Design 101: Fundamentals of Design for Everyone

Hello everyone,

I have finally succeeded in finalising the Design 101 guide, which has been waiting to be published in my drafts for a long time. Before starting, there are a few things I want to say.

While preparing this guide, I tried to touch on the points that I found the most ideal way in my design journey by trials and errors. I describe the “Clean Design” approach as an approach that you can encounter in different disciplines in every part of your life. For this reason, this article has been named the “Fundamentals of Design for Everyone”. Whether you are a designer, a software developer or in different professions, you can apply these approaches that I have discussed in the context of design in your fields.

It would be unfair if I do not say that I started this study by being influenced by the Clean Code approaches of Uncle Bob, which is especially well known in the profession of software.

I will share a few links for those who want to take a look;

Clean Code — Uncle Bob: All Lessons

The Clean Code Blog by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)

The Clean Architecture — Beginner’s Guide

Clean Coders — Clean Code with Uncle Bob Episode 1

Now, let’s get started :)

1) Define Your Mission and Character:

After you accomplish this part, make sure your design will even start to come to life in your mind. The rest will be just to position the right elements optimally. Whether you are designing a product, a website or a social media post, you should start by getting to know what you are going to offer before you start designing it. Your colours, lines, font, and components must be related to the service/product directed by the design.

If you have a corporate identity & design guide, this will give you very helpful tips. Oftentimes, starting with a guide helps you know your limits and keep your design consistent. In the lack of a guide, defining a character for the product/service is a method I use frequently. Of course, many technical names may have been given to this, but I try to describe it with certain human characters.

For example; Let’s imagine you are designing social media posts for a software service. If you don’t already have specific templates or guides such as a corporate design guide and all of the works are expected from you, start by customizing this service.

While doing this; You should consider your service, your target audience and the character that you want to show on social media. Does this product remind you of a playful, energetic, restless child? Or is it a serious engineer who is an expert in its profession? Remember, these do not have to be opposite characters, you can also build a character with both. It’s like creating a fictional character. Just write a story.

Which would your target audience get along better with? You can start by asking yourself this question.

2) Define Your Goal

Let’s continue with the boy who is restless and playful. What does this boy want to do? If we are talking about a software service, it is probably trying to increase brand awareness on social media, make more friends, be in the spotlight and be in demand. Therefore, for this, it should piece together the content to fit with the target audience with appropriate designs and be in front of other competitors. So how can we make this possible by design?

3) Define the Mode of Your Design

Funny, serious, informative, neutral, enthusiastic-

Regardless of the character, you position your brand on, the mode of your content can vary according to the level of the audience you are addressing. Sometimes there are situations where you need to be more didactic, sometimes more naughty, and sometimes more serious. Before you start your design, defining the mode of the content you need to design will be a reference for your choices in the following steps.

4) Choose Your Color Palette

Still don’t have a color palette? Then let’s take a look at the point where you position the brand/product. You may have come across a lot of content about the psychology of colors before. At this stage, the choices you make while creating your color palette should be compatible with the character you position the brand/product and the mode of your design.

Although the colors are eye-catching, you should be simple and consistent in your choices. It will be helpful to add 2 main colors and various accent colors to start. Take advantage of the effects and characters of colors while doing this. Limit colors. When choosing your main colors, consider that you may need colors that you can create contrast. Limiting your colors will add character to your design. Consider the design hierarchy and try to create a hierarchy among colors, rather than choosing several colors.

Don’t forget that the human brain is visual learner.

If you use more than one accent color, your main focus point may be overlooked. Therefore, the color hierarchy is the best way to express the message you want to give, even without using words.

I use Adobe Color for creating my color palettes. As you can create your color palettes, you can also benefit from the vast library where you can find several pallets.

5) Choose Your Font

Just like colors, fonts are one of the most important elements that will give character to your design. I suggest you dream a little here. What does the font Times New Roman, which everyone knows for sure, mean for you? Academic articles, textbooks, and many serious things… Just like color psychology, you can access many detailed resources about font psychology. Maybe we can talk about this in-depth in another article. What you need to do in your font selection is essentially the same as what you did in the color selection.

Remember the character, remember the message you want to give, remember the mode of your design.

That’s all!

If your design includes text components in different importance, remember that you should present them in a hierarchy. You can think of it just like headings, subheadings, and paragraphs in content. You can use various variations of the font you choose according to the texts you want to emphasize in the design. Such as bold, italic, thin, and heavy bold. If you can’t access enough options for your font, you can also do this hierarchy with the dimensions of your text and the color hierarchy we took into account when choosing it in the previous step. We didn’t skip the color hierarchy step, did we?

6) Choose Your Canvas

Here we are where the painter takes his/her brush. But first, we need a canvas. Your design must be compatible with the platforms you will share it. Especially if we talk about social media, many different social media platforms have different post sizes. If you want your design to look compatible enough in your feed on the platform you share, you should choose fit canvas sizes. In summary; Your canvas should fit your purpose and target sharing channel. If you are using Canva, you can easily access the canvas templates you need for every platform.

