Essential Tips To Improve Your Web Designs

When starting your design career, a good approach is to research basic design principles and to grasp them in order to ensure some solid foundation for your future projects. Hence, these web design tips might help.

The more expertise you get from your craft, the more techniques you will learn, and hopefully, you will develop ones of your own to implement bigger and better ideas that go beyond what is expected from you.

Learning from professionals is the best way to improve your web design skills, especially when pretending to take your craft to the next level.

Image source: Jared Granger

But how can you do that? Let us share a few web design tips you could use to improve your web designs:

Web design tips: Follow your idols

Every designer has a suite of favorite design layouts, effects, and elements, and he’s trying to recreate them. It is even how biggest artists have started, so there is no need for you to skip this step.

Image source: Erik Messaki

If you can’t do it on your own, ask for assistance or watch few good Photoshop/HTML tutorials in order to understand which functionalities are included. As soon as you implement the same into your design piece, you will be ready to work on the quality of your designs.

Fuel your web design fascination with these curated design resources.

Check design blogs as often as possible

Reading articles on design blogs is a great way to gain insight, in particular to inspire you when you’re lacking ideas. At the same time, it keeps you on track with latest trends and developments, and helps you connect with colleagues and share opinions with them.
Image source: Alex Sailer

At the same time, you can join a designers’ community, and ask questions that can be answered by your more experienced colleagues. During the process, you will learn more about web design than you ever expected to.

Web design tips for detailing

This is a very important website design advice. As a designer, you’ll probably agree that the most beautiful websites are those that attract attention through small and cute details rather than big elements and overdone decorations.

Image source: Vladimir Kudinov

This small-touch strategy should be a powerful tool for you to make your design more effective, as for instance adding interest to your surfaces with faint gradient and hairline stroke, or maybe including few small icons to make the design recognizable and more visually appealing.

Check out this blog to learn about best practices for website design.

Web design tips for color scheme

Choosing colors for websites and call-to-action-graphics can be tricky, unless you decide to leave your preferences aside, and to let nature choose for you. Go out, take photos, or simply look at the landscapes around you. Which color makes you feel the best? For the sake of truth, this is the only bet you have which can never fail.

Image source: Krzysztof Krupa

Research popular design trends

This is also very important web design advice. Be professional about what you’re doing, and keep an eye on the design theory and the techniques to make sure you’re doing things properly. Don’t simply let Photoshop do your work, but study and develop your own ideas.

Even once you feel experienced enough to work independently, avoid jumping straight on critical themes knowing nothing about them. What really matters is your ability to use what you know, and to build up your own creations upon it. That’s the best way to master what you’re doing.

Web design tips for unique fonts

Google Fonts is an amazing suite of stellar font ideas, and you should take advantage of it. Still, don’t let the thousands of creative fonts distract you. Stay consistent with them throughout the while project if you want visitors to take you seriously.

Image source: Olly Sorsby

Most of all, choose something that will match your brand, and opt for practical before you do so for beautiful. Remember: the text sections must be readable and well organized!

Also read: Ten Techniques To Improve Your Design Typography

Become more functional with jQuery

The advantage of JS libraries is that they facilitate the process of designing animated and interactive websites, which is of particular use to creative designers who like to ‘makeup’ their content, and to manipulate it in a dynamic manner.

Basic web design tips regarding sidebars

Image source: Alex Sailer

Sidebars used to be very popular for website navigation, but that’s no longer the case. In our current marketing world, the most important thing is to have call-o-action buttons, in order not to distract users from the main content and the actions they want to perform.

Watch at least one tutorial per day

Take things seriously, and motivate your mind with new strategies and ideas every day. The worst thing you could do to yourself is to stagnate. So watch at least one tutorial per day, and make the most of it. Doing this, you will be half-way to succeeding, together with the fact that you will be entertained.

Website design suggestions : Experiment with CSS3 Goodies

Image source: Brevity

CSS3 revealed tons of great possibilities for designers to style their projects, most of them really beautiful, sophisticated, and effortless (IE8 in particular!). Don’t be afraid to play with them, because you can use them to create progressively enhanced designs once you’re sure of your knowledge.

Web design tips and tricks : Collect good ideas

This sentence more or less summarizes what have been said so far – everything you see and you like is a potential source of inspiration, so store it. Read forums, download items that interest you, and make a collection which will inspire your upcoming projects.

White spaces mean the world to your design

Image source: Balkan Brothers

This is an imperative rule that is often neglected, since designers seem to prefer busy and crowded websites where users are lost within seconds. If you don’t want your site to be one of them, use an acceptable amount of white space.

Obviously, this doesn’t have to mean that you need to leave the page absolutely blank, but rather to leave some ‘breathing space’ between the columns.

Also read: Data Visualization Techniques And Examples

Create simpler samples

Image source: Ramotion

Instead of complex prototyping in Photoshop and similar time-ineffective tools, create your samples with less demanding programs such as PowerPoint Keynoteto. Samples are there to reveal some basic indicators, and they don’t have to be as beautiful as the final version of your website.

Web design tips for team work

Team work was not only invented for a busy office full of accountants, but also comes especially handy for artistic teams. Sharing opinions and ideas with other designers can help you integrate options and develop more specific goals, or at least solve some problems without turning to a developer for the purpose.

Also read: Ways Design Thinking Enhances Customer Experience

Not all of your ideas are in your computer

Image source: Andrew Baygulov

Computers are indeed the center of your work, but not everything has to be done using them. There is nothing wrong with preparing ideas on whiteboards, especially if you’re trying to explain those on a meeting.

They’re made easier and are much simpler to explain, and you can always write notes and comments on the very same piece of paper. Squinting, for instance, can expose your most important elements, and help you design what you should really focus on.

Keep your sketchbook, you will need it!

Image source: Logan Cee

Sketchbooks are classics for designers, and most of the time they are where best concepts and ideas are being developed. It is because it doesn’t require for a designer to turn on his computer and open a program to make his idea come to life, but just to grab the sketchbook and draw it inside.

Nowadays, there are even sketching apps on computers and mobile devices, but we’re still old-school students who think the traditional way to do things is the best.

Also read: WordPress Membership Plugins To Create a Subscription Site

Start with white, black, and grey

Image source: Oliur

Ask any professional designer you want, and he will tell you that the best way to design is to start with grey and to move slowly towards other colors.

This apparently dull approach is in fact very powerful, as it is exactly that what makes it possible for viewers to distinguish the most important points on the website. The technique is called grayscale visual design. And it can help you position strong color pops appropriately, and to avoid overdesign.

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