic moon bases, and landscapes. Although my drawings were often poor, I never became discouraged or impatient with my lack of early talent. I enjoyed the process of creating and it never felt like work. I was fortunate to have the support and encouragement of my parents so I continued to pursue creativity for the rest of my life.
What I have discovered since my childhood is that design carries much more weight in our lives than mere aesthetics. Design choices heavily affect the paths human beings take. Bad design can render good functionality meaningless while good design can give poor functionality a shot of being adequate for success. And the power of good design with good function gives us companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon.
So, what makes good design?
Industrial designer, Dieter Rams‘s put it plainly: “It makes a product useful and understandable, is innovative, aesthetic, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough to the last detail, environmentally friendly, and involves as little design as possible.”
That last one always sticks with me. The less is more concept of minimalism. I love that. That is how I try to design. I read a book called Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More With Less last year that brilliantly encapsulates this idea.
In addition to being terse, what other aspects make good design? We can start with a pretty solid list of simplistic guidelines to follow.
- Balance – A sense of equilibrium whether through symmetry, asymmetry, or radial balance.
- Alignment – This refers to page layout for optimizing how people view and read our designs.
- Proximity – This is creating connections or disassociations with design elements by moving them closer or further away.
- Repetition – A little redundancy to hammer in our design messaging
- Contrast – If you ever heard a client say “I want it to pop off the page” they are talking about contrast. Juxtaposing one color, icon, element, or word with a polar opposite one allows viewers to focus on the thing you want them to the most.
Conclusion
Design plays a critical role in our everyday life. Design should be thoughtful, purposeful, and intentional with clear objectives and goals defined, and follow some helpful guidelines to ensure it is being employed as successfully as possible.
Here is some of my design work where I used those principles above.