7) Simplicity

Let’s start by thinking about the difference between simple and basic. If you want to focus on the message, it is very important to plan the balance of your design. Balance is a pretty broad concept for the design, and we’re going to have to remember this element over and over in many of the fundamental processes of design. But when it comes to simplicity, another concept that you should consider is functionality. All components (texts, icons, logos, etc.) in your design must have a function. With as few but essential components as possible, you can make your design simple, easy on the eyes and functional.

8) Do Not Use Unnecessary Components:

Remember that all components must have a function. For example; If it serves your purpose, it can be functional to use little shadows where necessary. It’s a classic way to highlight the component you want to make a focus point. You should not think of functionality only as “enough to make oneself understand the matter”. Every detail that can make your design more attractive and interesting for your target audience can be functional.

Avoid using unnecessary text and graphics. It is often more difficult to simplify content. But remember that there is an important difference between simple and basic. Feel free to simplify and get rid of unnecessary elements.

Engage with your audience to make them wonder and continue to review.

9) Background Colors

You should avoid complex backgrounds as much as possible. If the point you want to tell your topic is not hidden in the background, you should only use the background as a tool to keep your audience’s attention in the right place. Do not strain the eyes, do not distract.

Let your background provide the right atmosphere to emphasize your main message.

If you are designing something that is full of content and has plenty of elements, if the thing you want to draw attention to is any text or component in the design, I can recommend you to choose your background in a single color or a soft gradient. Of course, harmony is always very important. You can also use your background to create contrast.

10) Focus

In the previous chapters, we have inevitably made many references to the focus issue. The main principle to ensure focus is the hierarchy. As you can see, it is very difficult to separate many concepts and principles from each other. Each one supports the other as a whole.

There are countless techniques for highlighting the element in your design that you want to keep in focus. Darker or lighter tones, different sizes or shapes, color hierarchy are the most basic examples of this. To draw attention to the most important part of your design, you must define a focus point. This is the part where you will highlight the message you want to give to the audience. Often all the others elements of the design are positioned accordingly after the focal point is determined. It is possible to support your highlight on your focal point with words, colors and images.

Design hierarchy is related to the way the human eye perceives what it sees.

When positioning your focal point, you must consider the perception pattern of the human eye. Consider user concentration and position your shadows, colors, and bold areas accordingly.

11) Proportion

The visual hierarchy we mentioned while talking about the focal point in design contains math in itself. One of the most basic ways to achieve this visual hierarchy is proportion. In the simplest terms, the elements serving the same purpose have the same dimensions in the design, and the spaces between the elements are aligned proportionally with each other. You can think of it as the proportionally sizing of the element to be kept in focus in the visual hierarchy.

You can imagine that just like the title hierarchy and font in texts. Text hierarchy is more important than text size. It’s all about the perfect hierarchy. As much as you need the perfect hierarchy to ensure readability in the texts, you should achieve this perfect proportion to keep the target audience in focus and convey your message to the others in the most accurate way.

Proportion is balance and harmony.

12) Positioning

Positioning is one of the important steps of the visual hierarchy. In particular, we mentioned the positioning required for the human eye perception in the positioning of the component to be kept in focus. In addition, the correct alignment of texts and the spaces you need to leave on the left, right, top and bottom of your canvas is also part of positioning. In particular, you should take care to keep the components you want to keep in focus as much as possible in the center. The edges and corners of the canvas can be used for simple design elements that visually support your content.

When it comes to texts, the ideal alignment is from left to right. That’s because the human eye commonly reads from left to right.

It is also very important to position the elements that serve the same purpose in your design so that it is clear that they are interconnected. For example, let’s say you make a list where you use icons and bullet points in your design. The alignment between the icons used for listing should be at the same rate so that the human eye can understand at first glance that they are parts of the same whole, even before reading the content.

You should not ignore mathematics of positioning for balance, order, harmony and unity.

13) Whitespaces
Let your design breathe. As we mentioned especially in the positioning section, be careful to leave white areas when placing your components on your canvas. Do not force the eyes. You don’t have to fill all the empty spaces, what matters is your focus point and the elements that can draw the audience to this point. An element that you position in the middle of a white page will probably be your most interesting element. Make peace with the white spaces :)

Last but not least;

Although I try to write more and more, as you will notice, each of the concepts is very related to each other. It is very difficult to make a clear distinction. To sum up, I suggest you remind yourself of the concepts of “balance, hierarchy, proportion, harmony, functionality” often. Although we have discussed it in the context of design, I prefer to position it as 5 main principles that you can apply in many areas of your life.

I hope it’s useful content for you. I’d love to hear your ideas and talk about the main principles I’ve missed if any. I am looking forward to hearing about the methods that you have noticed and adopted as a principle in your design journey 🙌🏻

It’s really lovely of you are here, thank you 🌟