When I first set out to design websites I was a bit lost. I entered the field from the development side and didn’t have a formal design degree. While I’ve always trusted my eye to tell me what was good and what wasn’t, my eye often told me my early designs fell more into the wasn’t category than the was.

When I talk to others first embarking on a web design career, I get the feeling my experience isn’t so unique. The good news is a few basic principles of design can dramatically improve your skills and help take your designs from amateur to professional.
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A couple of weeks ago I promised to expand on each of the four design basics. Today that expansion begins with an example of alignment.
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Last week we talked about alignment as one of the four design basics. We looked at a web page who’s elements were randomly strewn across the page and by aligning those elements, we began moving from an amateur design to a professional design. Today we’re going to take a look at repetition.
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Last week our discussion revolved around repetition as a basic design principle. We saw how adding repetitive elements highlights similarity and how repetition begins to create themes within your design. Today we talk about contrast.
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So far in this series we’ve taken an amateur design and improved it in several ways. We aligned design elements to provide a sense of order, we used repetition to create visual themes, and last week we used contrast to differentiate elements and call attention to them. Today we’ll talk about the last of the four basic design principles, proximity.
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