I only do it my way, sorta! Principles of Design you should know.

by Charious McLaurin 

Steve Jobs once said, "In most people's vocabularies, design is a veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product."

Designers are expected to imagine new things, not to study what exists today. In ordinary life, people are inventive but within the bounds of everyday life. To get people into a more creative mood, constructive design researchers use several techniques that differentiate them from the social sciences. One technique is vocabulary, which often fails at crucial moments. Few people have an extensive vocabulary for describing things such as materials, colors, shapes, spaces, and other things of immediate interest to designers. Designers have to find ways to make people imagine.

To understand the principles of good design, you have to consider all the layers that create great design. This careful marriage of all the "layers" of design are what make a design beautiful, timeless, and, ultimately, successful in reaching its goals.

For the purpose of this article I will cover the first layer which is purpose. The intentions of a design work together with the limitations of the technology used to create the design, as well as with harmonies of form, geometry, and color. All these pieces, all these layers, are inextricably linked with one another, forming the whole of what truly is design.

Whoa, that was deep right? Okay consider this for a second, design includes distinct layering an interconnectedness of different factors, that manifests itself in the impact of seeing a new living structure, sound or arrangement of shapes to create something you’ve never seen until now but at the same time its presence on its medium comforts you.

It's important to understand the layers that make up a design, because getting those layers to work together is the key to creating designs that look good, that solve problems, and that ultimately influence your users. On the web, more than anywhere else, using the layers of design appropriately is critical to success. People are exposed to more information today than ever before, and there just isn't enough time or attention for us to process all of it. So, we use shortcuts to decide what is deserving of our ever-more-precious attention.

Purpose of Design

Every piece of design has a purpose or an intention. The Pantheon was built as a temple of the gods, the iPod was built as a portable device for playing music, and every website or application you create has its own set of purposes. This article was written to help you widen your perspective on design in general. The purposes and intentions of a design is to interact with the characteristics and needs of a user. Every user needs to be able to access information clearly, and this communication is the very foundation of design. The ultimate achievement of any design in my opinon is to empower the user with one look. Meaning, when they see it (whatever it may be) they already know how it can benefit them even if they have never seen anything like it before.

Visual Design  

Within the context of designing websites or applications, visual design is a component of the discipline of user experience design. User experience design concerns itself with anything relating to a user's interaction with a product. User experience design attempts to make products memorable and easy to use and incorporates a number of different disciplines, including usability.

Visual design is intertwined with the other disciplines of user experience design. Because successful design relies upon sensitivity to the interconnectedness of these disciplines, it's important to have an understanding of user experience design when working on a project. The structured thinking of the user experience design process ensures that you're meeting the needs of your user and produces the basic shape of your application, which strongly influences your visual design.

The image below is a view of visual design's relationship with other disciplines within user experience design (in the context of websites and applications). As you can see, visual design is intertwined with the content and usability of a product. Naturally, the content of a product is what a visual designer is really trying to illuminate, while usability considerations — which strongly influence visual design — ensure that the end-user will be able to use the product effectively. Visual design is a component of user experience design and is influenced by other disciplines and components of user experience design.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when integrating user experience with your visual design:

·      You don't always need a great visual design to be successful. Be sensitive to the needs of your users, how they interact with your product, and how your product fits into the competitive landscape.

·      Great visual design depends upon great user experience design. Use some form of a user experience design process early on in your project. User personas use cases, and wireframes all help you focus on the critical aspects of user experience before getting caught up in details.

Any book on design has to face a difficulty that stems from the English language. The word "design" is ambiguous, as it covers both planning (of products and systems), and also what most other European languages would loosely call "form giving." The latter meaning is more restrictive than the former, which may cover anything from hair and food design to designing airplanes.

People negotiate their way through their life halfway with their eyes, ears, hands, and body, as well as their sense of space and movement and many kinds of things they are barely aware of. Although everyone lives in this halfway every second, there are few words to describe it. However, it is the stuff of design education. In Sharon Poggenpohl's words, “it aims at developing sensibilities of visual, material, cultural, and historical contexts.”

Designers trained in the arts are capable of capturing fleeting moments and structures that others find ephemeral, imaginative, and unstable for serious research. They are also trained in reframing ideas rather than solving known problems. Above all, they are trained to imagine problems and opportunities to see whether something is necessary or not. It is just this imaginative step that is presented in discussions on innovation in industry.

Your design can be indispensable tools for transforming designers’ intuitions, hunches, and small discoveries into something that stays — for instance, a prototype, product, or system. They provide the means for sketching, analyzing, and clarifying ideas as well as for mediating ideas and persuading others. In Bruno Latour's philosophical language, design things turn weak hunches into stronger claims. They also translate many types of interests into joined strongholds and provide tools that take design from short to long networks. This ability to gather people to talk and debate without any command of special skills is what is needed to work with systems design methods. Flow diagrams and other rationalistic tools cut too many parties out from design, creating a caste system. Understanding these forms requires training, and the mere use of these tools tells non-experts to stay away.

Like Steve Jobs said, many people think of design as some kind of afterthought — the upholstery on a couch, the logo on a business card, or the visual look of a button on a website. In pursuit of understanding design, many are led down the fruitless path of approaching design with this definition in mind. They may try to learn how to create a particular visual effect, repeatedly refer to lists of do's and don'ts, or try adding visual elements to a design that do little but create clutter.

In psychology, there are shortcuts called heuristics. Heuristics help us solve complex problems and make complex decisions by using "rules" that are either programmed into us by evolution or learned from our own experiences. These heuristics are in heavy use as people make decisions on the web. We make split-second judgments about how much we trust a news site to give us accurate information, how much we trust an e-commerce site to process our payments securely, or whether we believe a nonprofit will use our money wisely.

It turns out, in all these cases, design is the single most important heuristic we process when deciding whether a site, product or service is credible. The factors that influence design are countless, with fuzzy boundaries. You could ask a dozen different design experts what factors manifest themselves in a piece of design, and although you'd get a dozen different sets of answers, they would all pretty much cover the same things.