Web designers and developers understand the principles and concepts behind their craft. After all, they’ve studied and put it into practice. With the emergence of new strategies and theories, their learning expands and sometimes blurs the very foundation of web design. The fundamentals of this discipline are highly critical for successful design projects. Also, understanding the basics will help clients understand the process of what they are asking their designers to do.
So here’s a revisit of the foundations of web designing for designers as well as clients to further understand.
Colour
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Rooted on our cultural constructs, people relate certain emotions and meanings to colours. That is why red stirs an emotion of passion as well as danger, while blue and green calm us down. A web designer should, therefore, know that the colours people see on the website play a significant role in conveying a message and creating the brand for the business’ client. A careful mixture of these colours is then fixed, especially at the height of technological developments, where designers are provided with various tools that allow them to play with hues and shades. Designers are presented with an almost limitless scheme and palette to choose from. But, it is a must to use colours effectively and strategically to create the desired brand and perception of the users. |
Font
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Supplementing the colours and images is the duty of texts on the website. This is where readability takes place in at least two levels: the font attributes and the content structure. You would want to choose a font style, colour and spacing that is not only creative, but also functional – that means readers can quickly read through them. The primary purpose of the practical use of these typographical elements is to allow the users to process information fast and easy. Otherwise, say goodbye to your clients’ potential customers. The second level of readability focuses on the content of the text. It simply asks the question ‘does this relay the message that the client wants for their consumers?’ Designers may not be writers, yet they cannot just copy and paste texts. Designers may tap persons, who may have a better grasp on content creation. |
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Mobile Friendliness
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More and more people are using smartphones to access the web. Naturally, businesses want to tap all these channels as they provide greater opportunity to reach their customers. However, some websites (especially the older ones) are not very responsive to smartphone browsers. Some sites may appear broken, or difficult to navigate. Given the bulk of mobile users (who are customers and potential ones), it has become elementary in web design that websites will be accessible through mobile technology. April of 2015, as Ariel Rule wrote, Google introduced Mobilegeddon that prompts websites to become mobile-friendly by preferring to rank mobile-friendly sites more so than others. The mobility concept of websites concerns more than just user experience. It may also affect other marketing strategies such as SEO. |
Graphics
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Graphics, images or pictures as many would call it, is a powerful element of web design. There are a gazillion principles of graphics as applied to web design. But let’s only point out some of the important ones. First, the graphic should relate to the content. We’ve established that design is more than aesthetics. So, designers do not merely place images on the website without checking whether or not it suits the content of the site’s page. On a website, there are other elements that go with the graphics like text. So, web designers have to lay these out effectively that will show a clear flow of which to look or read first. This will allow users easy flow of reading and understanding. |
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Building a website is fun and exciting, but it is also a challenging job. Businesses can either house their designers or tap affordable web design companies. Regardless of that, these basic principles should be put into practice.