To this day I still remember the very first project I did in my intro to graphic design class. We had to take a big piece of bristol board and write down the ten principals of design. I think ten is a bit lengthy, so here are the ones I like the best:

• Size contrast


• Hierarchy


• Alignment


• Consistency

Whenever I get stuck on a design I go back to these principals to pull it all back together. I also think back to these principals when I look at other designs. Recently I came upon (what I believe is) the new Romanian site for Lipton Tea. The design has been making the rounds on inspirational blogs and galleries and I can see why, at first glance it's a great looking site. The designer(s) who worked on it are obviously talented.

At the same time I also felt like this site was lacking something. There is some awesome Photoshop work going on here, but some of the basic design principals were missing.

Size Contrast and Hierarchy

There are a lot of similarly shaped sections of this page making it hard to find the focal point of your page.

Overwhelm your visitor with to many messages at once and they will get lost and probably bail. The sections are also very close together in size. This would be very easy to fix by expanding the photo area to be wider, maybe the width of the page and incorporate the text to the left of it. That would change the shape and increase it's size making it the visitors focus when they land on the page. The most important message on the page should be the largest and most visible.

Alignment

This is where a lot of unconventionally designed sites have a hard time. When you have boxes it's easy to line them up, when you are using more organic shapes the alignments aren't as clear. Since there is no coherent grid structure to the page each element becomes its own floating island.

A very effective design element is having a a clear structure and having elements break the borders of that structure. It looks like that's what is trying to happen here but since there is little structure the photo elements look more like an afterthought. A site that does this well is the new GoMedia redesign. The reason the organic shapes work so well is because there is a structure there to break.

Consistency

Going back to the grid image of the Lipton site above, you can see there is little consistency in the width of the columns. There is also little consistency in size and shape. Consistency also helps visitors to navigate. Here it's hard to tell what is a link and what is text. Using the same color or button image or syle will clear that up. A little inconsistency can make your design exciting, but too much and it becomes chaotic.