Today we are going to start learning about the Principles of Design. Specifically, we will be studying four major principles that will help make everything you create more visually pleasing and easy to read. Understanding these principles will help you to identify how to improve your own design choices as well as the design of others.
These four Principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, which form a very amusing (if slightly unfortunate) acronym: C.R.A.P.
Follow along with the in-class demonstration or watch the attached PowerPoint presentation to learn how we’re going to use the Principles of C.R.A.P. to make things that don’t look like crap!
Objective:
I can name the Principles of Design and describe what they mean by creating a document that shows what each principle looks like so I can effectively identify when these principles are (or are not) being used in a published work.
Links:
Topics Discussed:
- Principles of Design
- Contrast
- Repetition
- Alignment
- Proximity
Assignment:
- Read “1 – README – The Joshua Tree Epiphany” silently while I read aloud in class.
- Read the rest of the document that introduces the four Principles of Design.
- Watch the C.R.A.P Design Principles Presentation for further clarification on what the principles are, how they are used, and what they look like.
- Visit my Google Classroom page, and complete today’s activity: Answer the questions in the “Check for Understanding 1 – The Principles of Design” form.
- We will go over the principles in detail this week.
- Make sure you understand what the four principles are, what the terms mean, what they look like, and how we use them in our documents, as we will have more Checks for Understanding later this week.
Assigned: September 3rd, 2025
Teacher Pacing Due Date: September 4th, 2025