Ask an Oregon Website Design Company: What are Balance, Contrast, and Emphasis?

Your website needs to work well, which means it is functional. When someone clicks on a link, your website takes them to the right place. When they navigate to a new page, it loads quickly. When they buy something from your website, the transaction is smooth and seamless. Your website needs to do more than just work, though. It needs to look good, too! This is where a team that handles web design in Oregon comes in.

Web design refers to the aesthetic portion of the website. It is how your website looks, not how it works. This is done by a website designer. How do they do it? Professionals make sure three main principles work in coordination with one another. These are balance, contrast, and emphasis:

Balance

Many times, this is the first principle focused on, because it is so important for the overall look and feel of the website. It is incredibly important for web designers to create a balanced layout for your website. In the web design industry, "heavy" refers to large and dark colors and "light" refers to small and lighter colors and elements. Using the correct proportion of each is critical for those who handle web design in Oregon to achieve a balanced website design.

Contrast

Alright, your designers have an idea that will keep your website balanced. They also need to think about the contrast. Web designers are modern day, tech-savvy artists. They go to school to learn how to make websites beautiful. These studies involve learning about color theory. They learn that contrasting colors are ones placed opposite one another on the color wheel. Think of black and white. Red and green, blue and orange, and purple and yellow are other quick examples of contrasting colors. It's not just the colors, though. Beyond just color, website designers look at contrasting sizes, textures, and shapes.This is done to define and draw attention to certain sections of the website you want to highlight.

Emphasis

What do you want your website viewers to actually be looking at? You can't answer the whole page! There are areas of your website that you want to highlight over others, at least at first glance. This means you want to put an emphasis on them. Emphasis is a design principle founded in the intentional drawing of the website visitor's eye to certain important elements of the website layout. Remember, if you emphasize everything on the page, you end up emphasizing nothing. Imagine you are reading a book and want to come back to a special page, so you fold a corner down. Then, you do that to every other page. Instead of every page being important, every page is the same again. This same principle applies to your website!

It's okay if this is a little confusing to understand at first. Website designers go to school for years to become experts in this! They know exactly what they are doing and how to make these concepts work for your website.

Data Driven Design is the best when it comes to creating custom and enterprise-quality websites. We can design websites that will increase the efficiency of your organization and drive up your brand engagement.