We’re taught to communicate with words. We write essays, prepare speeches, and take written notes. But words aren’t always the best option for conveying information and ideas. Sometimes the best way to tell stories is through thoughtfully crafted visuals, not long paragraphs of text.
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When the elements are arranged in an orderly manner, the intelligent use of spaces draws our eye to the most noticeable space –be it positive or negative. As much as the positive space seems to dominate the negative counterpart, both are used in equilibrium to tell a harmonious, coherent, and a seamlessly complete story. But what kind of story do spaces tell in web design?
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Color is arguably the second most important aspect of your app, after functionality. The human to computer interaction is heavily based on interacting with graphical UI elements, and color plays a critical role in this interaction.
It helps users see and interpret your app’s content, interact with the correct elements, and understand actions. Every app has a color scheme, and it uses the primary colors for its main areas.
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Depending on your browser, you may not be able to see all emoji featured in this article (especially the Tifinagh characters). Also, different platforms vary in how they display emoji as well. That’s why the article always provides textual alternatives. Don’t let it discourage you from reading though!
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In this final part of the series, we’ll focus on the principles of continuation and common fate, which involve movement, both implied and animated, to create relationships.
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In this second part of the series, we’ll focus on the principles of closure and figure-ground, which play with positive and negative space to build relationships and create wholes with the sum of their parts.
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In this first article, we’ll take a look at how the principles of similarity and proximity work, and look at real-world examples to illustrate them in use so that you can begin to use them in your own designs.
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A balanced composition feels right. Balancing a composition involves arranging both positive elements and negative space in such a way that no one area of the design overpowers other areas.
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When someone lands on a page of your site what do you want that person to do? Where do you want them to look? What information do you want your visitors to notice and in what order? Ideally, you want people to see your most important information first and your next most important information second.
You want potential customers to see the copy that will convince them to buy before they see the “Buy Now” button. You want people to be presented with the right information at the right time, and one way to do that is to control the flow of your composition. Compositional flow determines how the eye is led through a design: where it looks first, where it looks next, where the eye pauses, and how long it stays.
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Has a client ever asked you to make the logo bigger? Maybe they asked that just after you completed their request to make a heading bigger. The new heading stands out, but now the logo is too small in comparison and isn’t getting noticed. The clients wants to make the logo bigger.
Of course, now that the logo and heading are bigger, both are going to attract more attention than the main call-to-action button, which will need to be made bigger. And once the button is bigger, the heading is going to start looking small again.
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