One participant who abandoned the sorting exercise responded at length inthis vein:You need to spend time with some designers in an office or out in nature.Design just does not work this way. You are attempting to force a hypothesisand its [sic] just not going to work. People will try but this is missing the point.Imagine applying this to a piece of art for example. Art is no different thandesign in fact its the same thing just with a different outcome. You will thensee the absurdity of this process you are trying to force. Visual designcomes[sic] from seeing or rather observing and feeling how a form, colur [sic],texture peaks [sic] your senses and it is then further developed throughrepetative [sic] experimentation. this [sic] process of understanding takesyears to develop and you cannot just formulate rules—there are none. Iwould suggest you personally do something that removes you from theacademic world for a moment and gets you out into the world where youcan use your hands and mind and experience this for yourself. Take a potterycourse or a wood working course, or an elementarygraphic [sic] design course

Two respondents specifically distinguished between “guideline” and“rule,” both saying that situation has an impact on how a design principle shouldbe applied. One elaborated by saying that “Principles are contingent general-izations;. . . their application depends on the particulars of a given situation.” Thissuggests that designers believe design principles should not fully determinespecific design decisions, but can provide a systematic way of thinking aboutthose decisions.

hough a minority, some participants used these questions to express thatthey did not think that design principles are useful or desirable in educationor practice. Most strongly, one design educator said, “You only have to look atsome of the best designs to see that design prescriptions are for fools.” Othersstressed the importance of a good eye. For example, a design educator said, “Itis imperative for designers to trust their eye and design sense over the influ-ences provided by precise measurement, well-meaning computer algorithms and‘hard-n-fast’ rules.”

In addition, I removed one participant from the cluster analysis who sorted allthe cards, but in such a way as to skew the results. With a sharp wit, this participantcreated only two categories: “Byproducts of nuclear decay,” which containedonly one card,radiation; and “What an academic thinks of when he or shemisinterprets design as the synthesis of a set of design principles,” which con-tained all of the remaining cards. I did, however, include this participant’ssurvey responses, as they reflected an attitude toward design that favored artisticsensibility over using more formal methods such as design principles or designresearch. I address this attitude more fully in the conclusion to this article

Specifically, before the exercise I asked some basic questions about partici-pants’current design activities and roles. I also asked—before showing them the38 principles in the exercise, which might bias their responses—what designprinciples they had learned about in their schooling, training, or reading; whatdesign principles they use in practice; and how they would define what a designprinciple is. I worded these questionsto allow a participant to respond that heor she does not know about or has not used design principles. After the exercisegave participants an opportunity to think about design principles, I asked somequestions about when and how we should use design principles, particularlyin relation to the empirical methods of design research.In introducing these survey questions, I asked participants to focus specificallyon visual design principles. All of the questions asked for text responses exceptfor the first pre-survey question, which gave several options of positions fromwhich to choose. I did not require responses to any question except question 1.

If I had used a traditional face-to-face card sorting exercise, however, thenumber of participants would be lower, and they would be less likely to be part ofthe group I wished to study: designers, design educators, and design students.Also, because I have authored a book on document design that includes designprinciples, drawing from my local population might give biased results becausemy colleagues and students have read my book. I also hoped that the surveyquestions would give some qualitative feedback to substitute for the talk-aloudprotocol. Finally, given the exploratory nature of my study, it seemed reasonableto use this online tool to gather information from a broader pool

The primary advantage of this online approach was quick and efficient accessto participants. However, there were two disadvantages. First, in a face-to-facecard sorting exercise, the researcher often observes the participant as he or shesorts the cards and uses the talk-aloud protocol to gather further informationabout participants’ thinking during the exercise. Because I would not attend thecard sorting, this kind of observation was not possible. Second, I would havelittle control over who agreed to participate. The possibility for spam is alwayspresent with online media.

To expand the reach of my study, I used an onlinecard sorting tool, Optimal Sort (http://www.optimalworkshop.com). Instead ofindex cards, this online tool displays digital shapes that participants can dragand drop on screen to create groups, which they can then label (see Figure 2).This tool also allowed participants to provide feedback through before and aftersurvey questions.

