User Interface Design is known as a process of visually guiding a user through a product's interface

through interactive elements and across all platforms. It is responsible for the transfer of a brand's
strength and visual assets to a product's interface to enhance the user's experience.

Elements of User Interface Design

 Layout Grids

 Iconography

 Color Theory

 Typography

Layout Grids

they help you to structure your design in a way that would otherwise be difficult, time-consuming and
troublesome.

If you don’t use layout grids,

 Your projects will never have visual harmony.

 Like anything that lacks structure or a strong foundation, your concepts will be visually
inconsistent.

 Graphic elements will not properly work together.

Layout Grid Benefits

 Keeps your content organized.

 Makes it easier to balance your design.

 Enhances your visual hierarchy.

 Makes it easier to work on multi-page interfaces.

 Renders the content far more digestible and readable.

Iconography is an effective way to convey an idea in a small form factor. This approach is becoming more
critical in the days of the shrinking screen. With the increase in mobile devices, icons play a major role in
interface design.

Icons assist in scannability, support tappable, clear targets, and conserve space at small screen sizes.

Using Icons

 Label your icons unless there is a space restriction.

 Represent both the icon action and object.

 Ensure the icon order and placement are consistent.

 Give your icons a common visual motif.

 Avoid providing icons with too much detail.

Using Font Icons

The core idea of a font icon (icon font) is to take a set of icons or pictograms that would usually be
implemented as an image or vector file and then convert it into a font.

Icon font usage in a web app loads a page 14% faster than images and can be as much as 90% smaller
than SVG files.

Color Theory

Color, one of the seven elements of Design, is an essential aspect of UI. Since color has a massive impact
on your users, it is important that you know color theory and even a little psychology.

 Warm colors give off a fiery message, while cool colors have a calming effect.

 Analogous color schemes, often found in nature, are pleasing to the eye, while complementary
color schemes have a more energetic feel.

Hue

 Hue is the most basic of color terms and denotes an object’s color.

 When we say blue, green or red, we are talking about hue.

Chroma

 Chroma refers to the purity of a color.

 A hue with high chroma has no black, white or gray in it.

 Adding white, black or gray reduces the chroma.

Saturation

 Saturation points to how a hue arises under particular lighting conditions.

 Consider saturation based on pale vs pure or weak vs strong hues.

Value

 Value or lightness refers to how dark or light a color is.

 Lighter colors have higher values.

 For example, orange exhibits a higher value than dark purple or navy blue. Black shows
the least value of any hue, and white the greatest.
Tones

 Tones are formed when gray is combined to a hue.

 Tones look softer or duller than pure hues.

 Occasionally, tones are easy to use in designs.

 Tones with more gray offer a particular vintage feel to websites. They also provide an elegant or
sophisticated look based on the hues.

Shade

 A shade is created when black is added to a hue, making it darker. Shade is usually wrongly used
to represent tone or tint. However, shade only pertains to hues that are made darker by the
inclusion of black.

 In design, sometimes dark shades are put to use instead of black, and they can act as neutrals. It
is better to avoid mixing shades with tints for too dark and heavy look.

Tint

 A tint is created when white is included to a hue, lightening it.

 Sometimes, very light tints are known as pastels. However, when any pure hue is mixed with
white is a tint. For example, Pink is a color as well as, a tint of red.

Cap Height

Cap Height is the overall height of capital letters in a word formation.

Ascender

Ascender is known as the upward tail on letters such as b, d, h, k, l, and t.

Descender is known as the downward tail for letters such as y, q, and g.

Counter

Counter is the white space seen inside the letters such as p and o.

X-Height

X-Height is the height of the letter and does not have descenders or ascenders.

Baseline

Baseline is known as the boundary that the lowest portion of the letter sits on.

Let's consider the letter y in the illustration given above. The solid line on which the letter y is resting on
is the baseline.

Kerning

Kerning is the space between the characters.

Leading

Leading is known as the space between lines of text.

 It is a valuable tool for delivering readable text.

 Good leading can enhance the worst type look readable.

 Bad leading can depreciate a quality piece of work.

Understanding Brand Identity

Brand identity guidelines describe the materials and assets that make a company special.

