Basics are Bomb
Many people underestimate or are unaware of the power of using basic design principles. It is easy to have the tendency to try and create something extraordinary and do something that nobody has ever done before when designing interfaces, but the truth is the basics are tried and true methods and some of the greatest interfaces are the greatest because they have perfected these principles. If you don’t do anything, but these three principles, your designs will be better than mediocre ;)
Consistency
What? You mean that there are companies who have inconsistencies within their own platform or website?! Yep it happens all the time and it is one of the easiest ways of knowing the maturity of that platform. It is a lot easier to keep consistency when you are a team of one, but it is still something that you shouldn’t overlook. Creating a design system is a great step in ensuring that you are constantly using the same components and it is especially important when your team grows and you are all working on different parts of the interface.
Having consistency throughout the interface establishes trust with the user, familiarity, and reliability. It is important that you create uniformness in your designs and that similar components act similarly.
Color
Color should be consistent amongst not only your platform, but also your brand. Color is one of the first things that customers/users notice and recognize, those colors should be chosen carefully and then used consistently.
Color should be used to make distinctions within the platform, separate different parts of the platform with different colors, they don’t need to be completely different colors always, but you can change up the value, shade, etc.
Lastly, color should be used with intention. Many people will make connections to colors and they should be used appropriately. It seems obvious, but it is often done poorly. For example, using green for a delete button would cause friction with many users, and cause many to accidentally delete instead of save.
Alignment
Alignment is one of those things that can be a subtle irritator telling your brain that something doesn’t feel right on the page. Having perfect alignment will make the page look clean.
Not everything will have the same padding between each other, but have consistency between similar items and having padding that is divisible by the same number will make everything seam proportional. And while the user will not know why this is happening, the interface will feel clean and connected.
Final Thoughts
There are many more, very important, guiding design principles and it is important to learn them. These are three that I would argue are some of the most important to get right and will give you a great base for your design.
Emma Lightfoot is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the (DGM 1220 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
