Tips For Web Design Precedence And Spacing

by Ananth Prasath   |   0 Comments  |   93 Views    |   0/5 Rating   |   Print This Article
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Apr 24th, 2012
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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 its about how much visual weight different parts of your design have. A simple example of precedence is that in most sites, the first thing you see is the logo. This is often because its large and set at what has been shown in studies to be the first place people look (the top left). His is a good thing since you probably want a user to immediately know what site they are viewing. But precedence should go much further. You should direct the users eyes through a sequence of steps. For example, you might want your user to go from logo/brand to a primary positioning statement, next to a punchy image (to give the site personality), then to the main body text, with navigation and a sidebar taking a secondary position in the sequence. What your user should be looking at is up to you, the Web designer, to figure out. To achieve precedence you have many tools at your disposal: 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? 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 When you lay text out, the space between the lines directly affects how readable it appears. Too little space makes it easy for your eye to spill over from one line to the next, too much space means that when you finish one line of text and go to the next your eye can get lost. So you need to find a happy medium. You can control line spacing in CSS with the line-height selector. Generally I find the default value is usually too little spacing. Line Spacing is technically called leading (pronounced ledding), which derives from the process that printers used to use to separate lines of text in ye older days by placing bars of lead between the lines. Padding Generally speaking text should never touch other elements. Images, for example, should not be touching text, neither should borders or tables. Padding is the space between elements and text. The simple rule here is that you should always have space there. There are exceptions of course, in particular if the text is some sort of heading/graphic or your name is David Carson But as a general rule, putting space between text and the rest of the world makes it infinitely more readable and pleasant Web Designing Companies . White Space First of all, white space doesnt need to be white. The term simply refers to empty space on a page (or negative space as its sometimes called). White space is used to give balance, proportion and contrast to a page. A lot of white space tends to make things seem more elegant and upmarket, so for example if you go to an expensive architect site, youll almost always see a lot of space. If you want to learn to use whitespace effectively, go through a magazine and look at how adverts are laid out. Ads for big brands of watches and cars and the like tend to have a lot of empty space used as an element of design. For informations on Website Design Please click on Web Design Company Bangalore

Article Source: http://www.informationbible.com/article-tips-for-web-design-precedence-and-spacing-193049.html

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