Card sorting is typically conducted in one of two ways: closed sort or opensort. In a closed sort, participants sort the cards into predefined categories.In an open sort, participants sort the cards into categories they create themselves.Due to the exploratory nature of my study, I used an open sort so designerscould group the design principles as they saw fit. I also did not require partici-pants to sort all of the cards, but restricted my analysis to those who sorted atleast 75% of the cards

Having determined which design principles are mentioned most commonlyin literature on design, the next question is, how do these design principlesrelate to one another? Rather than arranging the design principles accordingmy own sensibilities or some separate theory (Ahmed [12], Park [13]), Idecided that it would be more interesting to ask practicing designers, designeducators, and design students how they think these 38 visual principles shouldbe grouped.

These results offer some interesting opportunities for reflection. For example,balance, which I have always denigrated to my students as the most vague anddifficult of design principles, actually turns out as the most common, with 27texts (58.7%) listing it. Gestalt itself, despite the very strong influence of thisschool of psychology on two-dimensional design, appeared in only three texts(6.52%), although principles based on the Gestalt laws, includingalignment,proximity,grouping,closure,continuation, andfigure/ground, appeared as wellat a variety of frequencies.

This quantitative review produced a raw list of 198 design principles. Thisnumber might seem discouragingly high except for two outlying works: Leborg[54], which lists 41 principles, 33 of which are unique, and Lidwell et al. [58],which lists 100 principles, 87 of which are unique. Lidwell et al.’s broader focuson “universal principles of design” rather than visual design principles meansthat many of their principles fall outside of the scope of my study. (Some evenstretch the concept of design principle—for example, “uncertainty principle”and “normal distribution.”) If we were to exclude Leborg’s and Lidwell et al.’sunique principles, the list of design principles contracts from 198 to 77—stillhigh, but more reasonable. However, because I included unique principles fromother texts, I retained all of Leborg’s and Lidwell et al.’s principles in the raw list.As might be expected, some of these principles are considerably more commonthan most. Overall, of the 198 principles in the raw list, 160 were mentioned inonly one work. The 198 design principles were listed cumulatively 420 timesin the 46 texts; 61.9% of these listings referred to principles used in at leasttwo works. Despite the large number of unique principles, they were used onlyin 38.1% of texts.

This study took the form of two stages: a quantitative literature review thatcatalogued and analyzed visual design principles mentioned in books and web-sites on design; and a card sorting exercise with survey questions (Texas TechUniversity IRB 100407). The first stage investigated what visual design principlespublished experts recommend most often. The second stage asked designers,design educators, and design students what they thought about design principlesand how they thought design principles related to one another.

So at best, design principles are a kind of lore. Lore is a kind of contingentknowledge based in practice, and as North has argued for composition studies, ithas a value that is often overlooked. However, lore being what it is—anecdotal,implicit, and often idiosyncratic—I think there is good justification to bringresearch to bear on it. Accordingly, in this article I apply empirical techniques tounderstand the lore of design principles more fully.

A few,such as Williams and Stimatz [8] or Blair-Early and Zender [9] generally refer todesign principles as “rules of thumb”; as such, principles are heuristic methodsthat help us make design decisions quickly. But these rules of thumb can be vari-able and ambiguous, because they are based on individual designers’experienceand on the advice they absorb from their training and reading. Depending on thesituation, designers may employ different design principles at different levelsof consistency.

This persistence invokes some questions:•What is a design principle?•How do design principles relate to each other?•How and when do designers use design principles, particularly in these daysof user-centered, research-driven design?

One would think from this narrative that we have progressed from the murkydays of the craft tradition to the more enlightened and progressive landscape ofempiricism. But, in fact, design training still typically involves an introductionto visual design principles, which persist as criteria for judging designs andas heuristics for making design decisions.

n the 1990sour attention shifted to usability and usability testing, such as popularized byNielsen [2], Barnum [3], and many others. User-centered design, championed byscholars such as Johnson [4], became the watchword in fields including graphicdesign, product design, and technical communication. Today, design research hasdesigners involved throughout product development in an iterative design cyclethat applies research to successive prototypes, continually improving usability.The state-of-the-art of user research includes systems that continuously monitoruser interaction, gathering data for designers to use to make further improve-ments to websites, software, and hardware (see for example Johnson [5]).

Designersused a finely honed instinct to fashion objects that were useful and beautiful.In discussing and promoting their craft, they developed sometimes codifiedand sometimes implicit design principles to guide new designers. Accordingly,training in design often involved learning these principles, as we can see inJackson’s popular 1891 textbookLessons on Decorative Design, which discussedand gave examples of principles such as repetition, variety, contrast, radiation,and symmetry [1].