10 Web Design Don’ts (for The Graphic Designer)

1 . Tend start a layout without having a concept/idea.

Before starting, ask yourself: who is I designing this designed for? What are the target’s personal preferences? How am I going to make this better than the client’s competition? What will end up being my central „theme”? www.edge-studio.ro Will it possibly revolve around a particular color, the specific style? Will it be clean, grungy, traditional, modern day etc .? And what will be the „wow factor”?

Then, before jumping on your favorite part – placing everything in Photoshop, right? – require a sheet of paper and sketch your idea. This will help to you organize the elements better and get a general idea of if an idea works or not really, before you invest a lot of time designing in Photoshop.

2. Don’t obsess over the styles.

Shiny control keys, reflections, gradient, swirls and swooshes, grungy elements – all these happen to be staples in contemporary web site design. But with just about everything else, moderation is key. If you make everything bright, you will end up just simply giving your visitor an eye sore. When every thing is a great accent, nothing stand out any more.

3. Do make anything of equivalent importance.

Egalitarianism is advisable in culture, but it does not apply to the elements on your web page. In cases where all your head lines are the same level and all the images the same level, your visitor will be puzzled. You need to direct their sight to the web page elements in a certain purchase – the order of importance. One subject must be the main headline, while the others can subordinate. Make one picture stand out (in the header, maybe) and maintain the others more compact. If you have multiple menu in the page, decide which one is the most crucial and draw in the visitor’s view to it. Create a hierarchy. There are many ways in which you can control the order in which a visitor „reads” a web site.

4. May lose view of the efficiency.

Don’s just simply use elements because they are pretty – give them a legitimate place in your design. In other words, is not going to design by yourself (unless you are designing your personal websites, of course), but also for your customer and your user’s customers.

5. Don’t repeat yourself excessive and too much.

It’s easy to acquire tricked in to reusing your own factors of design, especially once you got to master these to perfection. However, you don’t prefer your portfolio to seem like it was designed for the same consumer, do you? Try different fonts, new types of arrows, borders styles, layer results, color schemes. Find alternatives to your go-to components. Impose you to ultimately design the next layout with no header. Or perhaps without using smooth elements. Break your patterns and keep look diverse.

6. Don’t overlook the technology.

For anybody who is not normally the one coding the website, talk to your developer and find out how a website will probably be implemented. Whether it’s going to end up being all Flash, then you wish to consider advantage of the fantastic possibilities for that layout and not make it look like a standard HTML web page. On the other hand, in the event the website will be dynamic and database-driven, you don’t want to get too unconventional considering the design and make the programmer’s job extremely hard.

7. No longer mix and match different design elements to please your client.

Instead, offer the expertise: show you how several elements go perfectly in a certain context although don’t work in another one or in combination with other elements. That isn’t to say that you just shouldn’t listen to your customer. Take into account almost all their suggestion, but do it with their best interest. If what they advise doesn’t work design-wise, offer quarrels and alternatives.

8. Don’t use the same uninteresting stock photos like everyone else.

The completely happy customer support representative, the powerful (and political correct) business team, the powerful small leader – they are just some of the share photography industry’s clich? s i9000. They are sterile and clean, and most of the time look and so fake that may reflect the same idea over the company. Rather, try using „real people”, or search more difficult for creative and expressive stock photographs.

9. Don’t make an effort to reinvent the wheel.

Getting creative is within your job description, but typically try to get innovative with the items that should change. With a content major or a portal-style website, you would like to keep the the navigation at the top or perhaps at the remaining. Don’t replace the names intended for the standard menu items or perhaps for things like the shopping cart or the wish list. The more time a visitor needs to locate what they are trying to find, then more likely it is they will leave the page. You are able to bend these rules when you design pertaining to other creatives – they may enjoy the non-traditional elements. But as a general procedure, don’t take action for other customers.

10. You inconsistent.

Stick with the same web site, borders, shades, alignments for the entire website, until you have strong reasons not to do so (i. e. if you color-code completely different sections of your website, or when you have an area committed to children, to need to make use of different baptistère and colors). A good practice is to set up a main grid system and make all the internet pages of the same level in accordance with it. Consistency of elements gives the website a specific image that visitors can become familiar with.