Repetition graphic design principles prove vital to your website. In her book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book, Robin Williams discusses the importance of repetition in graphic design. Having consistency helps in strengthening a graphic design composition. And I believe this principle of repetition also applies to web design for the following reasons.
Three Repetition Graphic Design Principles
Typography
If you have multiple paragraph type faces, then your website will look weird. Suppose you have arial as your type face for your homepage paragraph text. And then on your About page, you have Times Roman as your paragraph text. Your website will look like it was pieced together with duck tape. Instead of varying your paragraph text, keep it consistently one type face. Repeat the same paragraph text all throughout your website.
Now this doesn’t mean your headers have to be the same type face. They can be a serif font or anything else that is different than the paragraph text. But when creating your cascading style sheet, consider keeping all of your paragraph text the same size and font type. Practice the art of repetition.
Navigation
Keeping your navigation consistent will help your website viewers find the content they need. So consider repeating your main navigation in the exact same way for every webpage. Even having your navigation’s order the same proves important. If one navigational element is rearranged differently on certain web pages, then a person may accidentally click on the wrong navigation item.
Now sometimes your sidebar navigation may be different based upon certain webpages. This is perfectly fine. But for the main upper navigation, repetition will help you maintain consistency across your entire website. And consistency will make for a much stronger website user experience.
Logos
Keeping your company logos consistent across your entire site proves important. Repeat the same logo. If you need to resize your logo for certain pages, that’s fine. But having different logos on different pages looks unprofessional. Make sure that your logos are consistent and that any old logos are updated with the new logo.
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