9 Potent & Effective Web Design Principals for 2016

We are nearly at the close of another year and as 2016 looms closely in the background we wanted to look at how design principals will change.

For web developers keeping a finger firmly on the pulse is all that matters, and be on top of those conversion boosting tactics is what helps the bottom line of company figures.

What you have to remember is that web design Arizona comes as part of marketing, maybe not as direct as inbound marketing itself but keeping things simple for the user is what makes results stand out.

1. Divine Proportions

The one thing that we all think of is aesthetically pleasing designs that make everything in proportion to each other. This in itself is a form of art and it comes down to a formula called the golden ratio which is actually part of rich architectural history. You only need to look at buildings such as the Pantheon from Ancient Greece to get an example of this ratio at work, and for web design its closer than you think. Just take a look at Twitter.

2. Don’t Make Users Think

A clearly, well thought out web design shouldn’t make users think or get confused on where to go. It’s simple really, you just have to follow users’ habits to get it right and this is where usability and conversion rates really come into their own.

Think about it, we all search for something that we find useful or interesting and if something stands out it instantly becomes clickable. Once a user has clicked it they need expectations to be met, and this is where you need to guide a user to getting to that end result quickly, before they bounce away.

3. Visual Hierarchy

A common concept which we see in web design that will only become more important in 2016. This is where you make the most compelling and important parts of your website stand out. It takes some planning and execution at this stage, especially for the larger organisations with vast amounts of pages. What you need to target here is the area where you can turn customers into leads, where you can make sales without the customer making too many clicks.

In 2016 call to action buttons and important links should become a solid part of your web design.

4. The Rule of Thirds

In 2016 images are going to play a phenomenal part to web design conceptand the principles of the rule of thirds will help communicate your ideas without writing down a thing. Visualcommunications are a faster way to represent your ideas, products, services and much more. As explained by Web design Pheonixthe rule essentially takes an image and then divides into nine equally sized sections, and what makes this important is that the important parts of the image should be placed on the intersections and lines to make the image more appealing.

5. White Space and Clean Designs

Finally we touch on every web designer’s favourite concept and principle, white space. This has been bandied around for many years now in the web design world but 2016 is going to provide a year where negative space is going to turn into a positive addition to a web design strategy. White space allows for a cleaner and pleasant experience for the user and by cancelling out the barrage of text and graphics that make a site busy and cluttered.

6. Hick’s Law

One of the most important design principals is how a customer’s journey carries on throughout a given page on the site. This law focuses on choices and the increased time required for customers to make a decision.

To put it in simple terms, the more choices there are, the more chance of not selecting anything or taking a long while to select something. Less choice, means that more people will have an enjoyable experience on your site and convert higher.

You can work around this by adding in filters to help lessen the confusion for customers.

7. Gestalt Designs

Effective web design principles for 2016 don’t come much more potent than the set of gestalt designs. These are made up of 8 laws which allow us to predict how people will perceive something. In this design group you have the laws of proximity, similarity, closure, symmetry, common fate, continuity, figure and ground and the law of good. All these design laws are useful to know in 2016 as they all help increase visual perception and conversion rates.

8. Occam’s Razor

To explain this specific design principle, it works on the basis that the simplest solution to a problem is always going to be the best result. In practice you will see this on many websites in 2016 as homepages become more condensed with the amount of information that is left on them. Content and clutter is removed in order to make homepages much simpler, and in most cases offer a few CTA buttons and a small amount of text.

What this results in, is much higher conversion rates.

9. Patience is a Virtue

Finally, patience is a key part in all of our lives but when overstretched it can often leave us angry, irritable. That’s why it’s important to allow users the chance to explore your site and look at your services in detail without the need to fill out long tedious web forms.

If anything you should only be asking for a username, password and email address which is just a reasonable practice for them to test something out and then you as the webmaster get their data in order to communicate when a final version has been completed.

All of these principles are going to be a key player in website conversions in 2016, so make sure that you have implemented these into your strategy.

Featured Designer: The Grown-up Kid Suhandi

Today’s featured designer is Suhandi, whose fun, colorful logos and character designs will make you feel like a kid again.

With bold lines and colorful characters, Suhandi brings the excitement from a childhood of reading comics into the digital, modern age. The artist’s work is great for fun logos as well as web design work and apps, and his Behance shows a variety of posters, logos and illustrations for web.

