I made this into a TikTok video some time last year and decided to turn it into an article. It was for anyone who ever wondered why certain designs just click while others fall flat. It’s all about the principles. These are some thoughts I had on the idea.
When people are looking at designs and generally don’t like it. You might hear statements like it does not look nice or doesn’t seem to work well visually, or they may get into some advanced statements like pieces aren’t styled well if we are talking about fashion. For most though you might be like, “Okay so what does it mean? How do you KNOW this does not look good or why don’t I like this?” And we can say things like art can be subjective but in essence, design, though it can borrow and use art in its creation, at the end of the day, it is not. You can think of design as the strategic communication of solutions through creative problem solving and some visual expression.
So how do you approach making something feel fundamentally well designed and get more people on board with communicating a style, a look, a feel. One basic way to approach that can be through Design Principles. You would have heard some of the design principles used before to explain something visually, Contrast, Harmony, Emphasis, Proportion, Balance, Unity, Variety, White Space, Movement, Repetition or Patterns, these are all principles of design that can make something look better visually.
So for example with Emphasis, you are looking at making something more prominent than everything else people will be seeing, if you go overboard it can get cartoonish or feel out of place ( this is if you combine emphasis with bad proportion) or you can emphasise the wrong colour and in this case emphasising the wrong colour can throw off your harmony and things may look weird, or garish or bland.
If you are self-taught I would like take a look at design principles, some people who may not have learned this have a really good sense of taste where they make these elements for them and are able to express it even though they may not fully understand how it is successful, and sometimes if you are struggling with making it work maybe you need to get a better understanding of these principles to make your thing better.