The Joshua Tree Epiphany

What is It?

The joshua tree epiphany is a concept in design that revolves around 4 ideas that can be though of as the fundamentals of design. These 4 things are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

Contrast is an idea based on things differing in your work. Contrast is very much necessary to help your work look better and even be easier for the person viewing your work to navigate about it better. A great example of this is text. If you are designing a website and you have gray text on a black background, it is going to make it much more difficult for the reader to navigate the page and read what is going on, which will ultimately cause them to leave the website.

Repetition is based on the idea of repeating elements in your work. By repeating elements you create a theme as well as build some consistency in the work. Even repeating something as simple as the typeface can improve your work by a lot.

Alignment is the idea of keeping everything relatively organized on your work. For example with text, if I were to center align all my work on a page, it would be much easier to read that if it was changing throughout the entire piece

Proximity is the idea of grouping elements together based on how topic. If I for example group a title on a page with its supporting elements it makes it easier for the reader to figure out that the two pieces of information are related.