Basic Design Principles

The four basic design principles are alignment, proximity, repitition, and contrast. Using these four principles will result in a very organized, easy to follow webpage. When aligning your page, you should make sure you use the same alignment throughout the whole page, dont mix alignments. You should also align your pages horizontally. Proximity is the closeness of certain things on a page and the relationship between them. The closer things are, the stronger the relationship should be between them. Repetition means that all of the webpages that compose your website have something in common that links them together. Using the same font, color scheme, layout, etc. can all help bring out repetition. The final principle, contrast, serves to lead viewers to the main points of interest of the webpage. Contrast can be making text bolder and bigger, a totally different font from everything else, etc. Combining these four principles should produce an AMAZING webpage!

As far as colors go on websites, you can be limited or unlimited. Either one works but if you're making a professional website, limited colors would most likely be the better choice. Limited color usage is picking a couple of colors and sticking with that color scheme for the whole site. Unlimited color usage is using many colors, but it still needs to be organized otherwise it will look messy. Any color can be used, all colors have been used at some point in time so reusing someone elses color scheme is not a problem!

Looking at my website, I believe I have definitely stuck with the same alignment the whole way through. On both my homepage and narrative page, everything is centered. Although the excerpt from Basic Design Principles says centering everything when you first begin making websites isn't very good, I think my page looks good. The proximity of the text and pictures on my homepage is good. I basically have pictures of myself surrounding the information about myself. The proximity of my narrative page is the same way. The pictures that are related to a particular part of the text are next to each other. The repetition I have on my pages are they are all set up with 3 columns. My homepage does look a little different from my narrative page, but my narrative page and page of my second paper have the same format and same font. The only place I really have the principle of contrast is on my homepage. I made my name bolder than the rest of the information about myself. The titles of my papers are also set aside and easy to notice.