Page Design

Guiding the Eye

We freely confess that designing pages in Canvas is not easy. That said, we'd like to offer a few basic design rules to help keep you on track. We've taken these from a great little book called The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. (No, not that Robin Williams.) Williams uses the acronym CRAP for her model of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. Catchy, but the rules aren't necessarily in order of importance. Note that although Williams has put these together in a brilliant little book they are fully in line with models of visual perception dating back to the theories of Gestalt Links to an external site. organization in vision.

• ALIGNMENT is the most important one to keep in mind. The more things you can align on the page the better. For instance it you decide to include multiple pictures, make them all the same width if you are stacking them vertically. If you are putting them side by side in a table, align them to the top so that even if they are different heights they hang like flags.
• PROXIMITY simply means to put things that belong together....together. Sounds simple but you would be surprised how often it gets overlooked. It is the basis of organization. Clump like things together so that so that the reader can mentally chunk them together.
• CONTRAST alleviates the sea of sameness that assaults the eye with an unrelieved body of text. The easiest way to do this in Canvas is to use headings. Note that the eye is drawn to the area with the highest contrast.
• REPETITION helps the eye orient itself and know what to expect. It also means that by occasionally interrupting the repetition you can signal something important.