Throwing Shapes

No, nothing to do with dodgy 90’s techno. I’ve been going through an intensive period of design concept iteration at my workplace over the last couple of weeks (translation: I’ve been knocking out designs for the company website) and have been thinking primarily in shape and colour during that process. Not unusual preoccupations for a designer I agree but its been awhile since I thought so purposefully and for such a long time about shape particularly. Its very easy to fall into the trap of ‘box’ when you’re a web designer so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been thinking about.

Squares

Well, not just squares. Rectangles too. Common associations with squares are the concepts of honesty, reliability, strength and trust. Think of books, magazines and newspapers – all rectangular in shape. Books have always been seen from ancient to modern times as conveyors of wisdom and truth – is that where the association came from I wonder? Or maybe it was the shape of our sturdy, reliable houses that built up the association.

Square shapes are particularly good for reinforcing familiar concepts in an abstract way and seperating off content in a direct way – look at my site design, the main section is two rectangles that even though they are borderless are obvious. One contains this text and the other contains the navigation to the right. I used these rectangles in a direct way to segregate distinct areas in this design but in an upcoming design (not this site) I’ll be using squares and rectangles to reinforce abstract concepts like honesty and reliability.

Triangles

Action, dynamicism, movement and directional indicators are what triangles represent – they don’t have to move themselves but they are ideal for leading a users eye to where you want it to go. Maybe you have a sale on on an e-commerce site and want to subtely lead your visitors to it? In this instance, triangles are your friend.

Triangles are suggestive of a wide variety of things – fire, flags, arrows, pyramids (quite a religious concept that) depending on how you orientate them and/or how you place them but however you use them, they are pretty much always suggestive of action. Use triangles wisely. Too much and your poor users won’t know what to look at or where to go. Instead use triangles to path your visitors around a site or to indicate one item or show location.

Circles

Circles are like big hugs (awwwww), giving security, reassurance, a sense of infinity and protection. If you want to use them in a different way they can also be used to indicate movement (rolling or spinning).

Circles and organic circle based shapes (ovals etc) are very popular in logo design. Because circular shapes offer a sense of completeness, they offer good psychological trust to users.

In the redesign lifecycle I’m just completing we toyed with ovals a lot. Ovals are the one shape that are retained in both men and womens short term memory equally well. Coupled with their inherent traits of trust and security we thought they’d be very good for emphasising key areas of the design.

As it turned out we went for a more square based design, the feelings we wanted to convey had more to do with projecting a feeling of trust and reliability rather than the more nurturing, feminine circle.