The Five Basic Elements of Web Design

The basic elements and principles involved in web design are true for all other types of design. These principles will show you the most effective way to put together the various design elements to come up with a good and effective site. A good web design company emphasizes the fact that web design is not simply about slapping all those HTML tags on the page, but it involves the use of web design principles to build a pleasing and useful web design. Your web design company will need you to make the most aesthetically attractive and effective web design, so make sure you keep these elements in mind:

Web Design Balance

Web design Balance is the equal distribution of the heavy and light elements on a singly page. Balance in your web design is concentrated in your page layout. You must achieve visual balance in your web design all throughout the page, not only in the initial view. You web design company might commonly suggest you to center the text and all the other elements on your page. It is also very common to set your page on an invisible grid system to create the balance that you need. There are three types of balance that can be achieved when designing a page.

Symmetrical. This is achieved by placing all the elements in an even fashion – a heavy element on the left is matched with another on the right. Be careful with symmetrical balances as you do not want your site to look flat or plain boring.
Asymmetrical. These are more challenging to build, but there are strategies to achieve this which can include the varying texture, color and image positioning and size to arrive at a pleasant looking page.
Discordant. Web sites that are off-balance suggest action or motion, so you can create a discordant design on purpose. This type of designs make viewers uncomfortable or uneasy, so they are best used for sites that are intended to make people think.

Web Design Contrast

Web design contrast is more than just about colors and black or white, but also involves contrasting shapes, sizes and even textures. You can take full advantage of contrast by changing font size, weight and family to provide textual contrast and varying sizes of images and elements. However, be careful not to blast your readers or scare them off with contrasting colors which are way too loud. The links on your content should be contrasted well to draw most attention.

Web Design Emphasis

Web design emphasis involves the main points where the eye is drawn into in a design. One of the mistakes that your web design company may warn you not to make is to have everything in the design stand out. Keep in mind that if everything in the design has equal emphasis, the entire page will tend to appear too busy for comfort and may end up unappealing. What you should focus on instead is to create a visual hierarchy in the web design – to put emphasis only on the right elements. You can use semantic markup to provide emphasis even without the use of styles; change the font size of image size in order to emphasis or lessen emphasis on them; or you can use contrast in colors for added emphasis.

Web Design Rhythm

Web design rhythm, also known as repetition, brings the much needed internal consistency into your web site designs. Almost all elements in your design can be repeated in order to create pleasing rhythm into your design. For instance, you can repeat your headline a few times for more emphasis, repeat the same image across the page, create a background that is tiled and patterned with repetitive elements, or repeat a particular style to provide site design consistency. It is also a good idea to repeat the navigation elements in your site design across the pages of your web site.

Web Design Unity

Web design unity, also regarded as a site’s proximity, is the what keeps all the similar elements in the site alike and those diverse further apart, and pulls everything together into one integrated whole. Unity when it comes to web site design is mainly achieved through the proper placement in your layout. You can implement this in many ways. You can, for example, adjust the layout of your elements to put them close or far away from each other. In the body of your page, you can change the spacing around the text in your page contents. You can further achieve unity by playing around the box properties and change the margins and paddings.

A good web design company keeps in mind all the basic design elements with each and every page they design and collaborate with. This way, you and your web design company will come up with web sites that are pleasant looking, effective and attractive. As the web designer, it is important that you keep these elements in mind and apply them appropriately to your page web design.

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I would say that being a web designer is a gift and there are expensive too. If I knew that web design is this on demand well, I should have studied this before and master it.

Reply To This Comment

Kirsty Lavier — August 21, 2011

I got some really god information from here even though i don’t design web but I’m defenately sure it will help my cusin.

Holiday discounts — July 28, 2009

This is great information for all web designers. You are very informative and to the point! Thanks for your help.

DreamweaverSpots last blog post..Installing Virtual Server 2005 SP1 on Windows Vista

DreamweaverSpot — November 15, 2008

Great post m8, looking forward to more posts like this, so i bookmarked you

btw. interesting design

keo — October 21, 2008

Great resource.Your review is definitely worth taking into consideration. I have been doing designs for years and I still need some improvements based on yuor article. Something that I have missed I think. Thank you for sharing.

Web Site Design and SEO — September 9, 2008

Nice points. Thanks for sharing such a nice and infirmative article with us. This was indeed helpful.

Kelli Myers — July 7, 2008

Well written your article. Its always good to read and internalize basics so they can consolidated.

Mitchel — April 16, 2008

Your post is interesting to read but all these are basics if you are in the webdesign business. But anyway if a custumor cames up with a really strange idea you can throw all the basics away and make him happy.

Richard — March 25, 2008

Great information, nice to share the same interest.
http://www.website-ideas.co.uk

Website Ideas — March 19, 2008

Great article..very informative post. Thanks!!!

organic supplements — March 14, 2008

Great Tips Man. Web design Balance is my favorite tip. I am based in Houston too.

Will come back to read more. Check out my website
http://www.webdesignerhouston.com

Houston Web Design — March 10, 2008

Determining who the visitors are likely to be is crucial in deciding not only the general appearance of the site, but also the technology that might be used to build the site.

If the project is likely to have visitors who log in from home, it is necessary to design the pages with the understanding that users will probably have slow modem connections.

On the other hand, if visitors are expected to be fans of a rock band, then high-end technology such as Flash may be acceptable.

design company — March 5, 2008