Suhandi also shows some licensed characters in the mix, so there is definitely something for everyone in this collection of both new and established superheroes. Alongside the fun, his confident graphic design work will definitely ensure that projects stand out among the crowd. To see Suhandi’s collection, visit his Behance below!

Suhandi

Effective Ways to Keep Track of Your Company’s Drivers

There are a number of tribulations synonymous with operating a freighting company. In addition to scheduling deliveries and ensuring that shipments arrive in a timely manner, it’s important to keep tabs on your drivers. Failure to do this can result in wasted fuel, late deliveries and diminished work ethic. Fortunately, keeping track of your drivers’ progress is much easier than many people in your industry realize.

Streaming Location Analytics

If you’re looking for a convenient way to keep track of your drivers in real time, consider the benefits of streaming location analytics. After outfitting each console with this game-changing software, you’ll never again have to wonder how far your drivers are from their destinations. Furthermore, this will give you a better understanding of which drivers take frequent detours and which ones meticulously stick to their routes. To learn more about how streaming location analytics can help your company, head over to http://ift.tt/21U9Kfb.

Frequent Check-ins

One of the easiest ways to stay abreast of your drivers’ progress is to have them check in with your office on a regular basis. These check-ins can occur as infrequently as once a day or as frequently as once every few hours. Although some drivers are liable to find this cumbersome, it’s in the company’s best interest to know where its freight operators are. Additionally, if drivers encounter heavy traffic, severe weather or anything else that might hamper a timely delivery, check-ins ensure that you’ll have ample time to report the delay to your client(s).

Regular Odometer Checks

It’s no secret that fuel has become very expensive in recent years. In fact, a number of freighting companies have reduced their workforce or closed shop as a result of unstable fuel costs. With that in mind, it’s important to keep track of how much fuel your drivers are using. After each delivery, have a look at your trucks’ odometers and compare the number of miles they were driven to the projected distance between your home office and their respective destinations. Keep in mind that these numbers will seldom, if ever, match up perfectly. However, if there’s a huge discrepancy between the two, certain drivers may need to alter their routes and driving habits.

Running a well-oiled freighting operation is fraught with challenges. Luckily, keeping track of your drivers no longer has to be one of them. If you’re tired of constantly worrying about where they are and what they’re up to, make sure to utilize the previously-discussed solutions.

 

Web Design History: From Cyberpunks to UI/UX

Prior to the 90s, not much were done with regards to web design. In fact, the first website had yet to be developed.

The closest things to web pages in existence, prior to the nineties, were online bulletin boards that were moderated by system operators (sysops).

These bulletin boards were certainly influential. The concept of communicating with others using user handles, finding groups of people with similar interests to communicate with, etc. all started with bulletin boards.

As interesting as all of this is, it isn’t really relevant to web design as much of the work at this time focused on back end technology, and graphical interfaces were nonexistent. If you are interested in this time period, check out some old cyberpunk movies. They are full of scenes depicting this technology.

The First Five Years of Web Design

1991 was a banner year in the history of web design. Developers created and launched the first website. There were no pictures on the website. There was no color. Here is a basic example:

In fact, there was absolutely no consideration whatsoever given to the rules of design. It was just text on a plain background. Of course, even if the capability existed to include colors, movement, images etc., it would have been impossible to display a website with these elements over the excruciatingly slow and unreliable dial up connections (by today’s standards) used to access websites. However, this is still an important part of web design, because the framework of the internet was in place.

Web Design in the Latter Half of the 90s

In the mid-nineties there was a shift in web design. This shift involved a significant change in website structure and website appearance. Web designers began to see navigation as an important consideration in designing effective web pages. As a result, they began thinking about text layout. The initial solution was the use of rows to organize text on the screen. This table based method of designing web pages would be the standard for several years to come. The biggest development of this time period, however, was without a doubt the development of flash technology and its release of that technology for public consumption.

Google Demo

Google.com – launched in 1996

Macromedia flash created a new era of visual web design and development. Flash technology made it possible to add animation to web pages and to incorporate multimedia elements. Flash also made it possible to play video games on the internet that used pictures and moving images.

Web Design Beginning in the Year 2000

Something extremely important happened in the last year of the twentieth century. Web designers began using CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. Until the advent of CSS, there was no ability to separate the content of a web page from the design of a web page.

