Design Elements, Third Edition

TWENTY RULES FOR MAKING GOOD DESIGN

Rules can be broken—but never ignored.

DAVID JURY/TYPOGRAPHER/ From his book About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography RotoVision, London, 1996.

When people talk about “good” or “bad” design, they’re referring to notions of quality they’ve picked up from education and experience; and just as often, from the experience of thousands of designers and critics before them. Some of these notions are aesthetic (“asymmetry is more beautiful than symmetry,” for example) and sometimes strictly functional (“don’t reverse a serif typeface from a solid background if it’s less than 10 points in size, because it’ll fill in”). Both kinds of observation are helpful for avoiding pitfalls and striving to achieve design ...