What are the 4 principles every graphic designer needs to master? They are contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity. These are the fundamentals that all graphic designers need if they hope to make strong work. They’re also known to designers as the C.R.A.P. principles. Without understanding these principles and how they work you won’t make it in the industry.
C.R.A.P principles and their purpose for a graphic designer
In any design you need unique elements to be able to stand out. To attract the consumers eye. We can achieve this with contrast and it can be utilized in different ways. We can use colour, size, shape and even direction to create contrast in our designs. This will help with hierarchy so consumers will be able to differentiate the most important information first and flow naturally to the next.
Next up is repetition, this gives sense a cohesiveness to a design. We can repeat certain elements like shapes, lines, images, colours and typography to give consistency to our work. People like to find repeated elements in life so adding them into our designs helps to attract consumers to our product or poster.
We don’t want our designs to ever feel disconnected so this is where we utilize alignment. Every element in our designs should have a reason for being placed there and we never want one element feeling lost on the page. We can achieve this by aligning each element, such as text, images or graphics, in correspondence to another. This will make the overall design feel consistent and balanced.
Lastly we have proximity and this brings unity to our designs. Elements that are related to each other should be placed in close proximity to one another. This increases consumers comprehension of our designs and lessens clutter.
All designs should be considered and based off these 4 core principles. Do you agree?
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