Design is all around us. Humans interact with design on a daily basis, whether consciously or not. Each design is created with the intended message and target audience in mind. By applying a few basic principles, you can create effective and understandable designs.
While the elements of art are considered the building blocks of design, the principles of design can be seen as the rules. Once you understand all the design elements, you’ll want to be ambitious and include multiple shapes, different colors, or types of lines and fonts. But without design principles, you end up with a disorganized, confusing, and hard to navigate structure.
And as a huge film lover, I am always fascinated by the way world-famous films convey complex concepts through their posters. I believe that simplicity is the key to understanding, and that’s why I try to explain these concepts in a simple way with posters from some of this world-famous films.
Contrast
You can use contrast to draw attention to or accentuate important components in your design. Two elements acting in complete opposition to one another produce contrast. This can be accomplished with typography, lines, shapes, colour, etc.
The way that information is organised on a page is greatly influenced by contrast. The reader will be directed to the most crucial component or the area where they should start looking. However, it needs to be powerful and clear in order to be effective. A design “pops” when contrast is used, and viewers are more likely to remember it as a result.
Contrasting things are said to attract one another, and this is also true of design elements. Imagine a design where there is no contrast at all. Every colour, typeface, shape, etc. would be the same size, and the result would be a fairly boring composition. The usability of a composition is also helped by contrast. The way contrast is employed to draw the viewer’s eye to the most crucial elements determines how a design is organised.
Alignment
Repetition
