12 Principles of Visual Design That Every UI Designer Should Know

Designs create impact using visuals, placed in the order of their importance. A good design is something that has a balance of all the elements occurring in a sequence in an expected manner in front of the user so as to give a sense of familiarity. Visual principles make each and every piece appear to be harmonious and balanced, which makes the design feel functionally and aesthetically pleasing in all aspects. 

In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the visual principles to impact your design. This article is specially designed for UI designers to create a seamless and feature-rich user interface. 

Before getting to know the visual principles, let’s understand what it is actually about and why is it so important.

What are Visual Principles? 

Visual hierarchy is an optimal arrangement of screen elements, in such a way that they appear to be balanced, organized, functional, and aesthetically pleasing to the human eye. Placing information with balance influences the design, and ease in decision-making based on what is important and what is not. Putting relevant information prominently without even putting too much emphasis by adding weight, or color comes from a balanced visual hierarchy. 

Why Visual Design Principles are Important?

Because a span to capture user attention on a particular element or piece of information is only “4 to 8 Sec” – Called a human attention span. This means, having too much information placed on the screen might miss capturing user attention, as a result, users should scroll, skip or jump off to something else. 

For a designer to know how to place elements in a proper hierarchy and what to do to achieve that hierarchy let’s look into these principles one by one.

12 Visual Design Principles

1. Size and Scale
2. Color Contrast
3. Alignment 
4. Emphasis
5. Balanced Typography
6. Repetition
7. White/Negative Spacing
8. Proximity
9. Movement
10. Proportion
11. Perspective 
12. Reading Patterns

So let’s dive into the visual hierarchy principle and understand each of these principles in detail.

1. Size and Scale

Humans are complex creatures, they hear something which is louder enough and see something prominent or big/large enough in a channel full of chaos/noise. Size and scale aid in balancing out elements based on their relevance and importance. For example, large and bold text understood is important whereas small and lightweight text is not too emphasized. 

It makes the elements stand out based on size. Making things extraordinarily big or prominent would also be a disaster, what this principle tries to say is that be mindful of the sizes you are using. Maintain a fixed-size system for all elements. Such as for text define H1, H2 so on till H6 sizes to place in balance. 

2. Color Contrast

Color and Contrast is another principle used to make elements stand out. It is associated with the use of complementary color pairing. It makes the design pop and grabs the user’s attention on a specific element on the screen. To implement this in design, always put important information in bright colors (as per the theme and color scheme) to make the design or information pop, to easily capture user attention. 

While using color keep in mind that warm colors will stand out against dark backgrounds, making them appear closer than cool colors on a dark background. Whereas, cool colors stand out over a light background, making them appear closer than warm colors on a light background. So use these colors, in accordance with your color scheme.

3. Alignment

This describes the symmetric distribution of elements in designs. Alignment helps create a structure in design and information. It mentions having balance and hierarchy in all types of screen elements such as images, text, and icons. Imagine it like a ruled notebook having left aligned which when empty or filled looks amazingly balanced. 

With the help of alignment, users know where to look, where to read, and how to interact. This can be seen in all designs whether websites or map outlines. By making sure your different design components have a well-balanced relationship with one another, it helps produce a sharp, organized appearance for ultimately better designs.

4. Emphasis

Yet another element highlighting principle, which talks about giving prominence and focuses on a particular single or group of elements on the screen. There can be times when you as a designer want to focus on a slogan, text paragraph, or image, at this time emphasis comes into the picture. This helps deliver a clear message to the user about the context. Emphasis is both comparative and relative, as when trying to put emphasis on any element one stands out and the other settles down. 

Emphasis can be achieved in a variety of ways, such as:

• Scale – By rescaling elements to make them appear larger and bigger as more the size, the better it grabs the attention.
• Positioning – Placement of the element also comes under putting emphasis and can be centered aligned, or peripheral
• Highlighting using color, patterns, or texture
• Use of font weights such as bold, semibold, or even extra bold.
• Underlining the information
• Putting pieces of information in Capital letters or sometimes under inverted commas.
• Using lines and arrows to grab attention

5. Balance Typography

Text hierarchy is crucial to achieve as more than 80% of the website or app have text content, including paragraph headings and image captions. Balancing out the textual content is very important, this can be done with the help of font weight, increasing heading font size, bold or underlining important details, and adding color to the text. Proper text hierarchy makes the layout look more pleasing to the eye and cleaner. It reduces the clutter on the read and enforces better readability. 

In most text editors, there are a lot of options to edit or input text such as different heading sizes, paragraphs, quotes, and captions. All these styles should also be added to text while designing interfaces. It is also good to use different font styles(there are a lot of amazing font combinations) which can be used to create a good text hierarchy or balanced typography. For example, combining Roboto with Archivo Black and etc.

