Lessons
Why Design Matters
05:50 2Design Vs. Aesthetic
06:27 3Impact Of Design
07:01 4The Design Process: Understand Your Audience
09:17 5The Design Process: Understand Your Content
05:21 6Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
05:47 7Design Principles: Contrast
02:55 8Design Principles: Repetition
03:20Design Principle: Hierarchy & Proximity
05:37 10Principle Scale And Balance
02:48 11Design Principles: Typography
04:29 12Design Principles: White Space
01:11 13Design Principles: Color
06:09 14Design Principles: Graphics, Icons, And Photos
02:51 15Design Principles: Layouts And Focal Points
01:53 16Design Principles: Color-Blind Accessibility In Design
01:41Lesson Info
Design Principles: Contrast
You're noticing a trend here with alignment. It's about helping us understand where to focus. Contrast is another principle that helps us understand where to start, what is important, so we're not left there guessing. Back to that book, "Don't Make Me Think." We don't want to make people struggle and think. We just want them to naturally look at something and know and flow through whatever it is. So contrast really helps us communicate and replace a ton of explanation that we sometimes might have to give. And we can achieve that explanation through just using contrast to make our point in a really, really visual way. And contrast helps us, we'll see this, highlight importance of things in a design, show comparison of things, create interest or even intrigue, convey context, and it can really just help catch the attention and add focus to whatever we are doing. So let's go back to our very boring boxes. But look, there's contrast. And which one really jumps out at you? And it could depe...
nd on you, especially this is no real content. To me, I'm drawn to the dark one. It's bold, it's jumping out. Maybe the light one stands out to you. But that contrast, you're gravitating towards one of them because they're no longer the same. We've added contrast to make them different. So we're going to naturally look at one or the other. Also, it could make one seem, appear closer or further, depending on how we're looking at it. Another way to achieve contrast is not just by shading, but by shape. All of a sudden we still have the two boxes, but now we're contrasting them through size. Another great way to achieve this, especially if you're trying to convey... Think of this as a charter or graph or something like this. It's communicating a lot without a ton of text. Closer away, further away even. Again, we could use contrast, achieve contrast just with a different shape. One is softer, one is harder. One maybe is more friendly, one maybe is more rigid. And we can also achieve contrast with layout. Slightly different number of boxes, but still. We're contrasting, so likely we're drawn to the larger one maybe, or maybe you're drawn to the other ones. But contrast through shading, shape, things like that, size, can help us gravitate towards one thing or the other.
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