Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Think Like a Visual DesignerSarah Doody
Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Think Like a Visual DesignerSarah Doody
Lesson Info
6. Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
Lessons
Why Design Matters
05:50 2Design Vs. Aesthetic
06:27 3Impact Of Design
07:01 4The Design Process: Understand Your Audience
09:17 5The Design Process: Understand Your Content
05:21 6Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
05:47 7Design Principles: Contrast
02:55 8Design Principles: Repetition
03:20Design Principle: Hierarchy & Proximity
05:37 10Principle Scale And Balance
02:48 11Design Principles: Typography
04:29 12Design Principles: White Space
01:11 13Design Principles: Color
06:09 14Design Principles: Graphics, Icons, And Photos
02:51 15Design Principles: Layouts And Focal Points
01:53 16Design Principles: Color-Blind Accessibility In Design
01:41Lesson Info
Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
So now we're going to move into more hands on type things. These principles they can help you design better things, not just things that are aesthetically pleasing, but serve a function, whether that function is understanding or someone taking a specific action. So these principles though are really guidelines. I wouldn't say these are strict, strict, strict rules because if I were to ask any of my designer friends, we would know we all break our own rules all the time. So use these as a guideline, but I think too, just as now when you're going to a casino, you're going to a grocery store, you're going to be thinking about all these things. Just by thinking about these principles you're going to kind of be able to have this bank of knowledge to design better things in the future. So use these principles as guidelines, 'cause when we use these principles correctly, they can really influence what people think, the information that jumps out on them on a page. The meaning of an actual cha...
rt could be influenced by these principles and by how we put them into practice for better or worse. So the five principles that we are going to first talk about will be alignment, contrast, repetition, hierarchy and balance and we're gonna see examples of these. And then I promise you, you're probably thinking, where is this going? We are then going to talk about typography, so choosing fonts, not just choosing fonts, but maybe things like line height or alignment or what to do the bullet of list, should you center text or should you not center text, things like that. So we're gonna get to the more how to what you would actually do inside your Keynote or your document, but we need to understand these principles first. So let's start off with the principle of alignment. Alignment can really be thought of as something that helps create cohesiveness in a design. And if every element is aligned, it's going to make sure that everything is, what I say visually connected, so that nothing seems out of place, so that someone looks at it, their eye is not kind of going everywhere, that their eye is able to focus and kind of have this sense of calmness. And some of those words might seem a little vague or fluff, but you're gonna see all this play out in a lot of examples here. So alignment really helps us group objects, organize things on a page. It helps us create a sense of balance so we don't feel like we're going to fall over or we're not sure where to look, helps bring structure to the information and it helps create connections between elements. So what does that actually mean? So we wanna use alignment to help bring focus to our eye and group things that could be relevant to each other. And how do we do this? So when we are learning design, you can think of something like a grid. And so in order to align things, you need to imagine that there is this invisible grid over whatever you are designing. So the way that you can do this inside a lot of your design tools, you can turn on to view a grid. And if you don't have that option, I often will just draw my own grid with little rectangles or something if I'm in Keynote, for example. So I can literally turn it on and turn it off and see how things align to make sure that everything is attaching and aligning to this grid. And the good alignment is invisible. And we use this grid to help us make sure everything is aligned. So anytime you're not sure just look for that, either turn on rulers, view grids, things like that and honestly, it is so easy to do this now. Sometimes if you're in, for example, Keynote, sometimes when you're moving things around, you'll notice, let's say you're dragging a box, sometimes there will be like a line that shows up or something to let you know this is kind of in alignment, this is in the center. So there's built in kind of things inside the software now to help you do alignment because we know from research that alignment helps us improve people's understanding and it's going to reduce this idea of overload that we saw, if we think back to that example with the boxes and then our really, really misaligned spreadsheet in the beginning. And that first version wasn't terrible. You could still get the information, but if you just take the extra five minutes or less that it would take to do that, it's a lot more pleasing. And chances are it's easier for you, it's gonna be much easier for someone who's maybe receiving that spreadsheet for the first time versus you who has been looking at it maybe for weeks already. Again, getting back to the user and thinking about the context of who is viewing it and the return on investment of making it easier, very, very high there. And your colleagues will thank you for sure I'm guessing.
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