6 primary principles in Graphic Design that you should know [part 1]

Human psychology often looks for harmony and ways to solve problems in daily life. When you realize that your life or work environment becomes too messy, you tend to want to rearrange them in order to gain back productivity.

At a basic level, Design is a form of visual organization. Graphic Design is the art of pictographic and typographic elements to create effective communication.

Below will be all the main principles, elements and visual relationships of Graphic Design that you should know.

Poster Design — 2018 RECCCAP by Christine Phan (Thai soccer team was found on 02 July)

Primary Principles

These principles have an overall effect on your design

1. Unity
2. Variety
3. Hierarchy
4. Dominance
5. Proportion
6. Balance

1. Unity & Variety:

In the eyes and minds of people watching any design, viewers need to understand what they are watching. A complete sentence brings more clear and complete meaning than each individual word does. A passage will convey the message more accurately than each sentence separately.

The goal of any design is to be able to convey at least one information.

Designers must create unity throughout each individual design to create a bigger consistent look.

Therefore, unity should be applied to make elements in a composition look more relevant, belonging to each other. When each element has a clear visual relation to one or other elements, this composition is consistent.

A house divided against itself cannot stand…It will become all one thing or all the other. — Abraham Lincoln

Unity is the repetition of a common element or a characteristic to create visual harmony.

Unity is the control of the variety. Usually, the content in design is diversified by many types, including typefaces, graphic elements, photographs, or illustrations.

Variety, an additional principle for unity, plays an important role in creating visual interest.

One of my collages for a campaign for feminism

How to create unity and variety

• Use repetition, alignment và proximity to enhance unity in your design
• Use contrast for more variety, add some fun to your design.
• When adding images, consider and make sure it matches the theme of the design. Using image A because it’s cool is not unity. Figure A increases the efficiency of communication, design themes, that is unity.

Using and managing variety is the art of balancing contrast. Unity brings order to design, but too much consistency makes design boring and lifeless. Variety brings fun to design, but being too diverse makes everything messy, difficult to read, and more confusing. Therefore, it is necessary to find the balance between the variety and unity.

To avoid the chaos and disorganization of so many different elements, like the one below, after grouping the chairs looks different, you can regain the balance between unity and variety for this pile of chairs by giving them a uniform color.

You can still see unity despite the chairs’ different forms.

2. Hierarchy & Dominance:

One of the important functions of unity in design is to manage the visual hierarchy in compositions.

Hierarchy implies an order in design according to the importance of visual elements, from high to low (dominant> sub-dominant> subordinate). The more important elements are, the more they are emphasized.

Dominance is an influence of one element on another element. Emphasis is the importance of this element over another element. Dominance and Emphasis are simpler functions of the hierarchy.

A designer must know how to manage the size, position, and balance of elements so readers can read and understand the content to convey. Control the hierarchy is to determine the path of the eye when the reader glides through the design. If we look at a design or work many times, we can experience the path of the eye. In the first few seconds of each view, the eyes’ path is the same. Areas with high contrast levels like human faces or strange shapes immediately attract the eye of the viewer. Once viewers’ eyes have traveled a few times through dominant elements in the design, they will become familiar with them and begin to consider the remaining auxiliary components.

Lack of visual hierarchy is why so many designs can’t attract attention. Identify what are the dominant elements and what are secondary elements helps convey the meaning of content in a design better.

The eyes of the viewer moves to the opening eye first, then the human face. Title: Today and Tomorrow are the first elements that are read. Next, the zigzag line draws the eyes of the viewer down to the smaller groups of text at the bottom. Ad for Automated Energy, Inc. by Steve Walker.

Depending on each culture and each individual, there will be differences in the reception of information, thereby affecting the tendency of the eye’s movement.

• In Western culture, people read from left to right, from top to bottom
• Most Arabic and Semitic scripts are read from right to left, but the numbers read from left to right.
• Chinese can be written from right to left in vertical rows, from left to right horizontally or sometimes right to left.
• In Taiwan, Chinese is often written vertically, while in China and Singapore are often written horizontally.
• For more reading and writing methods of other languages here: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/direction.htm

Depending on each concept, design can be read from the middle to the top, from the bottom to the top … Designers needs to control how his design is read by managing visual hierarchy.

Part 2 will continue to the other two primary principles: Proportion and Balance. If you see this article helpful, clap and comment to support and I will see you guys next time.

Stay Nerdy.