Be Consistent

Graphic designers speak of "creating a system" — using recognizable graphics, names, and relations throughout a presentation. The consequences of failing to create a consistent system are great. Inconsistencies frustrate the reader's ability to transfer existing skills across different applications, they accelerate the forgetting of associations between goals and methods of achieving those goals, and they interfere with the process of learning new methods by unnecessarily consuming short-term memory. Consistency of type, color, page layout, discussed in the section on Graphic Design Principles, are thus as important to the psychological design of a text as they are to its aesthetics.