PRINCIPLES OF DESIGNS

The Beauty About The Universe Is Our Ability To Comprehend It

A spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way. Credit: Nasa

Everyday we see different designs. Even when our eyes are closed we try to capture and create patterns and visualization in our imagination. I will be exploring some topics about some Principles of Designs and how this can help you create beautiful graphic designs that you can use for your projects.

1. ALIGNMENT

It separates a good design from a bad design. It’s the placement of objects so they fit well in a composition.

Two types:

Edge Alignment
Center Alignment

When elements are aligned, it is visually appealing to eyes and shows clarity, confidence and trust.

2. BALANCE

Ever look at an object it automatically feels like something is off? This here is the lack of balance in its composition. Balance can be symmetrical or asymmetrical

3. CONTRAST

The arrangement of opposite elements to create exciting, dramatic and interesting. This can be light vs. dark, smooth vs. rough, focus vs. out-of-focus, big vs. small etc.

4. HIERARCHY

It is the relationship between the size and scale of the elements and objects. It exhibits their order of importance. A good hierarchy design catches your attention. This is what the designer wants you to see. A typical hierarchy design is the header of a document, an app, a big building and the size of people around it.

5. PROPORTION

Brings out the unity in a composition. How objects are well related to each other. It’s about scale and size and how well these merge well with each other.

6. REPETITION

Repeating a single element for an aesthetic, unity and artistic consistency. If you notice on this very blog, there is a pattern of the H1 tags, an image and a paragraph. Repeating these sequences are appealing to the eyes and it gives a harmonic feel.

6. SUMMARY

By understanding these principles, you will understand what is appealing to the eyes and what’s not. Most of the time, your first gaze on a particular composition will give you a rough idea whether this design is good or not.
You should encourage yourself to learn more and capitalise on these tips so you can start creating great designs that are professionally appealing to the human eye.