Show most people two versions of the same flyer, one following basic design principles and one ignoring them, and they can usually pick the better one instantly, even without any design training and without being able to articulate exactly why. That instinctive reaction isn't magic — it's a response to a small set of underlying structural principles, chiefly balance, contrast, and hierarchy, that shape how comfortably and effectively a viewer's eye can navigate a composition, whether or not the viewer has any conscious awareness of the principles themselves.
Balance: distributing visual weight, not just objects
Balance in design refers to how visual "weight" is distributed across a composition — and weight here isn't literal physical weight, but a perceptual quality influenced by size, colour, contrast, and position. A large, dark shape in one corner of a layout with nothing to offset it elsewhere tends to feel lopsided and unstable, even if the actual space is technically divided evenly. Achieving balance doesn't require perfect symmetry; asymmetrical layouts can feel entirely stable if the visual weight on each side is genuinely comparable, just distributed differently. An unbalanced composition tends to register, even to an untrained eye, as subtly uncomfortable or unresolved, without the viewer necessarily being able to name the specific imbalance causing that feeling.
Contrast and hierarchy: telling the eye where to go first
Contrast, differences in size, colour, weight, or shape between elements, is what allows a design to establish visual hierarchy — a deliberate ranking of importance among the elements on a page, guiding a viewer's eye to the most important information first, then the next most important, and so on. A flyer where the event's date is printed in the same size and weight as minor sponsor logos gives the eye no clear entry point and no guidance about what matters most, forcing a viewer to work harder to extract the actual key information, even if every individual piece of that information is technically present and legible. Well-applied contrast and hierarchy aren't decorative flourishes added after the "real" content is arranged — they're a structural communication system in their own right, and when they're missing or contradictory, a design can look and feel wrong to a viewer who couldn't point to the specific principle being violated, only that something about the navigation of the page feels effortful or confusing.
What we're still unsure about
The core principles of balance, contrast, and hierarchy, and their broad effect on how legible and navigable a design feels, are well established across design education and practice, and are not seriously disputed. What's more genuinely a matter of taste and context, rather than settled principle, is exactly how to apply these principles for a specific audience and purpose — the same underlying rules can be satisfied by wildly different visual styles, and disagreements over which specific application "looks best" for a given brand or message remain a matter of design judgement and cultural context rather than something the principles themselves can settle on their own.
This sits inside Principles of Design (Balance, Contrast, Hierarchy), one of seven topics in Design, one of five domains in Art, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.