Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

199 WYSIWYG

What a person sees in a design context should be what they get in a delivery context.

WYSIWYG is an acronym that stands for What You See Is What You Get. The design principle was coined and developed at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, guiding their efforts to print documents that matched the look of their on-screen counterparts. The principle applies to any environment in which a design is translated from one context or medium to another — e.g., a design in CAD software is 3D-printed. In such cases, what the person sees in the design or development environment is what they should get in the final translated design — i.e., all of the salient features should be preserved in the translation across contexts or media.1

When WYSIWYG is applied ...