Top 10 Design tips

Editing your slides one by one is super time-consuming. If you want to change your entire presentation’s look, go to the Design tab and choose from the available themes in the Themes section. However, if you want more control over the colors and fonts, go to the Variants section (still in the Design tab). Click the drop-down to display color and font settings. You can play around with the different settings – you can use custom colors and fonts to your heart’s content – to achieve the look you want for your presentation. Lastly, if you want to, say for example, add a logo, company tagline, or website address to all slides, go to View > Slide Master. To insert elements you want to appear on all your slides, simply click on the Insert tab and insert the elements you want to appear globally.

Fitts’ Law, a fundamental principle of human-computer interaction (HCI), states that: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. In other words: the closer and/or bigger something is, the faster you can put your cursor (or finger) on it. This obviously has all kinds of implications for interaction and user interface design techniques, but three of the most important are: Make buttons and other “click targets” (like icons and text links) big enough to easily see and click. This is especially important with typography, menus, and other link lists, as insufficient space will leave people clicking the wrong links again and again. Make the buttons for the most common actions larger and more prominent. Place navigation (and other common interactive visual elements, like search bars) on the edges or corners of the screen. This last might seem counterintuitive, but it works because it lessens the need for accuracy: a user doesn’t need to worry about overshooting their click target. While you’re thinking about element placing and size, always keep your interaction model in mind. If your site requires horizontal scrolling rather than vertical scrolling, you’ll need to consider where and how to cue users to this unusual interaction type.

If you do have a home link, put it on the left. It’s the most common place for it, so visitors expect to find it there. As far as the rest of the menu items, research shows that the order isn’t all that important. There are two different eye tracking studies that show a low correlation between the order of menu items and success of visitors (source and source). So don’t spend a ton of time worrying about the order of things in your menu.

Poster design is the place where the designers can experiment a lot and have fun. This is the design through which you can entertain the viewers with illustrations, funny images, cartoons, vintage elements, loud colors and typography and other elements. You have plenty of crazy things to do with the design. So, try something that others that is unique and memorable. Use your imagination to come out with a design that stands out. Catch the eye of the viewers from a distance with your unique poster. If you are not sure of which idea will be great for your poster, you can think of lending the job to Designhill, which is a leading platform for creating a wide range of cool designs. Just launch your design contest with this site, and you get many unique design ideas from dozens of designers from across the world. You can pick a winning design at an affordable price in a short period.

A logo is a visual representation of your brand, so why tell people what you do if you could just show them? Use simple icons to communicate who you are. Remember the brand vibe we talked about earlier? The use of the plane and the sun here makes me feel excited and reminds me of warm sunny holidays. Visual puns are a designer’s best friend too – here Frost Bites have created a quirky ‘bite’ to show that they are a food company. This is really easily achieved by overlapping two circles that are the same color as the background.

While we’re on the subject of being unique, there’s almost nothing that can give your logo a unique feel quite like some awesome custom lettering. Too often we see logo design as simply a trip to the font menu to see which typeface makes the company name look best. If someone is paying you to “design” their logo, they probably expect you to put a little more effort into it. Too often we see logo design as simply a trip to the font menu. Custom type helps to ensure that your unique logo will stay that way. Lowlife designers will rip off your work in a heartbeat if they discover which typeface you’re using, but it takes some real skill to mimic custom hand-drawn type! Keep in mind though that if your logo is famous enough, people will always try to rip it off. This certainly holds true for my favorite script logo: The awesome Coca-Cola script has been stolen countless times in awkward parodies throughout the last few decades.

Hick’s Law states that the more choices an individual has, the longer they will take to make a decision. There’s actually a fascinating study on this phenomenon in which people in a supermarket were given more or less varieties of jam to try. In the end, those who had more choices were much less likely to end up buying some jam than the ones that had less variety to choose from. How’s that important for your website? Because you might be able to boost your conversions simply by limiting the choice you give to users. Here are a few examples of what that might look like:

• Reduce the number of menu items
• Limit form fields
• Focus on one call to action
• Only display social buttons for networks you are active on
• Stick to one goal per page There are plenty of other ways you can reduce overwhelm on your site and move users towards the choices you really want them to make. There’s actually an ebook on that.