Priniciples of Design

Emphasis

Say you’re creating a poster for a concert. You should ask yourself: what is the first piece of information my audience needs to know? Is it the band? Or the concert venue? What about the day and the cost of attending?

Balance and Alignment

Never forget that every element you place on a page has a weight. The weight can come from color, size, or texture. Just like you wouldn’t put all your furniture in one corner of a room, you can’t crowd all your heavy elements in one area of your composition. Without balance, your audience will feel as if their eye is sliding off the page.

Contrast

Contrast is what people mean when they say a design “pops.” It comes away from the page and sticks in your memory. Contrast creates space and difference between elements in your design. Your background needs to be significantly different from the color of your elements so they work harmoniously together and are readable.

Repetition

If you limit yourself to two strong typefaces or three strong colors, you’ll soon find you’ll have to repeat some things. That’s ok! It’s often said that repetition unifies and strengthens a design. If only one thing on your band poster is in blue italic sans-serif, it can read like an error. If three things are in blue italic sans-serif, you’ve created a motif and are back in control of your design.

Proportion

Proportion is the visual size and weight of elements in a composition and how they relate to each other. It often helps to approach your design in sections, instead of as a whole.

Movement

Going back to our concert poster. If you decided the band was the most important piece of information on the page and the venue was the second, how would you communicate that with your audience?

White Space

All of the other elements deal with what you add to your design. White space (or negative space) is the only one that specifically deals with what you don’t add. White space is exactly that—the empty page around the elements in your composition. For beginning designers it can be a perilous zone. Often simply giving a composition more room to breathe can upgrade it from mediocre to successful.

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