Ryan Rinaldi

Design is composition

Everything needs to work together and support each other

“Unity”

• Determines the total impact of a design
• Unity is relationships
• Manage relationships so the work together
• Order
• Simple
• Triumph of design is Complex Seems Simple
• Grid
• Things that are close together and aligned are implicitly connected
• The Grid is old. Simple grids used in scrolls way back when
• old old old old old
• Appeals to us and our sense of order.
• Powerful way to organize a lot of information.
• Zune app is a great example of grid layout
• The grid is made to be broken.
• Dominance
• Things that are more dominant on a page are more important
• Size, color or shape
• Dominance matters when you have density in information.
• Sometimes Dominance is an entry point or sometimes it’s a way to show relative importance of different things
• Don’t use too much dominance
• Hierarchy
• 3 levels of hierarchy works.  More than that really doesn’t
• Important
• unimportant
• everything else
• Containment
• Harmony
• To make harmony use theme
• “On the road” by Jack Kerouac – Read it
• Speakvisual.com – Great use of theme
• Gestalt
• tendency to perceive things holistically and find meaning in the way the parts relate
• Similiarity – implied realtionship between things that are the same
• Contrast – things that are different are implicilty somehow different
• Color
• Shipe
• size
• position
• orientation
• Avoid the trap of “sameness”.
• Increase contrast and you have the ability to say more things
• increases your visual “vocab”
• Chunking
• Figure/Ground
• What’s on top and what’s the background
• Closure
• Use negative space to imply other shapes
• Good Continuation
• Balance
• Whitespace
• Negative space
• Empty space
• Empty space doesn’t have to be empty (WTF)
• Same damn thing as figure/ground
• Yes, space can be wasted
• Empty space is not wasted space (sometimes)
• Empty space is not there to be filled. It is there to be manipulated.
• Benefits
• Feeling of quality
• Legibility and readability
• Reinforce order and structure.
• Create interest.