I love a good pun. And I'm sure none of you have heard that one before, right? Right? I digress. So, what do I mean by CARP? I'm definitely not talking about the fish (again, coming to you with some brand new comedic gold); I'm talking about the design principle acronym. Contrast Alignment Repetition Proximity Let's dive into each value using my Identifying Mobilizers job aid found in my portfolio. You don't need to link out if you don't want, I'll be using screenshots throughout this post. |
Contrast is a fancy way of saying that the differences among items (color, shape, icon, etc.) can have meaning. My example of contrast can be seen both by using an orange font color to distinguish more important characteristics and also by identifying each stakeholder type with a different icon. This lets the reader find the important characteristics first, and scan the others as needed.
Alignment
In the same image, you can see alignment in action as well. Alignment is the way things are laid out on the page. In this example, there are two columns to the text, everything is left-aligned, and all of the bullet points are indented the same amount. If there wasn't alignment (if a few of the bullets were off, for example), it would look pretty strange, and the eye would be drawn to those outliers.
With repetition, you want to repeat layouts, headings, visuals, etc. in a way that is predictable to the reader. You can see in the above example that headings have been repeated in both color, style, and size (if you open up the document, you can see that this is throughout), and in the example to the right, there is repetition in the graphic to help guide the reader. The questions are styled the same, and once they've read the whole box, there is a predictable flow to the graphic with the yes/no structure and arrows. This leads to another repetition of the icons from the first page, connecting the information from the start to the end.
Proximity
This second example is also a good example of proximity. The biggest part of proximity is putting things that are similar close together, so the reader knows how to connect the dots. I've grouped items related to the question close together, grouped the end stakeholder types by their overall "type" bucket (mobilizers, talkers, and blockers), and left enough white space around the outside and in-between to allow the eye some breathing room. If this graphic had been condensed to be shorter or narrower, the reader might have felt like there was a lot of information being thrown at them.