Intelligent Design - Basic Design Guidelines

When talking about intelligent design, we are not talking about the creation of man. Nope, this is more important! The creation of your media and site products.

There are some very basic things about design that one can learn that can vastly improve one's ability to make appealing and intelligent creations. Some of those things are:

1. Lining Things Up

2. Using Variation

3. Giving Breathing Room

4. Using the Grid

5. The Golden Section

6. Lining Things Up

Things that line up look nice. Things that are all over the place don't look nice. Of course, one must know rules to know which ones to break, so these rules are only guidelines. In general though, straight or smooth lines are appealing. Jagged and inconsistent lines are less likely to be appealing. A design with many elements lining up and a few elements that don't can create nice contrast, yet starting with things that line up is a nice easy rule for beginners.

To support these statements, lets look at examples of man-made objects. Roads, desks, walls, buildings, orange juice containers. The forms of all these objects are straight or consistent and any deviation from this norm is considered mildly repulsive. On roads, the matter is quite important to health. There is a merge under construction from the 60 East (that's how we identify freeways here in California) to the 215 South, where the turn starts at one size circumstance then abruptly veers a few degrees tighter to another sized circumstance. This slight change in curvature results in a driver having to adjust for this change with a slight, and apparently unexpected, turn of the wheel. I say apparently because road barriers prevent a driver from seeing the whole turn going into it and there are a bunch of tire marks etched up the construction barrier right at the point of the change in curvature.

Lets look at desks. Obviously straight and even desks are good for writing, fit against straight walls well and look nice, at least to me. Buildings, like desks are convenient shapes for space efficiency, map drawing, road creation, furniture and room modularity. Sure, curved buildings are beautiful too, yet the curves are often very even, and more often than not, the curve is accompanied by a straight line in another dimension.

OK, orange juice - very nice to ship little square boxes. Long rectangles make a nice canvas for marketing. If the straight lines are not straight, but crumpled or dented, chances are you won't buy that carton.

All of these are man-made objects that benefit in usability from straight or evenly curved lines. Lets take a look at nature. Trees are basically straight lines. The trunks of a redwood forest all go in one direction with remarkable consistency. (That direction is up, by the way, unless you are on the opposite side of the Earth, in which case it would be down.) Again, this is usability for the tree - a competition in height to get to the sun. Leaves - straight veins out to the tips - same idea, get some (light). Curvature of the earth - smoother than the curvature of an 8 ball. Something to do with gravity which, for existence as we know it, is quite useful.

OK, OK, but how does this apply to my intelligent ___________ (fill in the blank - web site, ad, package design, solar electric car, hair)?

For your designs, line up your stuff in straight lines. Line up images so that image edges are lined up with image edges and lines, text with text, and other elements inline with other elements. This is a fundamental design principle yet, some websites are all over the place with every image and section of text every which way.

Using Variation

Things that line up and have no variation are boring. For example, straight long roads with no turns are quite boring. The 58 zigzags across the arid Southern California desert, between mountains, with every few miles a turn. The 5 goes in one straight line for mile after mile after hour after hours. Which would you rather drive?

Likewise, with web sites, if everything lines up on the same line, the page is likely to look very boring. You can change it up with:

1. Bold Titles

2. Lists of items

3. Indented text

All these things break up the monotony of straight lines and can add rhythm to a design. Yet if there is too much breaking up of the lines, the design can become junky looking noise That is hard to read. Hey, no doubt - some people are into that.

Giving Design elements Room to Breathe

Even things that line up do not generally look good if they can't breathe. Putting text right against the edge of another element has a claustrophobic feel. Some sites pack in so much information on one page that there are no margins or breathing space between elements. The result is in uncomfortableness and unreadability. Give your images and text margins, frames or room to breathe.

Use the Grid, Luke

To help you line things up, use graph paper, the Adobe Photoshop grid or draw a measured grid yourself. In the final design this grid is usually removed, but used in layout to ensure things line up nicely. Experienced designers often intuitively use a grid without physically having a grid in the design.

The Golden Section

There is a thing called the golden section, the golden ratio or the divine proportion. If you're really into math, you can do a search to learn more. For those of us not so into math, the Golden Section is a little more than a third. If you take a picture, it just happens to look real nice if you show a little more than two thirds sky. The same applies to many forms of composition. This golden section has some relation to basic geometry that seems to resonate with a human's sense of beauty.

Conclusion

When designing things, remember: Line things up, but don't get boring. Use grids to line things up. The golden section looks nice. Peace.