Robin Williams and C.R.A.P.This is Robin Williams. She’s not Mork, of course.

She is responsible for a great many awesome design texts that are reader-friendly. She write the non-designer’s design handbook. It’s worth owning a copy, if you’re interested in design.

AND NOW SOME C.R.A.P.

As funny as it is…… making CRAP jokes, it really is a foundational premise of design, and it’s deeply important (and thanks to our sense of humor usually quite memorable). The letters, of course, stand for:

Contrast Repetition Alignment Proximity

CONTRAST

ContrastBasically stated, contrast means that things that are similar look similar but things that are different look

clearly different. This keeps your reader from becoming confused and creating relationships that

aren’t present.

It comes, of course, from literal contrast, the light-to-dark or black-to-white of an image. In design it often

ends up being about color values.

This image is a great example, and it is also a hyperlink to a

great blog entry on

contrast, if you want to learn

more.

REPETITION

RepetitionMaybe the easiest of these four concepts to define, repetition is, just as you’d guess, repeating something– a color, a logo, a typeface, a type style.

It unifies and organizes.

ALIGNMENT

AlignmentAlignment is about positioning on a page. Nothing should be put on haphazardly. There should be a reason and a measurement that guides where things are placed in relation to each other.

The image to the right links to a post that has some cool

reflection on alignment. And there’s all kinds of alignment going on with the new Windows 8 start page.

PROXIMITY

ProximityProximity is very similar in theory to alignment, but it’s more about grouping and use of white space.

Basically: similar things are grouped together, different things require space.