Learn Design Principles, and design with confidence
A solid grasp of Design Principles can give you greater flexibility to craft your work and understand the reasoning behind your design decisions.
It's common to see design newcomers producing work with little thought on how and why they created what they did, just that it looks 'Ok'.
Doing things this way, you're flying blind, hoping something sticks, but not exactly sure why.
But. It doesn't have to be this way.
A solid grasp of Design Principles can give you greater flexibility to craft your work and understand the reasoning behind your design decisions.
The knowledge of those timeless principles can be one of the most incredible things to bring to your design game.
How I discovered the benefits of using Design Principles
Ok. Before we move on. Let's take things back in time...
Back in the day, I worked as a Graphic Designer (yeah, before all this UI/UX business) and took my first steps into the world of Print Design professionally.
Here, I started to learn and understand Design Principles and discovered that I could create more accurate, purposeful, and consistent artwork by following and implementing these simple rules.
Some of the key design principles I've followed over the years include...
- Contrast
- Space
- Repetition
- Proximity
- Emphasis
- Hierarchy
These Principles and Rules to this day have remained the same and are still, if not more so, relevant when applied to UI & UX Design.
UI Designers can drastically improve how their designs look by learning the basic design principles and UX laws.
— UI Adrian (@uiuxadrian) May 2, 2023
Here's where to look 👇
Learn the principles, and increase your confidence
To enhance the quality of your work, it does pay to study design principles and consistently apply them to your projects.
This knowledge gives you more freedom to experiment with different design choices and allows you to make informed decisions about colour, typography, spacing, balance and more in your designs.
Using the principles will allow you to create purposeful designs and boost your confidence in any design task you face.
P.S. If you want to see how I apply design principles in my work, take a look at one of my earlier articles...
Marc Andrew
...Oh. If you haven't read 'Universal Principles of Design', I highly recommend you check it out...
See you next week,
Marc.
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