Good Design
The BMW logo is
an example of good design. For example, it is orderly in that every
element is precisely placed such that it stands out, but supports hierarchy or
grouping of the other elements. All of the elements are balanced left to
right, up and down. The balance for the up/down comes from the white (or
silver) BMW which has a lighter ‘weight’ than the empty black space on the
reciprocal bottom. It is leveled because this logo feels stable from
everything being left/right, top/bottom balanced; nothing is to an extreme.
Finally, I think the grouping of the elements enhances this design as
well. Finally I think that by grouping the white/blue elements in the center
and surrounding it by black keeps what little dynamism there is, solidly in the
middle of the logo, which keeps the viewers attention sin the middle of the
logo, the eyes may wander out, but they get pulled back in right away.
Bad Design
Original - http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/hell/plato.html
Background Removed
Basically, this
design fails because your ability to perceive what is being said in the content,
or find any pattern that belies a structural hierarchy, is supplanted by the
background image. The background image prevents your visual systems from
finding any kind of meaningful pattern beyond the bust of Plato.
However, even if
you get rid of the background image, as I have done in the second example, the
design still fails because there is no hierarchy to lend significance to any of
the content. Without a hierarchical system for the elements everything on the page has the same weight. This means that visually, everything has the same importance,
which in turn really means nothing on this page is important.
The easy fix for
this would be to simply give the elements on the page balanced structure by
simply grouping elements or by kind. For example titles should be bold,
questions can be lists, etc… I mocked up a quick example of how to improve this
design at least 10 fold by simply giving the elements hierarchy.
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