Design Principles & Their Implementation

Design Principles & their Implementation ✅

Courtesy of @_ayushjangra_
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One of the most difficult parts of talking about the principles of design is figuring out just how many principles there actually are (are there five? Seven? Ten?). 🤷‍♂️
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In reality, there are roughly a dozen basic principles of design that beginning and expert designers alike should keep in mind when working on their projects.
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In addition, there are another dozen or so «secondary» design principles that are sometimes included as basics (for example, the Gestalt Principles, typography, color, and framing) 💁‍♂️
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Understanding and implementing the principles covered above is vital to the success of any design project.
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Designers should aim to understand how each of these design principles actually impacts their work 🎯
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Studying how other designers have implemented these ideas to structure their own designs is also an incredibly valuable tool in learning to create better designs.

Contrast

Contrast is often the magical key ingredient to making your designs `pop’, which is a (sometimes frustrating) demand from many design clients.
So, use contrast to make your designs visually ‘pop’, draw attention to certain elements of your design.

Balance

Every element in design like typography, colors, images, shapes, patterns, etc. — carries a visual weight.
Some elements are heavy and draw the eye, while other elements are lighter.
A slightly off-centered layout lends a balance between the bold image and minimalist typography on The Nue Co’s website.

Unity

Unity refers to how well the elements of a design work together.
Visual elements should have clear relationships with each other. Unity also helps ensure concepts are being communicated in a clear, cohesive fashion.
The use of a blue throughout the design (including the blue overlays on the images), along with consistent typography and proportion, creates a sense of unity in the design.

Hierarchy

At the top of a hierarchical scale, we have the most important things, the kings. Hierarchy is most easily illustrated through the use of titles and headings in a design.
Grafill’s website creates hierarchy through the use of layout (the most important part is at the top), size (more important content is larger), and typography (headlines are larger than body text).

Variety

Variety can be created in a variety of ways, through color, typography, & virtually any other design element.
Without variety, a design can very quickly become monotonous, causing the user to lose interest.
Kennard Lilly’s website background uses a variety of colors and shapes to create interest, while also placing emphasis on the primary text content.

Emphasis

Emphasis deals with the parts of a design that are meant to stand out. In most cases, this means the most important information the design is meant to convey.
Clique’s oversized typography clearly emphasizes their tagline. Emphasis can also be used to reduce the impact of certain information.

Rhythm

The spaces between repeating elements can cause a sense of rhythm to form, similar to the way the space between notes in a musical composition creates a
rhythm.
The irregular spacing between the shapes in the background of TheArtCenter’s website creates random rhythm.

Movement

Movement refers to the way the eye travels over a design.
This is done through positioning (the eye naturally falls on certain areas of a design first), emphasis and other design elements already mentioned.
The slanted images and numbers contribute to the movement principle on Abby Stolfo’s website.

Bonus — useful designer tools for everyday usage:

Leadpages — lets you build beautiful, high-converting websites, unlimited landing pages, pop-up forms you can add to your other websites.
Crello — a free graphic design editor that helps create images for social media, print, and other web-based graphics.
FlyWheel — is managed WordPress hosting built for designers and creative agencies.
FlowKit — allows designers to create frighteningly fast user flows within Sketch and Figma.

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