Guaranteed Design principles
Your Guide to Stunning Sites
An eye for what design decisions improve your work and what detracts from your message. Here are eight basic design principles to keep in mind when working with visuals and creating graphics, plus templates to help you get started with great design.
Create exceptional designs
and stunning graphics
Good website design doesn’t come easy. Follow these effective web design principles to make your next project a success.
Alignment
Using the elements on a page to direct the viewer's eye, maintain interest, and promote return visits by ensuring a clear and engaging visual flow.
Hierarchy
Organizing content to prioritize information and guide users' attention by using larger or bolder fonts, placing your most important messages higher on the page, or using frames.
Contrast
The use of variations in colors, size, or style on elements to create visual interest and highlight key points strategically emphasizing parts of your design.
Consistency
Ensuring uniformity and consistency in design elements across a website for a cohesive user experience — it also helps people remember your brand or other important information.
Proximity
Placing related elements close to each other to indicate their relationship and enhance user understanding and ability to retain the information being provided
Balance
Distributing visual elements evenly to create a smooth and pleasing layout that aids user understanding and helps the user feel at ease as they scroll through the page
Color
The selection and use of colors to effectively display the brand, overall theme, and improve readability across all of your content.
Negative Space
(sometimes known as white space) The empty or unused space around and between elements to improve readability and focus and can help highlight the most important pieces of information in your design. Never underestimate the power of simplicity.
Type
The selection and combination of fonts to enhance readability and convey the desired tone or message. Type should work in harmony with hierarchy, contrast, and branding.
Effective web design principles every designer should know
Just like any creative discipline, web design has its rules. Content, navigation, and visuals must all work together to make sure your design strikes the perfect balance. But how does one approach the foundations of good website design? Let’s find out.
Alignment
The importance of alignment comes with the eyes draw naturally to the picture-perfect logical sequence in your work and the interest keeps developing. In web design this applies 10 fold, the whole point is to keep the viewers interest piqued and their minds at ease when on our sites so they keep looking and wanting to come back. Think of a line in a store, when it is clear and in one line you feel much more at ease looking at it than when the line is scattered and has no definition.
Imagine your designs on a grid
Don't interrupt eye movement
Avoid justified type
Justified type can often times throw off the rhythm and flow that alignment creates, so only use left, right, or center alignment
Using the Same Color
Contrast can also apply when using the same color so make sure when doing this you are using colors with opposite value
Contrasting Colors
The choice of contrasting colors becomes especially critical when two colors come into contact or overlap. When deciding on these colors, it’s crucial to strike the right balance. If you opt for two colors that have very little contrast or if they contrast too sharply, you risk creating a situation where the viewer struggles to read or distinguish certain important elements. The key is to use contrasting colors that enhance readability and clarity. A good way to test if two colors have the perfect balance is to take a couple of steps away from your screen and see if you can still clearly see all of the elements.
Low Contrast
Colors that have too low contrast are hard to differentiate and can lead to oversight
High Contrast
Colors with too much contrast can cause the eyes to have trouble focusing
Hierarchy
Hierarchy helps you to organize the information from your design layout making for the reader easy to find the information he is looking for and focus on the most important parts of your text and which are just supporting the main point. This is used to make the viewer navigate through the site more easily and view the call to actions clearer
Ways that you can create hierarchy are:
Type Size
Case
Weight
Color
Typeface
Position
Mix & Match
While using one of the design tricks listed can created hierarchy in your design feel free to mix and match all of the tricks to elevate your design!
Connection
It ties separate pieces of design work together, meaning an audience can immediately understand that these pieces of work are connected and are usually working together to communicate with an audience.
Design Constancy
Consistency in UI design means making elements in the user interface look and work the same way. This helps users feel like they know what to expect, which makes them feel more in control and comfortable. When things are consistent, it also makes it easier for users to understand and use the interface without getting confused, which improves their overall experience.
This should be used in all elements that are placed on a page/site. For example…if you use an orange heading for the type that is in the white boxes on the Home page all headings that are in white boxes on the rest of the site should be orange.
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Negative space
Or white space, as it’s often called — is the area of the layout which is left empty. It may be not only around the objects you place in the layout but also between and inside them. Negative space is a kind of breathing room for all the object on the page or screen. Due to that, white space is a rightful design element that has a big impact on positive user experience. In UI design for websites and mobile apps, negative space is a big factor of high usability and navigability of the interface. The negative space around the layout elements is also called macro space whereas the space between them and inside (for letters and stroke elements) is also called micro space.
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Breathing Room
White space is like a canvas: it’s the background that holds the elements together in a design, enabling them to stand out.
Guiding Attention
Proximity can help you define the direction of the viewers’ attention.
Proximity
Consistency in UI design means making things in the user interface look and work the same way. This helps users feel like they know what to expect, which makes them feel more in control and comfortable. When things are consistent, it also makes it easier for users to understand and use the interface without getting confused, which improves their overall experience.
Visually Group Related Elements
Creating Visual Hierarchy
Balance
Balance in design is the distribution of the visual weight of elements between both sides of the design to create unity, fulfillment and satisfaction. When organizing your web page, the first things to ask yourself are: Will my design be attention-grabbing? Will my customers feel comfortable using it?It is important to have a well functioning design, which also looks visually appealing. That is why we use such a fundamental design principle as balance.
Symmetry
Balance
Asymmetry
Balance
Equilibrium
Balance keeps what you create from being an excessive, overloaded mess that fails to serve the user experience
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Set the brand tone and influence its image, draw users' attention, affect their emotions, and increase usability.
Color
The most apparent advantage of using the right color combinations in web design is that they help users understand and navigate the site. Colors can improve visitors’ online experiences, enabling them to find the information they need and respond to your Call to Action (CTA). The effects of color are crucial for brand recognition, customer satisfaction, and overall product success. Colors are crucial in both physical and digital environments as they help guide the users through your website and improve the overall experience. Therefore, every web designer needs to become fluent in color theory.
Maintain a 3-4 color pallete
Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Color
Type
Web typography is the art and technique of arranging type on a website. It’s not only about the design or composition of the letters and characters and their arrangement. Of course, it’s about those things — but it’s also about communication, visual identity, brand persona, usability, and much more.
Resource: Astra Typography Documentation
Readability & Legibility come first
Try not to use more than 2 typefaces
Line Length
The “ideal” line length for optimum readability in web typography is known to range between 45 to 85 characters.
