Highlighting
Por Diana B. (Intel), publicado el 23 de octubre de 2013
Highlighting
Highlighting brings attention to specific parts of your design but, handled poorly, highlighting can reduce the performance of your design. You can use a variety of techniques to create highlighting, including adding bold, italics, and underlining to a font, changing the typeface, adding color, and inversing the values of a graphic. When you’re creating responsive applications (not native apps that work within the design confines of a smartphone’s operating system) you need to pay attention to highlighting techniques to make sure that the methods you’re choosing will read well on a phone or other mobile device.
YES: Well-designed highlighting is consistent and restrained. | NO: Too many colors and multiple highlights are distracting and make it hard to focus on the desired next step. |
Here are some good rules of thumb:
- Highlight no more than 10 percent of the visible design
- Bolding is preferred as it adds minimal noise to the design and clearly calls attention to the highlighted word
- Avoid underlining as a highlight technique.
- UPPERCASE is useful to highlight short words, but not for long phrases or sentences.
- Changing fonts in the middle of a sentence is too subtle.
- Inverse elements sparingly
- Blinking – No. Unless you’re designing a critical alert for a high-risk system, then maybe.
Color alone should never be used as a highlighting mechanism because colorblind people may not be able to see the change, and color is too variable and culturally-specific to have a consistent meaning.
Voice of the Expert:
Fast Company Design has a design blog that features the writings and work of design masters. Check it out http://www.fastcodesign.com. Another great blog that features innovating design across many disciplines is Cool Hunting www.coolhunting.com.