Basic Principles Of Design

There are four main ideas that the BPOD (basic principles of design) authors want you, the reader, to know and that is: alignment, proximity, repetition, and contrast. Alignment suggests when designing a webpage, it is smart to have all things flush to one side, rather than in the middle (unless you are highly paid to design webpages, in which case you know what you are doing). More often than not, it is more appealing to the eye to see something that is flush to the left side, since we read from left to right. Proximity is the thing that most young web designers mess up on the most. This is the basic yet overlooked principle of filling in the spaces. More technically speaking, it is giving a physical relationship between two items.  When two items, or words are too fart apart, then it the reader doesn't know to distinguish a relationship for the words. Therefore, it is smarter to put words that do have an understanding together to put them more closely together. 'Nuff Said. Repetition refers more towards the background rather than anything in the background. This suggests than when making a website, make all the webpages similar to the first one, or to have a similar layout for each webpage with varying pictures and words. Having different webpages completely different from the original webpage makes it seem like you have created a link that goes to a completely different website. Its all just to avoid confusion with your potential reader (or worse) or customer. Lastly, contrast. This is exactly what it suggests. Have enough contrast on your webpage so that it draws you reader in. BPOD suggests that you make the contrast very strong in order to get the full effects of what you are trying to do. However, BPOD warns that when you are writing something like continuos text, then it is very irritating to have any type of contrast at all, especially links with the color blue that can deter away from the text.

When talking about color, the main thing that one has to be careful is contrast. If you do not have contrast the isn't defining at all, then  it is pointless to have those two colors. Having strong contrast between colors is crucial. Typically, the strongest (and most boring) is a white background with black text.

When initially designing my webpage for the portfolio, I had already taken into consideration what BPOD had tried to tell me. I feel that when it comes to proximity, contrast, and repetition I have not let them down. I did realize that they suggested to not have your alignment along the middle, but I feel that with the use of my borders on the sides and the repetition on all the webpages, it is both easily accessible and easy to read.