Chapter 18-Understanding Design Principles

Chapter 18 is all about understanding design. By understanding such principles you can create a more well-balanced and original project. How to use design effectively is the first part to this chapter. There are 5 basic design principles according to Bedord Researcher:

• Balance: the vertical and horizontal alignment of elements on your pages. 
• Emphasis: the placement and formatting of elements, such as heading and subheadings, so they catch your readers' attention. 
• Placement: the location of the elements on your pages.
• Repetition: the use of elements, such as headers and footers, navigation menus, and page numbers, across pages in your document
• Consistency: the extent to which you format and place text and illustrations in the same way throughout your document

Moderation and simplicity are two more principles that you should consider in your designing process. You want to use these other principles in moderation to create a simple result. When it comes to designing you want to have a purpose. Is it to set a tone, or help readers understand your point, or to get them to accept a point you have made, or lastly clarifying concepts? You also want to design for your readers. With a well thought out and organized designed project your readers will have a better change of engaging into your document and understanding each part of it. Lastly, you  want to design to address genre conversations.

The second part to this chapter is what design elements can you use. There are many different elements that you can use. Different fonts, line spacing and alignment are the ones that most writers tend to use. Page layouts is also important because you don't want things that have nothing to do with each other next to each other. Color, shading, and borders can give your project some character and pin point the more important stuff to your project. And lastly, illustrations is another element that is useful to "demonstrate points made in the text of your project" (291).