Hi bloggers! My name’s Kjell Reigstad, and I’m a designer at Automattic. This is part three in my monthly series on “The Principles of Design.” In this series, I share some of the basic tenets of design, and we explore how to apply them to your blog.

Previous installments:
Clarity
Visual Hierarchy
Color Harmony

In college, the majority of my design classes centered around critiques, or as we called them, crits. At the beginning of each class, we’d pin our work up on the wall. Then the entire class would walk around the room as a group, providing feedback on each other’s designs. At the end of class, we’d take our work down, and spend the next week refining based on the feedback we’d received. Then we’d start the process over again during the next class.

Participating in hundreds of crits was invaluable to my design education. Though crits are a…