 Messaging (like taglines and mission statements), Typography, logos, color palettes, collateral,
and so on are aggregated and explained in brand identity guidelines.

 Brand identity guidelines offer answers to these basic questions in one centralized hub.
However, how do you create cohesive products?

Design Language

Brand identity guidelines are tangible, whereas, design language guidelines are difficult to pin down.

 Design language style guides connect a standard design direction, approach, and philosophy to
particular products or projects.

 A unified design language must not be just a collection of individual atoms and static rules; it
must be an evolving ecosystem.

Design Language
To display itself cohesively across an increasing range of media and products, Google created a design
language known as material design. It is utilized in all Google Products such as Android OS, Google
Search, and YouTube.

Let’s take a look at the design languages available and understand why the visual language has
established itself.

Design Language

Skeuomorphism, flat design, and material design are a few design languages that follow its own design
trends.

Let’s understand the concept behind them and why they are so successful at their time, in the next card.

Skeuomorphism refers to a design principle applied to user interfaces in which design cues are taken
from the physical world.

For example,

 Turning a digital page to resemble the experience of reading a physical book.

 Apple used Skeuomorphism in its primary design principles and Human Interface Guidelines.

Flat design is known as a minimalist UI design language, or design genre, currently deployed in
numerous graphical user interfaces.

Google created a design language known as Material design. As seen in the card motifs, it is a design
with more usage of padding, responsive transitions and animations, and depth effects like shadows and
lighting. Card motis were first noticed in Google Now.

Style Guide

So what do robust design languages look like? What form do these languages take? How will you
develop, maintain, and support them?

 The foundations of great design systems are style guides.

 These style guides document and order the design materials while offering guardrails, usage,
and guidelines.

Design Language Benefits

Design Languages are essential tools that help prevent chaos, both from a design and development
standpoint. Here’s why design languages are now vital tools in modern web design and development.

Consistency – Design languages encourage cohesion and consistency throughout a user interface. This
consistency helps both the persons who develop these interfaces and their users.
Making design languages central to your process results in user interfaces that appear genuine and
unified. This aids users complete their activities quickly and allow them to learn the interface.

Design Language Benefits

Shared Vocabulary – Design languages establish a consistent, shared vocabulary among everyone
concerned in a project, promoting cooperation between disciplines and minimizing communication
breakdowns.

 Communication breakdowns are common when many people collaborate on a project.

 It’s common for different disciplines to have different names for the same module, and for
individuals to invent their own naming conventions.

 It is essential for teams to articulate a common language for real collaboration to occur.

 Design languages aid in establishing that shared vocabulary.

Design Language Benefits

Education – A pattern library communicates the design language in a very tangible way, which helps
stakeholders understand that an underlying system is determining the final interface.

By exposing the design system in the form of a design language, teams can better comprehend
consistency and know why their requests for custom designs suffer pushback.

Empathetic Workflow – By making a design language a cornerstone of your workflow developers and
designers are made to think about how their choices influence the larger design system.

A good design language aids in notifying developers and designers the tools they possess in their
toolbox. It also offers best practices and rules to use them correctly.

Testing – A design language lets you to see interface patterns in isolation, thereby enabling developers to
finalize what is causing performance issues, browser inconsistencies, or errors.

Speed – Once the pattern library is established, subsequent design and development become much
faster, using old patterns instead of needing to create new patterns from scratch all the time to increase
the complete workflow.

Longevity – The genuine thing about interface design systems is that they can and must be changed,
expanded, and improved for ages to come. Even if you want the main redesign, you will see that
numerous structural interface building blocks will be the same. You will still have headings, buttons,
forms, and other standard interface patterns. A design language offers a good base for all future tasks.

Tools for UI Design and Interactive Prototyping

Currently, numerous tools aid you to create digital products. These tools range from web creation tools
to developing tools to design tools.
Prototyping tools aid you in creating products quickly and effectively. Prototypes exhibit your ideas,
and in performing so can improve the way you design.

These days, clients are searching for interactive prototypes. The prototypes offer you an overview of your
interactions, design, and ideas.

Sharing abilities and iterations are where prototypes show their uniqueness. The capability to work
quickly on various versions of your ideas and distribute them with your team or client is a real game
changer.