6. Repetition

Repetition in design refers to employing the same elements repeatedly throughout a piece of work, including colors, patterns, typefaces, images, textures, and more. Repeating elements over and over again in the design creates better consistency and ease for the user to know what to do and where to find something. This is majorly a good principle to use for motion graphics while creating a motion video repeating hills and mountains continuously to avoid any breaks in visuals. 

Also having consistent logos, icons, CTA, and colors throughout the product also creates brand identity. Such as amazon, uses the same brand color and unified logos to represent different apps like prime music, prime video, and Amazon shopping app. Repetitive information also stays long in user memory, using a repetitive app over a long period of time makes the muscle memory strong and thus users are very attached to the app/website.

Refer to – Design Principles and Usability Heuristics

7. Negative Spacing

Ever wonder why websites look cluttered but not dense? There is a fine line between being cluttered and dense. Cluttered websites reduce the ability to scan and read information effectively, whereas a dense website has information evenly spread with the help of proper spacing between multiple screen elements. This spacing is called or referred to as negative or white spacing. 

Effective use of white space, as a designer, lets the elements(such as text or image) breathe while experimenting with alignment, balance, contrast, and movement. Without the proper use of white or negative spacing, it makes the content looks flooded, unorganized, and overwhelming to the user. Better relaxed spacing makes the focal points clearer to the viewer.

8. Proximity

To make the relevant elements appear to be a group, proximity principles talk about adequate spacing between elements to help users visually combine or separate them from each other. Elements that are near to each other are often grounded together as one part, whereas a good amount of spacing between elements separates them from each other. 

Elements that are considered as a group would also be assumed to be having the same functionality, quality, and traits as each other. Such filters in a search group together have the same functionality of sorting products based on preference.

9. Movement

Movement refers to how a user or a reader scans through the content. How do they move from one point to another? In user experience, the importance of movement gives a traceable path of how users have scanned through the website or app while approaching a goal. It can be created in a design by using lines that trace paths between different focal points. 

It helps users to move forward as well as come back if they are lost in between the process. Movement lead’s a user eye to a particular content or element on a big screen, marking the focal point. This is a responsibility of a designer to visually create a path that the user can use to track the movement going back and forth.

10. Proportion

Proportion in design talks about how 2 elements relate to each other even after being different in size, color, and functionality. Visual designers may not always need to worry about an element’s exact size or placement, but they may be much more deeply concerned with how that element interacts with other parts within the design as a whole. 

There can be many sections, groups, chunks, and individual pieces of information which might be fitting a screen but what is important to be concerned about is how they are relating to each other such that they are pleasing to the eye as well as understandable at the same time. For example having CTA, image, and introductory paragraph placed on the Home screen are related to each other by the context. Where the image and paragraph tell about the website and CTA is there to lead an activity.

11. Perspective

This visual principle of design indicated the depth and how it was conveyed. It is the process of designing while keeping space in mind, as it all depends on how humans perceive space and understand it. There are different types of perspectives through which humans look, perceive, and interpret information:

• One-point perspective – Having only one vanishing point falling opposite to the viewer’s eye.
• Two-point perspective – Having two vanishing points, often used in architectural designs
• Three-point perspective – Having three vanishing points, in horizontal and vertical lines.

Perspective in design can be a bird’s eye view(looking at something from the top or a very high viewpoint, such as birds looking at the world) and a worm’s eye view(looking at something from the bottom or ground level like a worm). All these are useful while creating different design compositions, both on paper and in Figma.

12. Reading Pattern

There is always a pattern in how users scan and read any information. From numerous research, it is found that human is read from top to bottom and based on cultural writing it can be right to left(like Hebrew and Urdu) or left to right(like English). For a designer, it is crucial to know a few of the reading patterns that can influence the placement of content on the website or app. There are typically a few patterns like:

• Z-Shaped: Scan the website from the top left to the bottom right of the page. Making a z shape while scanning through content. 
• F-Shaped: When a user starts scanning data in F shape they start by reading the top line from left to right and then going straight to the bottom. Such as Google’s search result page.
• Layered Cake: When users only focus on the top heading and title while leaving the rest of the content unread. Just like a frosted cake – where frosting is the heading and cake walls are leftover content.
• Spotted: When the user focused on specific content scanning in a random manner.

If you’re a beginner and want to read about the design process – UI Design Process: Everything You Need to Know

Key Takeaways

Principles talk a lot about how to grab user’s attention and how to make them stay and fall back on your product, to implement this principle in your design it is good to know that:

• UX is a blend of a good handful of principle
• Always try to stay grounded to this principle
• Be open to using these principles in your design wherever needed.
• The simplicity and aesthetics of designs come from good balance, contrast, and composition of elements.

Conclusion

All these principles are the crucial consideration one should be mindful of as a user experience designer. It counts as a part of the user’s experience when they visit the website for the first time. For a business to grab user attention and engage them with the product only takes a few seconds, using these principles optimally helps the business to grab users. So it’s a wrap for this article, keep on shining!