Design Laws

Design does not have any laws. It never had and never will.

There are recommendations, advices and lists of items based on everyday experiences. There are "10 major mistakes" and "7 golden rules," but no laws.

If design was a science (and design – is as much of a science as chess –a sport), we could speculate that there is only one way and not the other. But design, as any kind of creativity, art, as any way people interact with one another, as language, or as a thought – will find a way around any laws.

So if we agree, lets talk about restrictions that apply in a particular case. The alcohol industry would stay away from an image of drunk homeless people under the benches in the park. Cellphone service providers never show users cheering from “Network – Busy” status on their mobile phones. But each of these industries could use something for themselves that does not fit the other. Scenario One: they sit in the bar, his phone shows “Network – Busy”, and from joy buys another drink. Scenario Two: two homeless guys under the benches chatting on the cheapest plans.

It’s pretty easy to disregard a rule and not feel guilty about it. For example, it is assumed that in any design on a given canvas it is better to use one font. But this is simply not true.

It is safe to say that even if one font is being used on a canvas, it is more than okay to use a few of its typefaces. There's nothing wrong in the use of two, three, four fonts. Beginner designers often use a variety of fonts to compensate for their lack of design experience. But to reject and criticize a design based on number of fonts it’s using—a soulless criticism.

On the page, consisting of thirty-five typefaces and twelve fonts, it looks very nice:

On the other hand if all these fonts are used on a simple newspaper spread, it will look horrible. Or not—depends on the newspaper and the article. For every rule there is a tricky exception.

Here’s a short list of “rules” that come up and are commonly discussed in the designers’ community:

• fonts with serifs are easier to read than the grotesque (sans serif fonts)
• stay with a small number of colors and choose only one to two of their tones
• there are colors that conflict with one another
• black is negative (funeral, gloomy)
• white text on a black background reads bad (and generally reversing is a bad idea)
• you should not use standard Photoshop filters
• on canvas (the box, posters, your design) there should not be more than seven significant objects, as a human brain can not simultaneously track more than seven of anything 
• logo on the magazine spread should be located on the bottom right (of a right page) or top left (of a left) corners
• logo should be a simple and concise form
• design should be simple, and text - short
• inscriptions on posters, packaging, or advertising should be in a such way that people can read them in one (two, three) seconds
• don’t limit your design to the colors of your country's flag (unless you work for your government)
• illustrations for print should be 300 dots per inch resolution, and pictures from the Internet in general can not be printed in the magazines
• frames on websites – bad
• horizontally scrolling windows – unacceptable
• women, children, panda bears etc. are positive imagery

It's not even that there are thousands of examples to prove these rules opposite. The fact of the matter is that all these allegations have no right to exist as rules in general. They are only true occasionally.

Following such "laws" are pain for designers and customers. And they suffer because they limit themselves with such restrictions that are appropriate only in certain situations, but in no case are universal.

And design does not have any laws. It never had and never will.