9 Principles for Good Web Design

1.Precedence (Guiding the Eye)

Good Web Design, perhaps even more than other type of design, is about information. One of the biggest tools in your arsenal to do this is precedence. When navigating a good design, the user should be led around the screen by the designer. I call this precedence, and it’s about how much visual weight different parts of your design have.

•Position - Where something is on a page clearly influences in what order the user sees it.
•Color - Using bold and subtle colors is a simple way to tell your user where to look.
•Contrast - Being different makes things stand out, while being the same makes them secondary.
•Size - Big takes precedence over little (unless everything is big, in which case little might stand out thanks to Contrast)
•Design Elements - if there is a gigantic arrow pointing at something, guess where the user will look?

2. Spacing

When I first started designing I wanted to fill every available space up with stuff. Empty space seemed wasteful. In fact the opposite is true.Spacing makes things clearer. In Web design there are three aspects of space that you should be considering:

•Line Spacing
•Padding
•White Space

3.Navigation

When I first started designing I wanted to fill every available space up with stuff. Empty space seemed wasteful. In fact the opposite is true.Spacing makes things clearer. In Web design there are three aspects of space that you should be considering:

•Navigation — Where can you go?
•Orientation — Where are you now?

4.Design to Build
Life has gotten a lot easier since Web designers transitioned to CSS layouts, but even now it’s still important to think about how you are going to build a site when you’re still in Photoshop

5.Typography
Text is the most common element of design, so it’s not surprising that a lot of thought has gone into it. It’s important to consider things like:

Font Choices, Font sizes, Spacing, Line Length, Color, Paragraphing

6.Usability
Web Design ain’t just about pretty pictures. With so much information and interaction to be effected on a Web site, it’s important that you, the designer, provide for it all. That means making your Web site design usable.

7.Alignment
Keeping things lined up is as important in Web design as it is in print design. That’s not to say that everything should be in a straight line, but rather that you should go through and try to keep things consistently placed on a page. Aligning makes your design more ordered and digestible, as well as making it seem more polished.

8.Clarity (Sharpness)
Keeping your design crisp and sharp is super important in Web design. And when it comes to clarity, it’s all about the pixels. In your CSS, everything will be pixel perfect so there’s nothing to worry about, but in Photoshop it is not so. To achieve a sharp design you have to:

9.Consistency
Consistency means making everything match. Heading sizes, font choices, coloring, button styles, spacing, design elements, illustration styles, photo choices, etc. Everything should be themed to make your design coherent between pages and on the same page.