In the development and creation of a website, it is of utmost importance that you understand the principles of design. The principles of design not only enable you to create and aesthetically pleasing website, but it also helps you create an engaging and user-friendly website. The success of a website and retention of viewers is dependent on how well and effectively you communicate through the screen. As aspiring writers, readers, and users of the internet, understanding how successful websites work will help us refine our how we view websites and how we relate to the content displayed before us. All of the design principles are important and relevant, but for my blog, I’ve chosen five principles I want to focus most on to further personalize my website’s aesthetic: unity, emphasis, hierarchy, repetition, and variety.
I chose unity as one of the most important design principles that I will incorporate into my website because I feel like it will be a challenge for me. I feel like as a person, I am very sporadic. I have many different ideas running through my head at all times, and I am constantly multitasking. I am indecisive and like to have many options. For a website, this isn’t good. If my website portrayed my brain, it would be like “Where’s Waldo?” Your brain would heart trying to find the main purpose of my website as you shuffle through countless other irrelevant content. Unity in design is the opposite of my brain because unity in design is aims to relate and bring visual elements together. By instilling and making it a priority to make sure my website exudes unity, I am challenging myself to consciously be mindful of the content I post up and the aesthetics I align my website with. I think a unified website is great because readers will not be confused and will know what to expect from your website. Also, by having a unified website, emphasizing something will be a lot easier to achieve.
Emphasis was the second design principle I chose because, I think the ability to emphasize something important in your website is crucial when communicating to your audience. Emphasis in design is the parts of a design that brings out the most important part of your website. By selectively using emphasis on important parts of my website, I can draw the audience’s attention to the most important matters. I think emphasis would be most useful for new information. I would use emphasis on my website to make sure new content would be the thing viewers are drawn to because it would contrast with the rest of the website. I think a change in elements like color or shapes would definitely help me emphasize important parts of my website. I do understand though, that emphasis should be used in moderation though, or else everything will just clash. That is why ordering things from most to least important is something I’ll need to establish when creating designing my website.
Hierarchy in design is when the important elements within a website appears as important as it is. This is achieved through the use of title and headings. Hierarchy helps the flow and movement of the website, enabling viewers to process the content, from most to least important. By using hierarchy, I can offer my viewers my content in digestible increments. With the use of titles, headings, and subheadings, readers will be less confused by the content I post. To help with the effectiveness of hierarchy, I want to incorporate the “three click rule.” By using this rule, viewers will be able to quickly access the information they need. By using headings for general categories and subheadings for more specific posts, I can help readers easily access information they need. This is a hierarchy design principle because the title is the overall purpose of the website, the heading would be a more general topic, and the subheadings would be more specific posts within that particular topic. I think this hierarchy design principle will be very useful in organizing the different content I’ll having in my website. With hierarchy, to keep things consistent without taking away the emphasis from the important parts of the website, repetition will be useful to help keep the design of my website unified.
Repetition is used to unify different elements within a design, and it also helps to reemphasize certain ideas in w website. I can use repetition to further unify the design of my website in a variety of ways through color, shapes, and typefaces. For now though, I think the best way I can utilize repetition to bring unity to my website is through repetition in the headings of the topics I will be addressing. I will be having different series in my website. Within each series will be a topic, and within each topic will be a specific question I will be addressing that relates to the topic. I’m thinking that each series will be a couple months, each month will be dedicated to a topic, and each week I’ll be answering a specific question through my post and podcast. To make sure that everything doesn’t get too out of hand and for my series and monthly topics to work, I’ll need to incorporate repetition in the design and presentation of the content I’ll be addressing. Each series will have their own page, with a designated color (ex. blue), and within the page would be the topics that’ll be addressed, all in different hues of the designate color (ex. turquoise blue, royal blue, baby blue, indigo blue). Each topic will have about three or four posts answering a question, all in the same hue. The typeface will be the same throughout everything, with the only changes being in the themed colors. I think this will be the most challenging but also the most rewarding design aspect of my website. The usage of color and different hues of color is my attempt to bring variety out from the unity I’ll be trying hard to achieve.
Variety in design is used for the views, to draw them in and keep them interested. If a design is too muted without much change or options, it becomes boring and uninteresting. By using different colors, I hope to bring life and variety into my website, while still maintain the connection across all my content. Variety can bring about chaos in design as well if not used carefully, and I understand this, that is why unity is my most important design element and variety my last. With the use of variety, I have found that my use in variety with the colors won’t bring disorder to my website and content but will help to further unify different ideas within my website. My use of variety in design is helping the other elements of design in my website and creating a more interesting and aesthetically pleasing experience for my viewers.
Design principles are important when creating your own website. To create a successful website that not only draws viewers in, but keeps them coming back, we must be knowledgeable in these design principles and actively incorporate these principles into our design so that we can provide our viewers with the best experience. I chose to focus mainly only five design principles, but it doesn’t mean that the other principles are less important and won’t be use, but it’s quite the contrary. The other principles are just as related to each other as the principles I chose, even if I wanted to exclude them, by using even just one design principles, you are utilizing at least two other principles along with it in some way or another. The aesthetics of a website plays just as big of a role as the content on the website, so just like how it takes time to perfect our content, we should take the time to refine the design of our website.
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