The Joshua Tree Epiphany

The first chapter in the book "The Non-Designers Design Book" starts off with a little story. The writer talks about how he got this one book about trees as a present. He talks about the first tree in the book which is called "Joshua Tree". He said he had never seen one before, so he decided to go out to his neighborhood and look at the trees. The first tree he sees, which is even in his garden, is the Joshua Tree. He talks about how he lived in that place for thirteen years and have yet to see a Joshua tree. This explains the idea stating, if you know something and your conscious of it you are in control of it. Then the book continues and the interesting part comes; The four main design principles. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity. Lets start off with Contrast. What is it? and what makes it so important in design. Contrast is a very key feature for a design. It prevents having very similar things within your design (Type, Color, Size, Line Thickness, Shape, Space, etc.) You need to make things different, to give a good visual attraction to your audience. Now I am not saying you should put a thousand of different colors, because then you have gone beyond contrast. Contrast can work with two colors opposite from one another. For example: Black and White, Yellow and Black, Red and Black, and many more. Think of the McDonald logo. What do you think makes it so attractive, because over all the logo itself is a pretty simple logo. It is the colors that they chose that make it so attractive. Yellow and red. It is so bright and it has so much contrast you can see it from anywhere at anytime. Second Principle is Repetition. Repetition is also a very important element because it helps keep the design organized. You don't want to have a million different fonts if your doing a poster for example. It needs to be consistent. Repeating certain values such as Line Thickness, Fonts, Colors, Textures, and pictures really adds to the strength of the design. The third principle is Alignment. Alignment is also a key for organization and development. It states that things should be places randomly but still feel like they are connected. This is supposed to give it a unique and interesting look. The last principle is Proximity. It explains that items that are related should be put together. When several items of the same group are close to each other (Proximity) then they become one visual unit. This is the key of the principles and probably the most important. You want your things to be close together, and you should not be afraid of empty space.