After more than a decade in design, I’ve realized how helpful it is to revisit the fundamentals I learned early on. These basics have become second nature, but they’re still the foundation of every design decision I make.
When working with stakeholders, we often go through several rounds of changes. Over time, it’s easy to lose track of why certain decisions were made. As designers, it's not just about creating visually appealing work—we also need to communicate the thinking behind it. That’s where design principles come in.
Today, I want to walk you through some key principles that are essential for creating balanced, user-friendly designs. These principles help guide our decisions and keep everything consistent, ensuring a cohesive and intuitive user experience.
We will discuss 15 essential rules: contrast, balance, color, proximity, proportion, emphasis, hierarchy, repetition & rhythm, pattern, white space, movement, variety, alignment, simplicity, and unity.
Contrast
In UI design, contrast is vital for highlighting key information, enhancing readability, creating visual interest, and establishing hierarchy. Key considerations include color, size, tone, texture, and space contrast.
Balance
Balance in UI design involves distributing visual elements for a harmonious composition.
Symmetrical Balance: Elements are arranged in a mirror-like fashion on either side of a central axis, creating a sense of stability and order. This type of balance is often used in traditional and formal designs.
Asymmetrical Balance: Elements are arranged in a way that is not symmetrical but still appears visually balanced. This can be realized by arranging elements of different sizes, shapes, and colors in such a way that the overall design appears balanced, even though each side may look different. Asymmetrical balance is often used in modern and creative designs.
Balance in UI design ensures a visually pleasing interface that is comfortable and stable for users, with a clear hierarchy of information for easy navigation and understanding.
Color
Colors in design play a crucial role in the look, feel, and user experience of a digital product. Key considerations in UI design include:
Meaning: Choose colors that align with the intended message and brand identity.
Contrast: High contrast aids readability, especially for visually impaired users.
Hierarchy: Use colors to establish an information hierarchy.
Consistency: Maintain a consistent color palette for brand recognition.
Accessibility: Ensure the color palette is accessible to all users.
Color in UI design creates interest, evokes emotions, and enhances information communication.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy is a design principle that arranges elements in a clear and organized manner to help users understand the relationships and relative importance of elements on a page or interface. The most important information should be a focal point of the design.
Repetition & Rhythm
Just as music maintains its momentum through rhythmic patterns, design rhythm showcases its ability by repeating elements with varying sizes, spacing, or colors. Visual rhythm creates a sense of movement and flow in a design.
Pattern
In design, a pattern denotes a recurring visual element or motif used to produce a consistent and cohesive look. It can be a repeated shape, color, texture, or other design elements that serve as a visual cue for the viewer. Patterns can add interest, depth, and texture to a design and support a sense of movement, rhythm, and balance. When used effectively, patterns can be an important tool for reinforcing a brand's visual identity, creating a memorable design, and making a design more visually appealing.
White space
White space, also known as negative space, is a space between and around the elements of a design, such as text, images, and graphics. Sometimes the white space is overlooked by those not skilled in visual aesthetics, and wrongly underestimated.
It has an important role in the design, as it provides visual breathing room and a sense of balance and hierarchy. It can also help to emphasize important elements, make the text more legible, and improve the overall readability and usability of a design.
Effective use of white space requires an understanding of the proportion between positive and negative space, and the ability to create a harmonious balance between the two. By mastering white space, designers can create visually appealing and engaging designs that are easy to understand.
Movement
Movement is something like a visual flow that guides the viewer's eye through the composition. It creates a sense of direction and can help direct attention to the most important elements in the design. Movement can be created with lines, shapes, color, and texture to enhance visual experience.
Variety
Variety describes the use of different elements in a design to add interest and prevent monotony. These include various colors, textures, shapes, and visual components, along with differences in size, placement, and repetition. Variety helps to create a more dynamic and visually engaging design and can help draw the viewer's eye through the composition. Through the strategic use of variety, designers can instill a sense of motion and continuity, while adding depth and interest to a design.
Simplicity
Simplicity, also called visual economy, is attained by eliminating all non-essential elements or details to focus on the meaning of the design. Like the white space principle described above, the use of the simplicity principle creates a clean and modern user interface and plays an important role in user experience.
Proximity
Proximity is a design principle that refers to the placement of elements in close proximity to one another in order to group them together and indicate a relationship between them.
For example, related pieces of information, such as a headline and a subheading, or a set of related images, can be placed close to each other to indicate a relationship between them and make the content easier to comprehend. Proper implementation of proximity can help to improve the overall organization, readability, and hierarchy of a design. Proximity is tightly connected with one of the Gestalt principles - closure. Many famous logos use this principle, e.g. logo WWF pictured here.
As you can see on this logo evolution timeline, WWF started to use the closure principle in their logo for the first time in 1986.
(Image source: https://popicon.life/panda-world-wildlife-fund-logo/)
Proportion
Proportion is a fundamental principle in design that helps to create a sense of balance and harmony. Proportion is defined by the relationship between objects in size and visual weight. The use of proportion can be applied to various aspects of design such as typography, graphic design, and architecture. The golden ratio, which is a mathematical ratio of 1:1.6180339887, is a commonly used proportion in design and is believed to create aesthetically pleasing designs.
(Image source: https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/golden-ratio-phi-irrational-number-ellenberg-shape.html)
Emphasis
Emphasis in design involves creating a visual hierarchy to highlight key elements in a layout. It aims to direct attention to essential information through methods like size, color, contrast, placement, and texture. This helps designers establish hierarchy, structure, and visual appeal in their designs. For example, a headline on a page can be made larger and in a different color than the body text to give it emphasis and make it stand out.
Alignment
Alignment is a design principle that incorporates arranging elements along a common line or axis to create a cohesive and organized look. It helps to set up a visual connection between elements and can be used to improve the overall balance and hierarchy of a design.
In graphic design, elements can be aligned vertically or horizontally to the left, right, center, or grid. Consistent alignment can help to create a clean and organized design, while misaligned elements can create a disjointed and cluttered look.
Unity
When design principles work together smoothly, they make the whole composition feel more united.
In conclusion, unity is not just a design principle; it is the thread that weaves together all other elements to form a cohesive and impactful composition. A design with strong unity is visually appealing and easy to understand, and it can help to establish a lasting impression on the viewer.