Top 10 Design tips

How you organize your product pages is crucial to turning your passive website visitors into paying customers. After all, if your product pages don’t make it easy for customers to find items they want quickly, they’ll end up confusing and frustrating shoppers. Your visitors end up leaving instead of buying from your store. Make it easy for your potential customers to find your products by organizing them into specific categories. For instance, you can add a menu bar to your product pages to allow shoppers to look through product categories quickly. It’s also a great way to give a glimpse into your main products and offers. The Marks & Spencer website is a classic example of this. All the product categories are at the top menu header with the sub-menu shown below. You can also include a search bar feature to make it easier for shoppers to type in specific items and find them on your website quickly. What’s more, you can go a step beyond a search function by creating an app that streamlines finding products on your website for shoppers. You can include highly customized filters for users to find specific items based on the size, variation, and style (among others). Remember to run regular backups of your app codes, data, and other business-critical work items to ensure everything is secure. If you use Azure DevOps to build your app, use automated solutions such as Backrightup. Backrightup lets you automate your Azure DevOps backup so your important data, repositories, codes, etc., are safe and intact. This way, you avoid losing any data in case of accidental deletions or issues, such as server crashes and malware attacks. Regular backups also help you keep your app running properly and smoothly so it doesn’t crash and potentially ruin your customers’ user experience. With a highly customizable product search app, shoppers won’t have to go through all your catalogs to find the particular items they want. It improves the user experience, encouraging them to check out their items (and buy more).

In the real world, the environment gives us feedback. We speak, and others respond (usually). We scratch a cat, and it purrs or hisses (depending on its moodiness and how much we suck at cat scratching). All too often, digital interfaces fail to give much back, leaving us wondering whether we should reload the page, restart the laptop, or just fling it out the nearest available window. So give me that loading animation. Make that button pop and snap back when I tap it—but not too much. And give me a virtual high-five when I do something you and I agree is awesome. (Thanks, MailChimp.) Just make sure it all happens fast. Usability.gov defines any delay over 1 second as an interruption. Over 10 seconds, a disruption. And the latter’s generous: for about half the U.S. population, 3 seconds is enough to cause a bounce. If a page will load in under 5 seconds, don’t display a progress bar, as it’ll actually make the loading time seem longer. Instead, use a visualization that doesn’t imply progress, like Mac’s infamous “pinwheel of death.” But not that. If you do use progress bars on your site, consider trying some visual tricks to make the load seem faster.

Space is a key element in graphic designs. In posters, the use of space is even more important because people look at it from a greater distance. It would be advisable to use greater spacing between elements when designing a poster. An advantage of extra spacing is that it enhances visual impact dramatically. It will also make your poster easily readable. You can use extra space between individual letters and between lines of text. You can also give more space between different types like text and images. Interior margins of the canvas are also the place where you should think of providing a lot of space.

We’ve all used background images on PowerPoint, but did you know you can also use a video as a background? Simply drag and drop your video on to your slide and resize it to cover the entire slide. If you’re short on video, go to Coverr.co for free stock videos. If your video is only a few seconds long, and won’t last the length of your slide’s discussion, just loop it. To loop your video:

• Click the video to access the Video Tools menu, then click the Playback tab.
• Check Loop Until Stopped. With your video background in place, you can add shapes, texts, or any other elements you want to use as your slide’s foreground.

It’s better to design your website to be mobile-friendly and adaptable to multiple screen display sizes from the get-go. After all, people prefer using their mobile devices to browse the web and shop online. If you don’t design your website to be mobile-friendly, shoppers are bound to have poor user experiences with your site, which can seriously hurt your conversions and sales. Also, mobile-friendliness is one of Google’s ranking factors. This means the more your website meets Google’s requirements, the better your web page’s chances of ranking higher in search results. Follow these quick tips when designing a mobile-friendly website:

• Avoid using dual websites. Instead of creating separate websites for desktop and mobile, use one URL for both to improve your search traffic.
• Ensure proper font and button sizes. Ensure your texts and buttons are easy for mobile users to see, read, and click on smaller display screens. Keep your font sizes to a minimum of 14PX (11 points for iOs) and your buttons at 44PX by 44 PX. Use one typeface and utilize white space for better readability.
• Don’t use Flash. Flash doesn’t work on most mobile devices and drains resources so you’re better off staying away from it. However, remember to make your image, CSS, and JavaScript files available to Google via the Google Search Console. Additionally, ensure you use high-resolution images and photos for your website. If shoppers have to squint or keep zooming in to see smaller details in your product photos, they’re bound to have a poor user experience — which won’t help convert them into buyers.

If your document is overwhelming with a heavy load of images, text, frames, and all sorts of objects on top of each other, it is surely a tough job for you to manage them all while designing. With the help of the stacked frames feature, you can move through the whole bunch of objects one by one at a time. To use the stacked frame feature, hold ctrl/cmd, and click on the top most object you want to start the selection. Hold the mouse bottom until Adobe InDesign digs deep to select the last object you need.

Call to action is the reason for making people read your poster. In the end, you would like them to visit an event, buy your products or services, be part of a campaign, registration deadlines, buying tickets, discounts, and so on. You need to give them a call to take the action you want. Therefore, a call to action slogan or line at the end or middle of a poster is necessary to design. Remember that the CTA is an integral part of any advertisement design, and your poster is also an ad that you paste on walls or post online. In a creative poster design, the call-to-action is usually a piece of information about an event or a contact point. Some posters have modern elements like QR codes as a call-to-action.

Typography is another key element that can make your poster look outstanding. But make sure that the use of typography is unique. One of the characteristics of typefaces is that they add some personality to designs especailly when you create custom logos. Remember that while colors evoke emotions, typography gives a personality to the design. It is to be noted that some of the best posters are those made with colors and typefaces only with no use of illustrations and images. Make sure that you follow the typography principles. Do not use many fonts at one location in the poster. However, you should experiment with typefaces by making them bigger, broader, bolder etc. This is the way to set the tone for your project. Use the typeface that appropriately represents the mood of the event. For example, if you need to show some seriousness regarding an event, use a bold sans serif. But if you wish to enhance elegance, use an italic serif. You can give your poster some playfulness or fun by using a loose handwritten font. When thinking of picking the right fonts, ensure that you use one for the headline and the other for the body copy. Such difference in the fonts will allow for a much-needed contrast for easy reading of the content.