From the course: Design Aesthetics for the Web

Understanding the elements of design

From the course: Design Aesthetics for the Web

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Understanding the elements of design

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- [Narrator] In design school, graphic and web designers often learn about the formal principles and elements of design. These concepts can and should be used as guides in making important aesthetic decisions that can help you create more unique designs with more distinctive areas of interest. So, what are the elements of design? Simply put, you can think of the elements of design as the basic components involved with creating any design. Likewise, you can think of the principles of design as the rules of design, which should always be considered even if you end up not using them. The main difference between principles and elements, is that principles are like the rules you should follow, while elements are the things that will help you follow those rules for the best outcome. How many elements of design do we need to learn? There is some debate over how many elements there actually are. Depending on who you talk to, some say six, some say 10. I've even seen lists with numbers everywhere in between. So for our purposes, with regard to designing for the web, we're going to say that there are eight elements of design, and they are, in no particular order, color, value, texture, shape, form, space, line and type. If you're like me and you have trouble remembering huge lists, you might want to use a mnemonic device that you can easily re-order these words in any way that makes sense to you to make up an easy-to-remember sentence like this one that I made up. Ten Very Creative Students Speak Twenty Five Languages, and the first letter of each word corresponds to one of the words in the eight elements of design. Now you know that there are eight elements of design. In the next set of lessons we'll examine each of these elements to see how they can directly influence the quality of a web design.

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