This meant that changing the text on a web page meant cracking into the code. With CSS, the design elements of a web page could be stored separately in a cascading style sheet. The elements include:

• Font Size
• Font Color
• Background Color

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft was extremely forward thinking when it came to CSS. Before the end of year 2000, Internet Explorer could support nearly 100 percent of the websites using CSS.

Shortly after CSS made its impact on web design, along came Java Script. This changed everything. First, the need to use tables to lay out a website went right out the window. So did the need to use flash for animations. The result of all of this was the morphing of the look of the average website into something that we still see today.

JavaScript was used to create forms as a means to gather information from users. These forms also gave users the opportunity to create their own presence on websites through the creation of user profiles. It also influenced the design trend of moving navigation buttons to the top of the screen, and the use of drop down menus from the navigation bar. If you were among the first wave of Myspace users, you probably have a clear recollection of what websites looked like when web designers first had access to JavaScript technology.

Web Design in the Mid 2000s

The most interesting web design innovation of this period has yet to take hold. The semantic web was intended to be an extension of the current framework of the web. The idea was that computers could learn to understand web pages. The result of this would be that humans could rely on computers to do the bulk of the work when it came to searching for information. This isn’t in place yet, but there are many technologies that come into being as the result of attempts to make semantic web a reality. XML is just one example.

Web Design in the Late 2000s (AKA Web 2.0)

This period of time is known for the expanding use of apps and the incorporation of interactive content into web pages. Social websites boomed during this period. Websites also became more focused on content and publishing.

Web Design Today

What’s in web design future? Who knows? There are so many trends: vibrant colors, minimalistic designs, innovative color palettes, visual content, and constant integration of animation for the better user experience. Here are some great examples of today’s web design:

The single most important thing to recognize about web design as it exists today is the growth of mobile use, and the shifting focus in web design from desktop to mobile. This focus means that web designers are concentrating on the following:

• Mobile optimization
• Designing for touch screens
• Minimal navigation
• Use of technology to track user’s location.

 

This article contributed by Leona Henryson – a visual designer and creative blogger. Currently, she is freelancing as a graphic designer, web designer/developer, and marketing consultant. She is always happy to share her creative ideas and provide advice on matters related to art and design. Connect with Leona @ g+| Facebook | Twitter | Gravatar

 

Create a Unique Logo Using This Free Logo Maker

We all know that anyone who is running a business, be it selling products or services, have one thing in common – they all need a logo.

It is so critical, that the success of a business depends on it. It not only represents the company’s ‘face’, but is also a key component in a business’ overall marketing strategy.

So how do you go about getting a logo done?

Well, you could hire a professional designer, but that’s going to cost you an arm. You could do it yourself, but then you would need to learn how to use a graphics software like Adobe Photoshop.

The easiest, and most cost effective method I found is by using a free logo maker. Services like onlinelogomaker.com helps you create unique logos quick and easy.

Onlinelogomaker.com is used by thousands of individuals every day, and it doesn’t even require you to have any technical knowledge or design skills. Once you log in, simply use its intuitive drag and drop interface to create your logo. All you have to do is find what you want, set them in the right place, choose the right colors, and you’re good to go!

It even has a ton of tutorials in case you get stuck or need help using it. So head over and start creating your unique logo today!

CLD Exclusive Freebie: 6 Merry Christmas Banner Templates [Vector]

Happy holidays! It’s a couple more weeks to the best time of year again, and we’ve got a great freebie from our friends over at Freepik!

There’s something awesome about freebies, but what’s even better are Christmas freebies! This time we’ve got 6 banner theme templates for your Xmas design projects. Great for any product or advertisement this holiday season, all the banners come in all 9 popular sizes.

Banners are in EPS, AI and JPG format. Direct downloads after the jump!

Gimme my presents!

Featured Designer: Bazsó ‘Black Bird’ Lossonczy

Today’s featured artist is Bazsó Lossonczy, a freelance graphic artist and illustrator from Hungary. The artist’s work is darker both visually and conceptually, setting a mood of mystery and suspense.

With eyes that stare right into you and colors that will haunt your innermost being, Lossonczy’s work is striking and shows human figures alongside animals, often in many cases along with a sense of danger and drama. Dealing with issues of solitude, Lossonczy’s illustrations are difficult to pull your eyes away from.

A diverse artist, Lossonczy works in multiple areas and media such as painting, drawing, digital, typography, logo design, and much more. No matter where or how his work is portrayed, the viewer is invited to see the mystery and suspense the artist offers. To see more, check out his Behance site below.

Bazsó Lossonczy