Exercise: Developing design intuition

Hey, this is an exercise from my UX/UI Design Bootcamp Prework. Here you can see the rest of my projects. Want to know more about me? Click here 🙌🏽 .

This exercise’s goal is to develop a language for describing design.

For describing a design you have to pay attention to elements it contains and the visual principles the design follows.

What are the Principles of Visual Design?

• Balance
• Proximity
• Alignment
• Repetition
• Contrast
• Unity

If you want to go deeper on the Principles of Visual Design, you can start by reading this article.

For developing my design intuition, I’ve to pick 4 designs that I think are good or strong and describe them.

To chose the designs I’ve used Dribbble.

You can find me on Dribble. I don’t have any shots yet, but be sure to subscribe to check the incredible projects to come.

Thriva design (Upper left)

The website is about tracking your health at home. This may seem a serious topic to talk about and by adding illustrations to the design, they manage to reach the user more kindly.

From this design, I personally like how the designers played with illustrations instead of using real images.

I like the balance, as well, between the elements on the page and how they are connected. There’s a lot of white space between the elements, which helps the user to focus.

Snow trips (Upper right)

From this one, I like the kind of texture the designer chose to give.

The texture is the way the surface is perceived to feel, allowing the designer to create drama, making a two-dimensional image look like three-dimensional. Thanks to that, the user may feel being on the snow.

I wanted to point out the cool color scheme chosen which convey peace to users and how the designer use repetition to call the attention of the users where they have to choose a place to stay in.

Bankerbets (Bottom left)

Bankerbets helps the users to invest in stock market

For that, I really like the graphics they used.

About the visual design principles we can see on this page, I like how they align the elements in a 3 columns grid, which is easy to read and follow and brings order to the design.

Quicksilver (Bottom right)

I really like the lines’ game and how the logo is integrated into the design. I think that the lines and the vibrant help to give contrast to the design.

I, also, like how the products are located on the website. They have a lot of white space around them, which makes them be emphasized.

Additionally, I found some great architectural designs, in which we can see how the design principles are found not only on UI designs but in every design piece of our daily life.

On these two, we can easily observe the symmetrical patterns which follow. We can imaginary trace a line in the middle of the photo and see how the elements match on both sides. This symmetry contributes to finding balance.

I would also point out how the elements alignment gives unity and harmony to the scene. This can be perfectly seen in the next design:

All the elements are perfectly aligned: the cupboards, the kitchen countertop, the windows, the sofas, the carpet, the doors, the floor and the ceiling. Every element is meticulously aligned with the other. This could be really inspiring when we are designing UI.

To chose these designs I’ve used Behance.

That’s all for now,

see you real soon.