Universal Principles of Design

Explore over 50 core design concepts, from the 80/20 rule to storytelling, all based on Will Lidwell's landmark design books, Universal Principles of Design.

Introduction

• Welcome

1. Making Things More Usable

• Aesthetic-usability effect
• Affordances
• Consistency
• Errors
• Feedback loops
• Flow
• Forgiveness
• Hick’s law
• Mental Models
• Performance Load

2. Improving Layout and Composition

• Alignment
• Face-ism Ratio
• Figure ground
• Five Hat Racks
• Golden ratio
• Legibility
• Orientation Sensitivity
• Progressive subtraction

3. Developing Design Thinking

• Crowd intelligence
• Design by committee
• Desire Lines
• Feature Creep
• Garbage in, garbage out
• Iteration
• KISS
• Redundancy
• Root cause
• Satisficing

4. Developing Design Wisdom

• The 80/20 rule
• Factors of safety
• Flexibility Trade-Offs
• MAYA
• Modularity
• Paradox of unanimity
• Scaling fallacy
• Selection bias
• Sunk-cost effect
• Weakest link

5. Choosing the Right Colors

• Black effects
• White effects
• Red effects
• Green effects
• Yellow effects
• Blue effects

6. Increasing Innate Appeal

• Archetypes
• Baby-face bias
• Gloss bias
• MAFA
• Savanna preference
• Supernormal stimuli
• Top-Down Lighting Bias
• Waist-to-hip ratio

7. Influencing Attitudes and Behaviors

• Cognitive dissonance
• Expectation effects
• Five tenets of queuing
• Freeze-Flight-Fight-Forfeit
• IKEA effect
• Left-digit effect
• Nudge
• Shaping
• Storytelling
• Zeigarnik effect