Design Principles

Lesson Overview

The key to creating a great design is designing with intention. There’s more to design than just making things look pretty. Whether you’re designing a website, a flyer, or a logo, you have information that you need to share with an audience, a message that needs to be delivered. You have objectives to accomplish: on a website, you might need to convince someone to buy a product, book a service, sign up for a class, donate to a cause, or simply reshare an article. So how do you accomplish all that with design?

You design with intention.

To elaborate, to design with intention is to make design decisions that serve a specific purpose, to have a reason behind every choice you make. The first step to doing this is learning basic design principles. By starting with this foundation, you can start to develop an understanding of how the design decisions you make (e.g., what colors you choose, how you arrange elements on a page, what size you make your text, what type of imagery you use, etc.) can impact the way that your audience receives and interacts with the content that you’re presenting. 

In this lesson, we’re going to cover a few essential principles that’ll help you design more effective websites: Hierarchy, Layout, Typography, and Color.