subject: Intelligent Design - Basic Design Guidelines [print this page] When talking about intelligent design, we are not talking about the creation of man. Nope, this is more important! The creation of your media and site products.
There are some very basic things about design that one can learn that can vastly improve one's ability to make appealing and intelligent creations. Some of those things are:
1. Lining Things Up
2. Using Variation
3. Giving Breathing Room
4. Using the Grid
5. The Golden Section
6. Lining Things Up
Things that line up look nice. Things that are all over the place don't look nice. Of course, one must know rules to know which ones to break, so these rules are only guidelines. In general though, straight or smooth lines are appealing. Jagged and inconsistent lines are less likely to be appealing. A design with many elements lining up and a few elements that don't can create nice contrast, yet starting with things that line up is a nice easy rule for beginners.
To support these statements, lets look at examples of man-made objects. Roads, desks, walls, buildings, orange juice containers. The forms of all these objects are straight or consistent and any deviation from this norm is considered mildly repulsive. On roads, the matter is quite important to health. There is a merge under construction from the 60 East (that's how we identify freeways here in California) to the 215 South, where the turn starts at one size circumstance then abruptly veers a few degrees tighter to another sized circumstance. This slight change in curvature results in a driver having to adjust for this change with a slight, and apparently unexpected, turn of the wheel. I say apparently because road barriers prevent a driver from seeing the whole turn going into it and
there are a bunch of tire marks etched up the construction barrier right at the point of the change in curvature.
Lets look at desks. Obviously straight and even desks are good for writing, fit against straight walls well and look nice, at least to me. Buildings, like desks are convenient shapes for space efficiency, map drawing, road creation, furniture and room modularity. Sure, curved buildings are beautiful too, yet the curves are often very even, and more often than not, the curve is accompanied by a straight line in another dimension.
