Design Planning 101 A Step-by-Step Guide

Table Of Content

• Designing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces
• What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?
• What are the 5 Stages of the Design Thinking Process
• The goal is cohesion, not consistency
• Product
• Step 2: Establishing Design Principles and Guidelines
• The 12 principles of design to consider in creating great designs

As I’ve gone out in the community and talked about the process we went through, I’ve been asked “How do we define ours? Map the product’s interactions and actions to understand user goals, define user journeys, and identify touchpoints where users engage with the interface. Wireframes serve as a blueprint for the final design and focus on the arrangement of content, functionality, and user interactions.

Designing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces

Where emphasis draws the viewer's attention to specific elements in an obvious way, movement is more subtle. In this simplistic yet elegant design, a contrast in colors adds depth of field and distance between objects. These are the principles of design to enhance your creative genius. It provides breathing room between other design elements to highlight spaciousness. Also known as brightness, value determines how light or dark colors are. It creates depth and mood by showing how light and shadow fall on objects.

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Objects, text, their size, and shape, color and texture, all have weight, which is important to distribute on your composition with care and evenly. Defining our design principles also required us to distinguish them from TXI's company values. Our principles needed to exist within that set, not in contrast to it.

What are the 5 Stages of the Design Thinking Process

And not every digital experience we design will incorporate all five principles each and every time. Our design principles are aspirational intentions not strict rules. They give us five different ways to think about a problem statement and five different aims to assess against throughout a project. There's an inherent complexity to defining design principles because its impossible for them to mean the exact same thing to every person. This was made possible, in large part, by our guest facilitator, Valerie Craig. You can stay true to this principle of design by using similar colors, shapes, textures, and elements that appear consistently throughout your communication.

The goal is cohesion, not consistency

The elements of visual design — line, shape, negative/white space, volume, value, colour and texture — describe the building blocks of a product’s aesthetics. On the other hand, the principles of design tell us how these elements can and should go together for the best results. Many of the principles below are closely related and complement one another. Design principles are a set of guidelines that help designers create more aesthetically pleasing and functional designs. Design principles are usually not written down formally, but instead, they are learned through observation and practice. This is because there is no one set of design principles that applies to all designs.

These are the building blocks that form the visuals and structure. Proportion refers to the relative size and scale of elements in the design. It's essential for making things look three-dimensional and also adds direction and hierarchy.

Swiss Style: The Principles, the Typefaces & the Designers - PRINT Magazine

Swiss Style: The Principles, the Typefaces & the Designers.

Posted: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

We had an idea to visualize the pyramid with pictures of examples next to it. I thought about burgers and how they have bread, meat, and sauce. I replaced “meat” with “ingredients,” as it presents psychological needs better. I set up a second meeting and asked everyone to write down their principles on sticky notes. Then we all put them up on the wall to group them and rank their importance. Write them, review them, edit them, share them with the team.

The 12 principles of design to consider in creating great designs

Create refreshing pops in the sea of brand guidelines and color guides. Your brand intends to reach out to the masses, and if you do not have a design that can successfully achieve this, everything is in vain. Rhythm lets you pick a style where you can consistently deliver valuable information to customers with a smaller learning arch.

Have a clear hierarchy

For example, daylight constantly alters how we perceive colors, and different light sources like incandescent, LED, or fluorescent can shift color appearances. Also, colors can appear different depending on their background, a phenomenon known as simultaneous contrast. For an in-depth exploration of color's impact on design, watch the insightful video by Joann Eckstut on the topic. Have an easy-to-scan visual hierarchy that reflects users’ needs, with commonly used items handily available. Proportion adds order and perspective, creating a relationship between elements. Also known as direction, movement uses elements to lead the eyes from one location to another.

Proportion is the relative size of the design elements compared to each other. It comes organically once you’re done with your contrast and balance. You can have the word “up to” smaller just above the most important element of your poster, to keep the visual hierarchy. This is the second function of emphasis – reducing the impact of the information, you don’t want to catch the eye of your audience first. For example, if you’re designing any kind of logo, you can create contrast with a pink background, blue or green elements, and white text.

We see the whole formed by the dotted lines first, before perceiving the separate dotted lines in each of the images. In paint, colours mix subtractively because the pigments in paints absorb light. When different pigments are mixed together, the mixture absorbs a wider range of light, resulting in a darker colour.

During the process, you may find some people talking about brand, and others talk about design. The results from these exercises will help you to form an understanding of the outcomes you’d like your principles to achieve. Design principles can also be specific to a certain context, for example, Apple have put together a set of 6 Design Principles specifically for the iOS 11 version of their iPhone platform software. Dieter Rams had a big influence on Jonny Ive, an English industrial designer who is currently the Chief Design Officer (CDO) of Apple and chancellor of the Royal College of Art in London.

A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in the world of human-centered design. Depending on time constraints, you will gather a substantial amount of information to use during the next stage. Design thinking is a broader framework that borrows methods from human-centered design to approach problems beyond the design discipline. It encourages people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together and apply the designer’s way of thinking to generate innovative solutions to problems. In this video, Laura Klein, author of Build Better Products, describes a typical challenge designers face on agile teams.

In some cases, people will want to carry across some of the words you already have, and you can shape them to be relevant to design. UXPin Merge bridges the gap between design and development to simplify design planning and product development. Meredith stresses that DesignOps can streamline workflows, create design systems, and foster collaboration across teams, which helps in moving forward with deliverables. Meredith Black, a DesignOps consultant, added that design teams often face bottlenecks and inefficiencies due to fragmented processes, communication gaps, and resource constraints. The panelists shared insights on the challenges design teams face and how DesignOps can address these challenges. Design planning is a strategic project planning process of outlining and organizing the design approach for a digital product.

It is also a great way to set focus before building a new product or service or when onboarding new designers. Before writing your design principles, you need to identify the values essential for the success of your product or service. These important values may have been captured in vision statements or project briefs.

In many ways, our principles offer tangible examples of how our company values look in practice, applied to design. Where our values hold us accountable as people, our principles hold our work accountable. Part of the problem we faced was figuring out what "right" or "great" even meant for TXI—especially when design manifests so differently client to client and product to product. What works for a food innovator like Tyson looks completely different than what works for a news service like Accuweather. Design principles are typically tied to a product, not the in-house team building it.