Website design plays an integral part in ensuring a business or organization’s online success. Effective design involves adhering to principles that prioritize accessibility, such as using white space, design elements and negative space effectively as well as optimizing image sizes according to screen size and mobile devices via responsive design.
1. Visual Hierarchy
Visual Hierarchy (VH) is the principle governing how elements are prioritized and displayed within a design, making certain elements stand out and drawing the eye towards them. VH also helps users comprehend information easily related to an overall composition such as websites or business communications like infographics, presentations or reports. This principle holds true regardless of its application – be it websites, infographics presentations or reports.
Visual hierarchy is founded on Gestalt principles that have been proven to influence how humans perceive designs. These include size and scale, color contrasts, proximity, alignment, negative space repetition leading lines the Golden Ratio perspective etc. By understanding these principles you can leverage them effectively when designing designs which communicate their message clearly while engaging their target audiences.
As an example, your largest element should contain the information or call-to-action you wish to focus attention on, while smaller elements provide supporting details or additional or secondary data. This could involve using type size differences between header, subheader and body text areas; or creating unique designs by mixing font sizes, colors and attributes for every section on the page.
An effective visual hierarchy is key to web design, and can make or break user experiences. Without it, visitors could quickly get lost and lose faith in your brand or site.
2. Invariance
As a web design principle, invariance implies ensuring your website has an orderly structure with consistent images that users can navigate easily – this will also make the site appear professional.
Websites with large amounts of content require invariability when designing them, particularly to maintain consistency across pages. To create such a website, rank the elements of your page according to importance before adjusting their order accordingly – for instance having a banner at the top that reads “Welcome”, images below it and finally an “Buy Tickets” button may need adjusting with regards to size and color before appearing correctly in sequence.
You could opt for the index pages pattern, consisting of one main page with equal-sized subpages. This option would work well on sites with lots of information or product categories with wide coverage. Alternatively, the strict hierarchy pattern offers more branchy navigation that lets you show different depth levels within pages.
Keep in mind when designing for invariance is that it involves more than simply maintaining consistency; it involves placing items logically. As seen below from Canva’s Jewelry And Accessories Online Store Website template, space between images helps draw the eye of visitors while creating an air of tranquillity for customers.
3. White Space
White space refers to the space between design elements and content on a page, making it an integral part of website design. White space enables visitors to scan a webpage easily by breaking it up into digestible parts; without it, pages would quickly become too busy and difficult to read for visitors. White space also enables designers to highlight certain parts of a page by making certain elements or pieces stand out more.
If your website features a call-to-action button, placing it prominently and visibly can make the most impactful statement about its importance to visitors and encourages them to click it.
White space can also help improve legibility of text on websites by using appropriate font sizes and spacing, as well as grouping paragraphs and lines of text into logical groups.
Macro white space refers to large areas between major layout elements and their surrounding design layout, and also in between blocks of content on websites. Micro white space refers to any smaller gaps found between individual letters, words and paragraphs compared with macro white space.
4. Contrast
Contrast is an essential aspect of web design, used to establish visual hierarchy and highlight important elements on your page. Contrast can also help make your website more visually pleasing and user-friendly; using colors, shapes, sizes or textures to differentiate elements helps achieve it.
Color contrast is probably the best-known form of contrast. This term refers to the difference between two colors; darker hues tending to have greater distinction than lighter ones; for instance, red text on a white background would feature high color contrast while white text against a blue backdrop would only produce moderate results.
Shape contrast is another way of adding contrast to websites, and refers to differences in physical shape of two or more elements on a page. For instance, adding rounded corners can give buttons a pop and make them stand out against other elements on the page. While web designers sometimes overlook this technique for adding some flair into designs, shape contrast can add visual interest while giving an aesthetic flourish that helps make an otherwise plain site unique and captivating.
Size contrast is another popular form of contrast, typically defined as the difference in size between elements. For instance, using larger font sizes for headlines and smaller text sizes for subheadings helps create visual hierarchy and make navigation simpler for visitors to your website. Furthermore, using different sizes for different actions creates a sense of urgency by emphasizing essential actions more prominently.
5. Balance
Balance is one of the cornerstones of good web designs. It involves carefully distributing visual weight across images, text, and other design elements on your site, for instance, on yoakimbridge.com, you can see that too much balance can make the website appear unattractive or distract viewers altogether.
When creating a balanced website design, it is key to take note of both the size and color of its elements. When considering balance in web design, smaller visual objects typically carry less weight than their larger and darker counterparts – hence why multiple smaller elements in one spot is often preferable over just one large object. It is also wise to utilize light colors as background on your site while using darker hues for text and illustrations.
Balance and symmetry go hand-in-hand, so a grid system can help achieve it by evenly dividing your website into columns and rows to achieve this effect. Doing this creates a sense of order and structure on the site for users who visit it, making navigation simpler for visitors.
Asymmetry can also be used to achieve balance on websites that want to convey uniqueness and personality, such as CG Vietnam’s website which makes use of this technique in order to showcase their graphics development services in an eye-catching manner. Furthermore, this site also features radial balance, where all elements radiate outward from a central point.
6. Simplicity
Simplicity is key in today’s age of distraction. A website should be clean and uncluttered to reduce clutter and noise that could distract from its overall message, as well as remember its purpose – whether that is direct new business for a company, or providing education about an important subject matter. A user-friendly site will make finding what they are searching for easier; increasing chances that visitors stay longer.
Simplicity does not equate to minimalist design alone; rather it involves considering users’ goals and then providing the simplest means for achieving those objectives.
Consider employing the “law of common region,” which states that elements near one another will be perceived as connected. You could achieve this effect with similar background colors or by placing an image at the top of each page, while using contrasting hues can draw the eye towards more important components of your design.
Another key to simplicity is not overcrowding websites with too many calls-to-action. Hick’s law holds that when presented with too many choices, users become less likely to choose any at all – therefore only including limited calls-to-action on each page.