Principles of Web Design

Web Design principles are one of the most important steps and practices that one must ensure in order to obtain a professional web design. Principles of web design aim to simplify the web design process into some set of systems and procedures which when followed, lead to a professional web design. Now there is no fixed number of Web Design principles and every designer has their own principles. After all, this is not math but design. However, upon researching and learning from multiple design professionals, we have come up with a list of design principles that are more or less consistent among various designers and give the best results.

Principles of Web Design

Components of Web Design

There are various steps in the process of web design and multiple components of web design. The following are the most important components of web design

• Research and Analysis – taking surveys, and presenting information to stakeholders.
• Creating wireframes and prototypes with tools like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, etc.
• Working on Layout and Structure, Typography, Color Scheme, etc.
• Creating the final user interface.
• Working on the graphics and visual elements of the design.
• Measuring how designs are performing, taking feedback and iterating.

Principles of Web Design

We discussed earlier, there are different principles of web design and it defers from designer to designer, but here is a list of Web design principles that the most important and most commonly used ones.

Balance

Balance simply means visual harmony. Good balance is like trying to create a Visual Harmony on your website. For example, avoiding one side of the website from having all the information when the other side has almost nothing. Balance can be measured in three forms: symmetrically, asymmetrically and radially.

Note:- Next four practices are together called C.R.A.P. (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity)

Alignment

Alignment is the way in which elements are placed on the website. The most common usage of alignment is with text alignment, making the text written left, center, right or justify align. But alignment is more than just about text alignment, it is also used to add interest into your design. designers use alignment to add creativity to their designs. Good alignment ensures proper readability which in turn ensures good communication of your message.

Proximity

Proximity of elements means how close the elements are to other elements. the primary use of proximity Is for creating relationships between elements, like objects go together and distantly related objects are further away from each other. Proximity is the design principle designers are often referring to when they speak about white space in the design, so proximity like white space helps your elements breathe and make sections distinct from one another. bad proximity can have negative effects on your website.

Repetition

Repetition is basically creating a pattern in user’s mind looking at the user interface. Repetition is all about the consistency and the unity of the design in trying to create a cohesion between all the elements. Repetition is probably the most used in naturally intuitive design principle. It is extremely unlikely that a website doesn’t even have the modest amount of repetition. The most obvious example of repetition is typography, think about it, every paragraph is designed the same font size, every H1 heading should look like every other H1 heading and every H2 heading should look like every other H2 heading and so on, this ends up creating a cohesion. Repetition also helps in creating brand, style, consistency, a better user experience and of course repetition. Repetition should be consistent throughout a website’s typography, sets of buttons, stylings, spacings and very importantly header and footer. here’s an

Contrast

Contrast is a design principle where we try and differentiate one or more elements/visuals from others by differentiating them by help of colors, fonts, typography, repetition, alignment, or anything else. The idea is to make a particular element or visual to stand out to the users. In design terms – The visual design principle of contrast refers to the juxtaposition of two visually different elements. Contrast is when you notice the difference between two objects in the user interface and that difference emphasizes that they are different. This distinction might mean that they belong to different categories or have different functions or behave differently etc. To know more about Contrast you can check out this article – Why Color Contrast Matters in UI/UX Design ?

Accessibility

Accessibility is designing products services (in our case, it’s designing UI/UX) and environments in an all-inclusive manner. In simpler terms, it means designing for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface.

For example you can create a new feature of listening to news in your social media app and improve its accessibility by also providing the transcript in some commonly used languages so that the feature becomes accessible to people with hearing issues.

Design thinking

Design thinking is basically a creative way to solve problems. It is the sum of all the processes that results in designing of a prototype, The most important skills for design thinking are – having empathy for the users and prototyping.

Design thinking involves five main steps:

• understand the challenge
• defining the problem.
• coming up with solutions
• creating a prototype
• test the prototype and iterate.

Conclusion

Principles of web design aim to simplify the web design process into some set of system and procedures which when followed, leads to a professional web design. There are many web design principles in web design like the C.R.A.P. design principle (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity), Design thinking, Accessibility, UI Patterns etc. etc.

These web design principles are meant to ensure that you do the most important things the right way in your design process. Make sure to follow these important web design process in order to get a professional web design.