The principles of graphic design

Where do these five principles come from?

From the eye, not from taste. Design principles are explanations of how the visual system tidies a page: it sees things that are closer together as one group, it sees whatever differs from the rest first, and it follows repeating edges. A designer does not change that behaviour; they only learn to work with it, or at least not against it.

The list of these principles differs from book to book, four in some, seven in others. We picked five because all five genuinely produce decisions in daily work: hierarchy, contrast, alignment, whitespace and repetition. Hierarchy comes first because it steers the rest; once it is settled what holds first rank, decisions about size, colour and spacing get easier on their own.

The method of this lesson is a choice as well. This site deliberately carries no images and its figures are the visuals, so each principle is described as a before and after: one specific state, one specific change, and what is different afterwards. The advantage of that over looking at two pictures is that you are forced to put the change into words, and those words are what serve you later in a meeting with a client.

What is wrong with a poster where everything is the same size?

The problem is that reading it has become the reader job, when it was yours. Picture a conference poster: the event name, the date, the time, the address, three speaker names and two sponsor logos, all at one size and one weight. The eye has nowhere to land, so it either reads from top to bottom or moves on, and on a pavement it picks the second.

Now the before and after. Before: seven elements, all one size. After: the event name three times the rest, date and time together in one medium block, the address small, the three speakers in a smaller row, and the sponsor logos the smallest thing on the poster. Nothing was deleted and no new colour was added; the ranks were simply settled.

And what settles rank? The reader question, not the importance the client attaches to the elements. The client thinks their own logo is the most important thing, and the reader walking past wants to know what is happening and when. When those two disagree, you have to explain that a large logo on a poster nobody stops to read delivers nothing to anybody. That is the sentence we said sets the price of the work.

One common mistake lives here too: enlarging everything important. If four things are big, none of them is big. Hierarchy means something has to get smaller so that something else can look large, and that is exactly why it is hard to apply.

Contrast is not only dark against light

Contrast means difference, and difference is built out of five things: size, weight, colour, direction and shape. The rule that pays off most is one sentence: if two things are not meant to be identical, make them very different. A small difference reads as a mistake rather than a decision.

The before and after here is the clearest of the five. Before: a heading in one typeface and the body in another that is slightly unlike it, both at a normal weight and close in size. The result is a page that looks as though somebody changed font mid job and forgot to change back. After: either both in one typeface with the difference carried by weight and size, or two typefaces that are obviously from different families. Both routes are correct; the middle position is the wrong one.

One part of contrast does have a number, and it is worth borrowing that number. The WCAG standard says the luminance ratio between text and its background should be at least 4.5 to 1, and 3 to 1 is enough for large text. That standard was written for web pages, yet the light grey on white that looks elegant in a portfolio does not pass there either, and it does not read in print.

For print there is no equivalent number at all, so the only way to check is to make a real proof and look at it in the light it will actually be seen in. A colour that is vivid on a calibrated screen is a different thing on matte paper under a shop light. Guessing does not make up for that.

The invisible line everything has to sit on

Alignment means every item on the page has a visual relationship with some other item, rather than merely being placed somewhere. The eye finds edges, including edges that were never drawn, and an element that sits slightly off one reads not as variety but as an error.

Before: the title centred, the body ranged right, the image flush to the left edge, and the caption centred again. None of those four decisions is wrong on its own, and together they make a page that feels busy for no reason. After: all four on one edge, say all ranged right, with the image edge lining up with the text edge. All you did was move three things a few millimetres, and the page suddenly reads as tidy.

In Persian the strong edge is the right one, and that single fact settles several decisions: text blocks start from the right, Latin words and numbers inside a sentence can have their punctuation appear displaced, and centring a text leaves both of its edges ragged, which then has to be deliberate and controlled.

Centring is not forbidden, but it has to be a decision rather than a default. Centred text works for a short symmetrical block such as the title of an invitation; it works badly for a paragraph of several lines, because on every line the eye has to hunt for the start again. The practical summary: choose one edge and put everything on it, and where you want to leave that edge, know that you are drawing attention and make sure that is what you wanted.

Whitespace and repetition, the two least applied principles

Whitespace looks wasted and is not. It does two things: it gives importance to an element that has emptiness around it without adding anything to that element, and it tells the eye which items form a group. The eye reads distance, so if the gap between a heading and its own text is larger than the gap between that text and the next heading, you have attached the heading to the wrong paragraph without meaning to.

Before: a five millimetre outer margin, elements filled out to the edge, and the same gap between blocks as inside each block. After: the outer margin doubled, two low value elements removed, and the gaps between groups clearly larger than the gaps inside them. The page got emptier and the message got stronger, and those two happened together rather than despite each other.

Repetition is the thing people are calling professionalism. Before: every page of a catalogue has a heading at a slightly different size, spacings that vary a little each time, and icons from two families. None of those differences is visible on its own, and their sum makes the catalogue look unprofessional. After: four text sizes in the whole document, one limited scale for every gap, one icon family. Nobody can say what changed, and everybody notices that it did.

A limited scale is what saves the most time. Instead of choosing a spacing for each case, choose four or five numbers and use only those. Its second benefit shows up when the work passes to somebody else, or when you come back to it six months later: the rule is written down and nothing has to be guessed.

Which of these principles can be broken?

Any of them, once, on purpose. The condition is that the rest of the page is obedient. An element that hangs off the edge draws attention only when everything else is exactly on the edge; if everything is slightly out, that one is no longer a broken rule, it is only carelessness. The same logic holds for size, colour and spacing: breaking a rule takes its meaning from the rule.

Our position is that these five principles are written for a design that has a job to do. A poster that has to inform, packaging that has to be seen on a shelf, a catalogue that has to be read. For an art piece or an exhibition portfolio there is no job to interfere with in the first place, and there the five turn into matters of taste that can be set aside.

And one more boundary a lot of people cross: if the thing you are designing is going to be operated rather than only looked at, these five are not enough. There you have to add consistency, and contrast stops being taste and becomes a number. That discussion has its own place, and the principles of interface design is where it lives.