5 Principles of Design and how to apply them to your Life.

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As a person working in design, I realized that it is good to have a certain number of principles that you apply to your work. Art and design differ in the way that design always has a purpose. So it’s good to have your toolkit of principles ready to play around with and use as a fundament to get things started and orient yourself.

But why not take this to another level? Because maybe you’re not a person doing any design-related work (although I would argue that everything you do is design-related in some way, shape or form) or you are a person working in design, but have never taken the time to look at the things you deal with every day from another, unorthodox perspective. So let’s ask ourselves the question, what sort of additional values some principles that apply to design might have on a grander scale.

Principle 1 — Emphasis

1. Emphasis

The first principle I want to talk about is Emphasis.

Emphasis asks the question, what is the first piece of information that gets communicated while looking at a design. It is about Order and Storytelling. What’s the first thing I see and what does it convey?

To further analyze this principle, I want to dive into the domain of Interior Design. More precisely, the restructuring of my living room.

Before thinking about the contents of this article, my living room pretty much looked the same as probably most living rooms do. When you walked into the room, you looked at a couch that is facing a media console with a TV on it. The idea behind the structure was logical. When I come home from work, I want to relax on the couch and watch some Netflix or play some video-games. But then the question occurred to me: is this actually the ideal way to spend my evenings? Wouldn’t it be better to use the few hours of free time I have per day more productive and with a deeper purpose? What if my living room had more “living” in it? What if it was a place of writing. Of doing creative work. Of gathering with friends, eating good food, discussing interesting ideas.