6 – Use Structure!
Because I trained myself web style, there are some really primary design concepts I skipped out on learning beginning on. A several years after I had began creating sites I signed up with a regional design organization and met a guy known as Matt Leach who went on to be editor of the subversive Empty Magazine. Anyhow Matt did two factors for me for which I am permanently thankful. The first is he presented me to my lovely wife Cyan (yay!) and the partially less essential second is that he trained me to use structure in my design.
In those days I used to just toss things on a web page and sometimes things lined up or were equally spaced or kind of used a grid, and sometimes well they just kind of dropped how they dropped. Matt critiqued a design I had done and revealed me the wonders of alignment and spacing and I’ve never seemed returning.
If you’re not already doing so, spend some time doing these things:
• Evenly space things
For example if you have some text in a box in your sidebar, it’s usually a wise decision for the writing text to be central from the top and side. It’s an easy addiction, but creates the box look healthy and consistent.
• Line things up
If you have a lot of boxes, a logo, some headlines, some written text, all approximately in the same place you should be lining the edges as much as possible. There are some techniques to this in that some characters in titles should not be exactly covered up – the best example is a investment "T", or if you have written text in a box you have a option between arranging the advantage of the box or the advantage of the writing with the other components. The more you exercise aiming and the more you look at how other individuals and styles do it, the better you will get at it until it becomes natural and you will discover it begins generating you insane when individuals do not arrange factors effectively :-)
• Use Grids
Grids are an extension of lining things up. Here you’re predefined a set of vertical and horizontal spaces and then sticking to them (with variation). Do you have to do this by actually drawing in guides and column lines – not really, personally I do it mostly by just guessing and "making it look right". But of course the more complex the grid and use of it, the more you may want to use guides and helpers.
• Be Systematic in Font Sizes and Families
A rookie mistake is to go crazy with typefaces and mismatch sizes, fonts and colors While variation is good, you also want consistency. It’s best if you have 1-3 typefaces you are using and you do so completely consistently.
7 – Now Mix in Some Unstructured
Once you have structure in your design and you’ve gotten used to aligning and being ordered and systematic, only then is it time to break out and start mixing things up. It’s the old adage that you have to understand the rules before you break them.
Mixing some unstructured elements into a structured design is a really nice way of getting a result that looks ordered and comprehensible and yet isn’t boring. Your main aim is to break out of the structure using a couple of bold visual elements, to vary up spacing, typefaces and use of your grid, and yet have an underlying structure.
Actually you can even just completely break out of structure altogether, but it’s pretty damn hard to do well. A famous designer who is known for breaking rules – largely to do with typography, but also with grids and design structures – is David Carson.
SmashingMagazine has a bunch of articles about grid-based design, including this one about breaking out of the grid by our own Psdtuts+ editor Sean Hodge.
8 – With every project, do one thing you’ve never done before
If I could give one piece of advice to a new designer it would be to make this a personal design habit: With every single project you take on, do one thing you've never done before. Whether it’s a new font, a new grid, a new visual style, a new color scheme, a new graphic effect, a new menu structure, a new technology, anything. Even if it means the job takes a bit longer than it should, even if it leads to a couple dead ends you could have avoided, even if it means you have to spend a bit extra to buy a new font, just do it.
This habit will do a number of things for you. It will force you to constantly expand your horizons as a designer. It will keep your work feeling fresh. And it will prevent you from falling into a design rut and just pumping out the "usual". It’s a habit that you can take on early in your career as a way to become better, and then long after you are established it will keep paying dividends.
If you only take one thing away from all these Web Design Week posts I’ve been working so hard on, make it this: to habitually push yourself as a designer, to try new things, to experiment, to always be learning, and to never stop finding joy in new techniques, styles and ideas.
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