Wel­come to the sec­ond install­ment of Ele­ments of Design! Fol­low­ing up on my first post about “Ele­ments of Design — Pro­por­tion” we come to the next addi­tion, which is “Ori­en­ta­tion.”

Ori­en­ta­tion refers to direc­tion and aspect of ele­ments of an on-screen page. In design­ing the lay­out, the inter­face designer will con­sider all ele­ments that are to be included on the screen, tak­ing into account the visual hier­ar­chy or promi­nence of var­i­ous items.

Ori­en­ta­tion

It’s the tech­nique of arrang­ing objects on the screen and decide the direc­tion that each screen ele­ment will face. An impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion is the aspect of each screen ele­ment in rela­tion to other objects on the screen, and to the screen over­all. To put it in sim­ple words; Ori­en­ta­tion refers to the direc­tion and aspect of the ele­ments on a screen, for exam­ple, the posi­tion­ing of frames at left or right.

The ori­en­ta­tion and jux­ta­po­si­tion on screen ele­ments become extremely impor­tant, as the user nat­u­rally will not be sat­is­fied with the prod­uct if the file can­not be eas­ily viewed and understood.

Types of ori­en­ta­tion range from the direc­tion that a logo face to whether an image should be rotated to the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of text and the direc­tion they are fac­ing. The size of an on-screen page needs to be con­sid­ered in the design for ori­en­ta­tion of var­i­ous screen ele­ments. Some pop-up noti­fi­ca­tions, such as newslet­ter sign-ups, are not always viewed full-screen, but as a smaller float­ing box, with another page usu­ally load­ing behind.

You as the designer must con­sider the size and shape that the pop-up will default to when first viewed. For instance, if the newslet­ter sign-up  is to be viewed as a short, squared box float­ing on the screen, the screen ele­ments of the pop-up need to fit into that shape, yet still be clearly leg­i­ble to the user.

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