As a fairly technical agency we do occasionally need help from our fantastic freelance designer to get a good looking product. You can read her take on design rules here.
But even before talking to our designer there are some rules we can follow to get a decent-looking and usable design. I know them as “the four horsemen of design”, though I cannot remember where I first learned this term.
The four horsemen are:
- Alignment
- Repetition
- Proximity
- Contrast
One thing to keep in mind when reading this is that all of the rules are about a set of elements. A single element in isolation cannot be aligned, repeated or be close to another element.
If this statement appears false, e.g. in the case of a single word aligned to the left side of a piece of paper then the set of elements is not complete: The piece of paper is an element in itself.
Alignment
To align elements means placing them on a straight line. A very common example is normal text - like the one in this post. Every row of text starts along the same vertical, invisible line on the left.
Alignment guides the eye but it also appeals to an inner sense of order. Unaligned elements look chaotic as the following example illustrates:
Humans are very good at picking up even slightly mis-aligned elements. In the following example I moved one element by only three pixels:
Because humans are so good at picking up these small details it is very important to ensure that all elements on a website align.
There can certainly be exceptions to this rule, e.g. to draw the eye to a specific part of the site, but breaking the alignment rule should only be done with care and for good reasons!
Repetition
In everyday speech the word repetition has a slightly negative connotation. A job might be repetitive, or a person is repeating themselves.
In design the word repetition is used in the strictest sense: to repeat elements.
In the following example each element first repeats from top to bottom, but then we also repeat the entire column of elements a second time:
Repetition is everywhere. When you search on Google you will see a block of text repeated ten times per page. The navigation bar on the left side of Wikipedia repeats navigation elements.
Repetition doesn’t just happen in the spacial domain, it also happens in the temporal domain. If you click around on Wikipedia the content changes but the layout of the page repeats: Navigation to the left, text on the right, title on the top.
But why is repetition important? Repetition is a shortcut showing humans that things are alike. If I can click on the first result in Google and the layout repeats then it’s safe to assume that I can click on the second, third, etc. result as well.
Breaking the expectation of like things behaving alike can lead to situations like a kid being confused that a paper magazine doesn’t react to her touch gestures.
Repetition is not only useful for layout, it is also useful for colours and shapes. That strays slightly into branding territory though, so I’m going to omit it ihere.
Proximity
Proximity explains to the user which elements belong together in a visual way.
All the elements in close proximity form a new “super” element which in turn can be aligned and repeated.
The following example is simple but illustrates the point with three dots making a group, and the group forming a new element that is repated three times:
A slightly more interesting example is the following version of Google’s stylised search results. It’s pretty clear that there are two results on the page, and that the text in each group belongs together:
The two groups of text create two new super-elements that are aligned to the left.
Contrast
A designer creates contrast by picking two ends of a spectrum. E.g. dark and light, small and large, quiet and loud, close together and far apart.
Try spotting the important part of the page in the following example:
The example uses both, colour and size contrast to highlight the important section.
The following example makes the element at the bottom right stand out. It might be a contact address, or a button to advance to the next page:
Contrast can be used to great effect but it also is the most tricky of the rules in my experience. That’s the point where we go and ask a designer!
tl;dr
It is possible to develop a usable and decent-looking design by following some simple, formal rules; no skill required. Just following rules won’t automatically result in a great design, but it limits the damage by avoiding design train wrecks.