The 5 Primary Principles of Potent Web Design – Part 1 : Alignment

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There are 5 primary principles of effective web design. All five concepts are essential to excellence, thus it is rare to see them used individually. Rather each one must be woven through the others like the threads of a fine tapestry.

Because a basic understanding of these concepts is fundamental to the most successful web design, I do not wish to rush through this content. I am crafting this sequence with special care and spreading the lesson over five parts.

This is part 1: Alignment

Alignment helps to create a sharper, more unified website design. By aligning a web page’s elements with one another so that each item on the page maintains a distinct visual link to another one of the page’s properties, a web designer is able to effectively tighten their design and eliminate the random scattered effect that invariably chases the helter skelter placement of disparate elements.

The alignment of a website’s components can be as essential to the overall look and feel of your finished product as whether or not you have properly justified the on page text or floated the images to the left. The alignment that you articulate upon the web page provides the scaffolding for the entire website design, providing the permanent cues for every set of eyes that will ever land upon the page.

The proper alignment of a website’s elements will have a dramatic affect on the mood that is set and the message that is presented.

By effectively aligning items on a web page, a skilled designer can easily disregard the distance between elements. This is because the proper alignment provides an invisible connection linking the elements and thereby telling the reader that they are two parts of a single whole.

A web page can be designed with either a clean structure that feels almost instinctively obvious, or with something more subtle with the pieces of the page scattered around the text. Alignment is one of the most beautifully basic yet intrinsically important principles of solid web design. The proper alignment allows our eyes to see the inherent order and then pull uniformity from the page – this is comforting to a reader.

Every second there is a set of eyes upon your page is another second you are in communication with your audience. It is a web designer’s duty to communicate without words what a reader is supposed to see, think, and do while on that page.

A clean page alignment creates associations between the various visual elements and guides the reader to quickly understand the relationship between the various objects on the page. Once the eye sees a number of aligned elements, it instinctively believes those elements are related to one another or share one or more common properties.

Understanding and utilizing alignment effectively is an essential skill for todays web and graphic designers. Only by understanding the role of proper page alignment will you be able to effectively bend the rules to your designer’s desire.

In part two of the series, “The 5 Primary Principles of Potent Web Design,” we’ll explore Repetition and how it strengthens a web design by tying together otherwise separate elements.