Seattle Website Design

A truly shocking number of web designers are unfamiliar with the basic principles and elements of design. Having never been through any formal design education, many just go with what they think 'looks good', with very mixed results. If you're going to design a website, you'll do much better if you have some idea of what you're doing when it comes to graphic design. Here, then, is a crash course in the principles and elements most useful to web designers.

Balance.

It is important for things to be balanced. That doesn't necessarily mean symmetry, making one side exactly the same as the other, but it does mean that you can't make one side 'strong' and not balance that on the other side. For example, if you use a dark color, you should balance it with a larger area of a lighter color. What balance allows you to do is to lead the viewer’s eye to certain parts of the page without making the page look ridiculous.

Shape.

One thing that lots of people don't realize is that there are two kinds of shapes: positive and negative and every design has both kinds of shapes. The positive ones are the ones you, the designer, actively placed on the page, while the negative shapes are the spaces created around the positive ones. Many web designers simply ignore this, leaving their negative shapes as a mess. This leads to the 'boxy' look that many amateur pages have.

Color.

Color is a big subject. As soon as you add more than one color to a page, you make the other colors look different. Some colors are complementary, and some just look terrible together. On the web, though, you should usually avoid using too many colors on one page. Even if they are complementary, it will look garish.

Emphasis.

If you want to make part of the page stand out from all the rest, you can give it emphasis using a variety of techniques. Grouping everything together and then moving one thing a significant distance away from them will make it a focal point, as will making it a different shape from the others, or a different color.

Line.

The directions of your lines will give a mood to your design: as a rule, horizontal lines are calmer, vertical lines are moderately active, and jagged or diagonal lines are very active. If you were designing an austere financial news site, then, you'd use horizontal lines, while a fun site for kids would be full of lines going in all sorts of directions.