This essay compares and contrasts the websites for the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL) by focusing on proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast.
A useful website must conform to the site's practical design principles to present its messages to the audience professionally and creatively. These design principles make the site grab the audience's attention and present messages that appeal to the audience's senses. The creative and professional presentations allow the messages these sites pass to reach a wider audience. The practical design principles employ four standard precepts to ensure that websites remain attractive and informative to the highest levels. The central formal precepts used in web design include repetition, alignment, proximity, and contrast. In the United States, sporting organizations use the websites to pass various news and general information concerning the different sporting events. Such organizations include the most famous sporting organizations such as the national basketball association (NBA) and the national hockey league (NHL), which have their websites for passing information about the game. This essay will compare and contrast websites for these two popular sporting organizations, the NBA and NHL, to determine how the standard precepts are used in their websites.
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Repetition
This design principle, whenever applied, tries to create unity. The repetition principle allows for reusing key themes in designing a website to allow the audience or the readers to identify and recognize the organizations or the brands easily. Repetition also involves applying thematic colors, for instance, those related to the logo repeatedly within the website. Shapes, sidebars, widgets, headers, footers, line thickness, videos, images, textures, and fonts are examples of frequently used elements. This repetition allows the audience to identify messages from the website quickly. With the repetition of these elements, the organization's aspect and continuity come on the website, which prevents the website from becoming dull. Themes and colors through repetition may help identify a particular website and the belonging of the messages to a specific organization.
The first image is from the NBA's stats page. NBA website employs several repetitions through the use of colors resembling the NBA's original logo. The blue color is used throughout the page to draw the readers' attention to the page's subtopics, and at the same time, blue identifies the NBA. Dark thematic color, which again is present on the NBA's logo, is frequently used in the page, as a thematic color on the headers and is also the font color for texts on the page.
NHL web pages also deploy repetition through its dark header; however, it misses the color repetition as different colors are applied within the page without much repetition.
From the repetition principle from the above stats pages, the NBA website applies more repetition as a design principle to create a form of identity and draw the audience to the page. Color repetition is used in the NBA site in the identification of subtopics.
Contrast
This second design principle is for the idea that different colors, sizes, or shapes draw the audience's most attention. Contrast is also significant while choosing websites themes as it is necessary to create fonts and titles that have visual contrast of light and dark shades to caption the viewers' attention. Through comparison, related elements on the website can be displayed differently and shown regardless of their similarities. Techniques used in contrasting include color, shape, size, position, orientation, texture, and movement. Contrasting transforms similar elements into significantly unique pieces.
In contrast, we shall compare homepages for the two websites and see which one draws the most attention.
NBA homepage balances white and black colors to create a visually attractive interface. For text, even though everything is white, sizes differ from differentiating between headings, subheadings, and the general text. Dark contrast matches the image used and the header making the homepage look unique.
NHL homepage also applies the same dark contrast concept used in the NBA homepage; however, it is on a smaller scale. White space covers much of the page and does not bring out the aspect of contrast.
Alignment
The third design principle is alignment, and it focuses mainly on the location and placements of elements in the website pages. The text can be placed in a particular area, logo in a specific corner on the page, or images in one particular area to allow the audience to know where to check for detailed information specifically. When these elements are scattered on the website, readers may confuse the exact points to check for news. The right page arrangement creates logical flows within the web pages; hence, it can please and appeal to the audience or the reader. The standard rule used in alignment is that edges of the images should line up with the text margins to make the pages neat and white spaces plenty.
The first image is from the NHL's statistics page and is used to show alignment. The page brings and clearly shows logical flow on data arrangement.
The next image is from the NBA's schedule page, and alignments are visible throughout the page. The logo remains in its usual corner, the header on its usual spot, and elements arranged logically.
Both the websites deploy alignment principle in the webpages to create logical flows.
Proximity
The fourth principle, proximity, talks about keeping related elements grouped within the website. Related images, paragraphs, words, or tables should be grouped on the website to allow for effective communication and white space. Proximity makes the webpages look neat and concise, and this will enable readers to quickly interpret essential details on the website. Through proximity, physical relationship elements come out as the spacing and isolation involved create emphasis and similarities. Attention grabbers intentionally overlap or sit at the top of the pages.
Proximity exists on NBA's news page where relevant news is grouped on the left while the organization's add, which is irrelevant to the story, is placed on the right.
On the other hand, the NHL's news page uses attention grabbers as the proximity principle to distinguish the most important news from other news. Further information is also arranged on the left side of the page hence shows the idea of proximity.
Both pages deploy proximity principle.
