People often make way for creativity and experimentation in place of respecting principles and conventions. But this might not always be a smart strategy. Read why sticking to the basics in design can bring you greater market success. From simple social media graphics to complicated projects such as web design and experience design, clients working with design teams might have ideas and wishes that are brave, experimental and break common conventions when it comes to graphic design.
However, these guiding principles have been around for a long time, and though they may seem to constrain sometimes, they can help your design decisions, as well as assist you in getting the right actions from your target audience.
Through using good principles in design, as well as doing market research, you will be able to design products and assets that will impress audience and as a result, have a good market and monetary success.
Here are main reasons why sticking to principles is important.
Ease the design process
By sticking to the ground rules, the process of designing your product or asset will go smoother and quicker. Call it simple deduction: by ruling out things that aren’t compatible with the principles and creating within what is allowed, you will be able to focus only on the variants that are most fitting.
Whether you are a team member that has no experience in design, or a project manager that needs to make the final decision, learning the design principles will also you recognize the most quality version of a design. You’ll probably need to grasp the main design fundamentals to be able to provide helpful criticism. Rather than assessing by emotion or aesthetic taste, assess the most fundamental design principles and evaluate if a design job adheres to them.
A quicker design process or iteration will result in more effective preparation for putting your product on the market, which increase the chances of success.
Improve user experience design
Good UX design is incredibly important if you want your business to succeed. This is especially true for Software-as-a-Service businesses, as they don’t have a brick-and-mortar business where customers can be impressed. UX design influences the experience customers have when trying to discover the business, get informed about its products and services, make a purchase or stay in the know about all news related to it.
So, a website or app is a one-stop station for all these things. You need to employ good design principles to make sure that the look and feel of them serve the purpose and usability too. It’s not just about looking good, it needs to be easy to understand and use. the same goes for the design of products themselves: the final user needs to have a good experience with the product, and that is the utmost goal of their design.
Create an intuitive user interface
Similar to the ux design, ui also incredibly important and it can make or break a product on the basis of its intuitiveness. While ux concerns the phycological and experiential aspects of using a product, user interface relates more to the visual part of it.
How easy can a user navigate on a website? Is it easy to spot buttons in a particular shape and color? Are the transitions between screens in an app smooth, or disruptive? Does a landing page wireframe make sense for someone seeing it for the first time with no information about the business?
Through design principles like balance, proximity and white space, for example, a UI designer can focus the eye exactly where they want it, hence achieving the wanted result.
Improve the marketing materials
There’s no market success without good market presence. Marketing (and with it advertising) are the most important disciplines that can help a product be discovered and wanted. But, in order to produce marketing materials, whether they are social media ads, packaging or even business cards, graphic designers stick to good principles that help achieve the right result.
Color theory, lines, shapes, textures, sizes, dimensions and movement are only some of the techniques that can give a visual product a purpose. The final audiences will easily notice and learn the marketing messages through the help of these principles.
Helps attract the right audience with color theory
The rights colors and their correct usage according to principles, could also help you attract the right audience.
For example, blue is believed to give audience a sense of calmness and reliability. This is why many banks and brands in the automotive and technology industries use it ( samsung, BMW, IBM, etc) Red, on the other hand, makes them hungry. That is why it is one of the most widely used colors in the fast-food industry ( burger king, pizza hut, McDonald’s, KFC, etc).
Other colors also have different effects on human psychology and combined with design principles you’ll be able to use the them sparingly or in abundance, as the focal point of the design or perhaps to add balance to the overall look, depending on what you want to achieve.