What Is the Correct Design Style Language?

A design language is an overarching scheme or style that guides the design of a complement of products or architectural settings, creating a logical design system for styling. How does a company define its design style language? Historically, design language would have been a cordial-style guide for a print product. All the information would be included in that guide such as what colors should we use? How would we shoot photography? What typeface should we use? What elements would impede our efforts? How do we share the correct information? Jo Gulliver, Group Art Director for Future and UX Design Foundations contributor, talks to Yellowbrick about choosing the correct design style language.

Design Language and the User Experience

“Perhaps design language is for whoever takes it to the next step to decide. It is all about the importance of conveying the right information to enhance the user experience (UX) and the user interface (UI).” Gulliver explain further, “how would you tell someone that this is the button they need to press? Where do you get the information when it’s a button that they have to make or if they just want to engage? So, UX design and UI design are really about thinking of everything from the start. It’s about consistency, as well.”

Going on the User Journey

“With a design, you’re taking someone on a journey. You need to make sure that the information, the message is the same on each page. There are certain principles out there that are already readily available for all designers, which are things like not using too many colors on a page,” explains Gulliver. “You don’t want to use more than three or four colors on a page. The more designs that you analyze and perform these UX audits on, the more you’ll pick up on the current design style and language.”

Design Language as a Pattern

“Eventually, you’ll start to see the way people create certain elements. There are rules and guidelines not to confuse people, to not introduce too much complexity into it,” says Gulliver. “For example, if you have a call to action button and you have a secondary call to action, you’re not going to make it the same color. You’re going to choose a color that’s secondary from your brand guide.

“You have these kinds of different user needs and brand needs to balance. Even as you weigh which colors and elements to use from a brand style guide, you also balance user and brand needs,” continues Gulliver. “That’s how you stay in style with style guides. You can learn how to do this effectively and more useful design skills with online UX design education.”

For more information on design language, check out Yellowbrick’s UX Design Foundations.

• Category: Product Design
• Tag: design industry, video