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Another big improvement is that today’s designers have chairs above the table. The reason is that nowadays we are increasingly using digital products and moving towards a fully digital ecosystem. UI designers are proponents of the almost lifelike magical interfaces we interact with on a daily basis. While designers enjoy greater authority, they also have greater responsibility on their shoulders. To create a seamless experience and enable an emotional connection between people and technology.
While we like to know and learn new tricks and trends as we progress in our practice, it is equally important to stay true to the basic and timeless concepts that drive the essence of UI Design.
Today I want to take you through some of the basic but key principles that ensure you achieve something memorable and meaningful every time you design a digital product.
Understanding design principles is important for all levels of designers, from beginners to experts. Putting principles into action brings visual appeal and functionality to designs. Putting principles into action brings visual appeal and functionality to designs. So let’s find out what it is?
Alignment is a design principle used to create structure and organization, and improve readability. This helps create a more visually pleasing design for users, helping them find what they are looking for. This helps users better understand the relationship between the different elements.
There are different alignments including Centered Vertical Align, Edge Align, Horizontal Align, Left and Right Align, Horizontal Align, Centered Horizontal Alignment. They are described in the image below:
When elements are closed together, they appear grouped. The use of proximity allows designers to make content more comfortable for users to view. More scannable pages.
This principle explains that visual elements are perceived as related if there is a visual resemblance. In this way, visually similar elements are seen primarily as groups rather than individual elements. So we can use the proximity principle in UI design to group similar information that is related to each other. for example, we write subtext under the title to support it. The proximity principle helps designers make interfaces easy to scan and understand for users. It’s a proven fact that proximity trumps other tools like color, shape, or style.
One area where proximity plays an important role in interface design is Typography. Users don’t like reading long texts. It is difficult for them to identify important information. Hence the designer has to break the large body copy pieces into smaller pieces so that the user can easily understand and digest the information. On the other hand, items belonging to different groups should be placed far enough apart to prevent negative influences.
The same elements are repeated throughout the interface which helps the user to recognize the relevance between these elements.
The emphasis is on controlling how users will perceive your design by making elements stand out.
Contrast helps us design a better interface. It’s not just about contrasting light and dark colors or sizes small and large: it’s more than that. Contrast helps us organize our content in a better way, it also helps users to focus on certain elements. Apart from emphasizing the elements it also creates a visual balance and interest in the design. But too much contrast can confuse users. It can create multiple focal points as users may find it difficult to take the desired action.
A balanced composition feels stable and pleasing to the eye while an unbalanced design can create instability and distraction. Visual balance is about having negative and positive elements in equal proportion in a design.
A balanced composition may have some areas that catch the user’s attention but should not clash with the visibility of other elements. Keep in mind that visual balance must mimic the physical balance of real-life products to keep users engaged with the design. Designers can balance composition by playing with the visual weight of the elements. Visual weight can be determined by how prominent an element is. There are several parameters that affect the visual weight of an element, such as size, color, contrast, and density.
Human brain tends to interpret bigger things to have more weight. The same psychology applies in digital interfaces as well.
In case of colors it works differently, i.e., sharp and bold colors have more weight regardless of the size. An element will stand out even though it may be small in size but its color is sharp or bold e.g., red, dark blue etc.
The difference between light and dark elements is called contrast. In interface design, if we want to draw users’ attention or want to highlight something we use contrast. But naturally, the darker element will have more weight.
This one is obvious that things that have more density regardless of color, and size will be having more weight.
Hierarchy, as in its traditional meaning, is the arrangement of items in order of importance or weight on the screen. The visual hierarchy describes how we can organize content and design elements effectively. Naturally, elements that have visual weight are more likely to grab the user’s attention.
This behavior should be considered when designing the layout.
For example, a blog title will require more attention than the body text. Similarly, in interface design, a call to action (aka a CTA) may require special importance than others. Whenever we try to make sense of information visually, we first notice similarities and differences in what we see. This relationship allows us to distinguish objects.
White space is empty space in a design. It is also known as negative space, its purpose is to emphasize an object in a composition. Simply put, it creates focus.
Source: mounirelogbani.com, 17seven.co
