{"id":65,"date":"2020-08-16T22:01:08","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T22:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enter77.ius.edu\/cjkimmer\/?page_id=65"},"modified":"2025-10-15T21:29:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T21:29:43","slug":"surface-plane-principles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/enter77.ius.edu\/cjkimmer\/surface-plane-principles\/","title":{"rendered":"Surface Plane Principles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This link to the Laws of UX <\/a>is shared every time I teach INFO-I 300 (roughly the same thing as INFO-C 300). The fourth entry (Jakob’s Law<\/a>) states that users spend more time on other sites than on your site. If you site works like other sites, then users can use it. Conversely, other sites should work like yours. If we follow our thoughts through to conclusion, all sites should work the same! That’s a little extreme, but it really just indicates that users value and benefit from consistency<\/strong> in user interfaces. The eighth entry is the Law of Proximity<\/strong><\/a>; users perceive things that are close together as a group of related things. These two are singled out because of their relation to 4 graphic design principles below. In I300, we see these from The Non-designers Design Book<\/em> by Robin Williams, which is worth taking a look at if you’re a typical informatics student who will have to do a little design sometimes. The 4 principles are<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Contrast<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Repetition<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Alignment<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Proximity<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Repetition is all about consistency in look-and-feel, which can strongly supplement the consistency in interaction mentioned above. Contrast is the opposite of consistency, and it’s membership in this list indicates its power. It’s good to be consistent, but it’s also good (even better?) to deliberately know when to not be consistent by introducing contrast. The odd person out in this list is alignment since it doesn’t have as direct a connection to the Laws of UX. It’s not much of a stretch to relate alignment to the Law of Uniform Connectedness,<\/a> though, for alignment is a way of connecting elements. Although the line of alignment is invisible, the user can still be aware of its presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The basic way to apply these graphic design principles to the surface plane is to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n