Design helps to determine what the user focuses on. For instance, eMarketers are familiar with the idea that the most important information in most emails should be placed at the top. Because of how emails are displayed on computers, viewers see the top of the email first, and attention needs to be grabbed immediately before the email goes in the trash. While marketers don't necessarily think about it in these terms, placing the information at the top is a decision about the design of the piece.

Most marketers are not designers, but they should be able to talk intelligently to the design team. In order to do this, and to help and not hinder the designer, it is advantageous to have some idea why the designer is making the decisions that s/he is.

Obviously there is a lot to design decisions, but one place to start is understanding design elements. Design elements are the building blocks of a composition. One analogy is that they are like the parts of speech that make up a sentence. Or, for the scientifically minded, they are like the amino acids that make up a protein. Once the elements are arranged together by the designer, they form a composition.

Different people seem to have slightly different ideas as to what should be included in a list of design elements, but these seemed the most useful.

Point

A point has neither width, height nor depth. If you show a person a blank page with a point on it, the natural tendency is to try to make sense of it. People typically connect two isolated points in a line; three points become a triangle. This tendency to connect points is called gestalt.

Line

A line is a connection between points and it can vary in weight, length and direction. Horizontal lines give an impression of stability. Vertical lines produce a feeling of loftiness and formality. Diagonal lines suggest movement.

Form (Shape)

A form, at its simplest, is the area enclosed by a line that connects back onto itself. A form is two dimensional, i.e. it has width and height, or three dimensional, i.e. it has width, height and depth. Some writers differentiate between form as two dimensional and shape as three dimensional, whereas others use the terms interchangeably.

Color

Color and color schemes are fundamental for successful design. The use of color and different color combinations shape the look and feel of the final composition. More about color can also be found in a previous post.

Pattern

A pattern is made up of reoccurring elements. It organizes the appearance of the piece in a regular repetitive way.

Texture

Texture is something we feel. In design, texture can be suggested by an image. For instance, a picture of grass can look rough and a picture of water can look smooth.

Designers take these basic elements and manipulate them to create a finished composition. While there is a lot more to design than knowing the fundamental elements (in the same way there is more to writing a novel than knowing the parts of speech) this is still a vocabulary that is worth developing.

More Information

Art, Design and Visual Thinking: A useful on-line resource that goes through the basics of design. This is written for a college art class.

The Elements of Design: One of a series of articles which looks at design from the point of view of online media.