Mini Art School - Blog 2 - Intro to Rules of Design

After doing the readings for this week, I started thinking about all the websites people go to on a daily basis that are a pain to navigate. So I started asking around for what people felt were the worst. A friend of mine recommended that I check out Chud.com, which they said was great content-wise, but was visually very confusing and overwhelming. This is what the front page looks like :

And the page continues down below for quite a while with more links like you see at the bottom of the page. There are some good things about the design of this page but, according to the "Layout Sins" outlined in Chapter 4 of Golombisky and Hagen's "White Space is Not Your Enemy", but there are also a lot of  bad things.

1. The authors warn to avoid using things that blink constantly. Chud does have an animation that repeats in the box in the center of the page. It scrolls through options for movie reviews. Golombisky and Hagen recommend showing this sort of animation once and then ending it there, but Chud plays this animation the whole time you are on the page. On the plus side, the scrolling is slow and there are only three options, so it does not feel the same as incessant blinking, but this could have been avoided. 

2. Warped Photos:  Chud.com has no problem with this. Their photos are all movie photos and are scaled as they should be.

3. Naked Photos: The chapter mentions Naked Photos, meaning photos with undefined borders that blend into the background, as a design sin. In examining this website closely, you can see that they carefully do, as recommended by the authors, use hairline rules to border all their photos. They have even taken the time to do so with the series of small thumbnails near the top of the page. This helps to give the page a defined feel.

4. Bulky Borders and Boxes : Chud uses a variety of strategies for separating information. There are some borders, which are done as a film roll, so they conceptually make sense. In the list of links below, the borders are this lines, so there is no major offense in this category. However, I do feel that they do not use negative space to their advantage here.

5. Cheated Margins: This website is kind the outside margins of the page and do a great job in that regard. However, they do not seem to consider much the inset and offset margins around pictures and the inner columns of text. The negative space within the page is definitely cheated, which adds to that cluttered feeling.

6. Centering Everything: While there is a lot centered at the top of this design, the addition of 3 text columns does help to vary that for the viewer's eye.

7. 4 Corners and Clutter : Even though the outside margins of this page are nice and big, the rest of the page feel claustrophobic and cluttered. As Golombisky and Hagen indicate, "Good layout feng shui requires calming pools of negative space," which Chud.com is definitely lacking (Golombisky, p. 37, 2010).

8. Trapped Negative Space : There is no trapped negative space in this case, but that is because there isn't much negative space at all.

9. Busy Backgrounds: There is no background on the page itself, which is a plus. However the large focal title at the top, with its own reflection, feels a bit busy and overwhelming.

10. Tacky Type Emphasis: There is so much capitalization on this page that I feel I am being yelled at all the time. I think it would help to minimize some of it, especially in the article sections. Also, the entire page is reverse type, with white print on a black background. This feels difficult to read for the eye.

11. Bad Bullets: No bullets.

12. Widows and Orphans: I'm not sure if this qualifies exactly, but the far right column on this page continues far beyond the first and second columns, which leaves a huge awkward area of white spaces running down the page for a long time. This column could probably be unorphan-ed in some way.

13. Justified Rivers: Not a problem.


Overall, not horrible design, but this page could definitely be improved. The overall feeling it gives is one of clutter, shock, and overemphasis. It is definitely not a soothing or relaxing site to visit, which may influence web goers to subconsciously stay away!


I also completed the design exercise on page 71 of Design Basics by Jim Krause. I used the Paint program to create these, which is always my version of pencil and paper. In thinking about composition and shapes, I tried not to think at all, but to go with my natural inclination. And I found myself fighting the natural inclination to center and have symmetrical balance. Here's what my images looked like :

And after doing all of those, this is the one I came up with that I liked best composition-ally :

Part 3 :

I also worked on remodeling an old flier that I created this year to advertise a language arts help wiki that I created. I tried to improve it using the various principles of design we saw in the readings and on the websites for this week. First, I changed an All Caps font I used for the first 4 questions so as not to be using Tacky Type. Then, I eliminated a border box that I felt was unnecessary and tried to organize the negative space to do the same job. I also limited the variety of fonts to mostly one. I think the design is simpler now, though I may rework it again for compositional elements. :

 So far I am really enjoying learning about graphic design. I find that all the small tasks I perform as a teacher, making websites, creating assignment sheets, sending home fliers, could all be vastly improved by employing some of these strategies!