Most creatives today are familiar with working only on screen. While the benefits of creating work digitally are endless, there is a certain satisfaction to holding a piece of your own work in your hands. This is where printing your own merchandise can come in.
Printing on your own product can be quite the daunting experience. What would you print and how many? What works best a vinyl sticker or a pin badge? And most importantly, would anyone buy it? With over 500 merchandisable products to choose from, it can be a tough decsion.
There are many positives to creating merchandise of your creative work. Whether you’re just starting out and want to trial your new product with a run of ten notebooks, or you’re investing in a 100 custom t-shirts. The profits should come rolling in after some potential good investment in marketing.
Also having said that once one item is seen by another, who knows how far it could go. One person could be a walking canvas and an awesome advert for your artwork. This also creates a sense of community, which can broaden maybe choosing to sell items at print fairs which is not only an opportunity to sell work, but also to meet customers and creatives from further afield.
One group of creatives who regularly utilise their digital work by printing it on merchandise are illustrators. Illustrators of any drawing style take the time to really think about their audience before jumping in. Who are you selling to? To avoid making any mistakes, utilise your social media as a tool for research. Often merchandise ideas go to a poll on Instagram stories, or out to a Twitter poll. It’s an awesome way to gauge interest in your product before committing to an order.
If you need any help in setting up artwork for print or help with graphics for your new project I am only too happy to help. Just contact me. I look forward to seeing your new designs in print!
Website Design Should Concentrate on User Experience
Website Design
We spend a lot of time online reading news, navigating websites and using web apps. In some cases, our experience online is not the best that we could have.
And all this is due to poor design that didn’t take user experience into consideration. It’s easy to look from afar and notice these errors, but it’s a bit trickier when you are the one handling a project.
As website designers, it’s our duty to create design with great user experience. And it isn’t easy.
Here are some best practices for UX for website design projects.
1. Website Design Should Concentrate on User Experience
Making the experience of the website memorable is more important than what the website says. Website users often forget the data and salient points of content, but they will remember how it made them feel. It works in advertisements, why not use it on website content?
Website graphics, layout, text, and interactive elements work in synergy to present the user with an experience, not just present them with information. UX website design is a consequential piece of application and website design work.
Making your website page stand out from the sheer quantity of websites and information on the internet is essential. Modern website designs contain more visual and interactive qualities to strike at more emotional responses to help them stand out in the highly competitive website world.
2. Websites Are Scanned, Not Read
It is a must that your website is scannable because people do not read websites, they scan them. Infographics and visuals have become the way for anyone trying to convey instructions or data.
Making your web page scannable will appeal to your website audience. Most will scan the content for something that strikes them and then they switch to reading when they want to find out more.
3. Website Users Want Clarity and Simplicity
In a half of a second, users evaluate the design of a website, so you need to decide what you want users to do and make it apparent. Don’t make it difficult to find action buttons. Visually focus attention on the main button versus a bunch of buttons on the home page.
Constantly reconsider what your app or site can do to make it easier to use. Part of the website design is making it highly usable for the majority of users and allowing for extra functionality to be hidden and made discoverable as it is needed, not shown all at once.
Also providing a clear, consistent design is simpler for web users. They can then know what to expect when you are reusing colours, behaviours, and aesthetics which reduces the need for them to figure out the interface. When users are familiar with some of the aspects of the web design it makes the process clearer and easier to use.
4. Common Web Design Elements Versus Creativity
When design elements are common elsewhere, don’t reinvent them by becoming creative with new UI patterns. Making users think too hard to figure out your UI interface is not what you want. You want to have a familiar looking interface where standard objects like links stand out as links, and login access is located in the upper right. There is no need to relocate such standardised components.
Creativity with standardised patterns can make your interface hard to work with and not promote website design usability. Although you may think non-traditional is cool, it may make it harder for users to navigate and thus it falls into a problem area. Design, creativity and web usability need to have a balance.
URLs, button, and navigation placement need to focus on usability before web design. Its best to focus on the layout of these first without the design in mind, then add the creative elements.
5. Web Design - Know the Website Design Audience
You must have a good idea of who the web audience is for the intended website or app before you create it. How to best design the interface will come from them.
Once you have a clear idea of the audience for your website or app, you can then find out their needs and wants, and design the perfect design that will meet their desires. The competition can show you some ideas of how this was done. Note the competition’s colours, layout, style, and features.
When you use styles and designs that your audience is already comfortable with, they can be eased into your site. You can then differentiate yourself with your ideas on their needs.
When you’ve identified your audience, remember to incorporate their feedback into your design. Considering end user’s actionable feedback is significantly valuable.
6. Web Design - Visual Hierarchy
When putting the most important elements on the interface, highlight them so that users focus on them. In design, there are a lot of ways in which to highlight things, but the most effective is to make it larger than anything else on the screen.
Making something a focal point by making it larger than anything else, is how several websites achieve the impossible to ignore highlighting of sales or ‘click here’ buttons.
7. Web Design - User Experience Qualities
Peter Moville represents the factors of UX in the User Experience Honeycomb on the usability.gov site. At the core is value in what you are providing to the client, surrounded by hexagonal shapes of the following:
- Useful - Website Content should be original and full fill a need
- Usable - Website Site must be easy to find
- Desirable - Website Design elements bring about emotion and appreciation
- Findable - Website Content needs to be locatable and navigable offsite and onsite
- Accessible - Website Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities
- Credible - Website Users must believe and trust what you tell them.
- There are other schools of thought regarding UX qualities. Here are more things that are related to building UX as well:
- Be contextual - Be sure to mark where users are in their path through the interface.
- Be human - Be trustworthy, transparent, and approachable with human interaction preferred over machine interaction.
- Be discoverable - Be sure users can accomplish their tasks the first time they visit.
- Be learnable - Be sure that interaction is easy and moving through product is seamless. Be sure that on subsequent visits users can accomplish their goals.
- Be efficient - On repeat visits can they accomplish repetitive tasks quickly and easily?
- Be delightful - Be sure that product delights users so that they have an emotional connection to it and champion your product.
- Be a performer - Be sure that the system performs well when users are interacting with it.
Web Design - Conclusion
Users need to have an emotional connection to the experience of using your product. If you are merely creating an interface and not an experience, you have limited chance of gaining the following you need to make your product a success.
UIs need to be simple to navigate, easy to use, and created with the proper colours and fonts for your audience. Don’t forget to integrate end-user feedback while remaining consistent throughout the website design.
Blog written by: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/author/Ben-Pines/
Mobile SEO - WordPress SEO
We are addicted to our smartphones. For many people, the smartphone is the first thing they check when they get out of bed in the morning and the last thing they look at before they go to sleep. People use them for everything – it’s become huge! Mobile phones have dramatically changed our lives, the way we use the web and, consequently, it has changed SEO. Mobile SEO helps you to reach customers and satisfy their needs while enjoying the experience.
Why is mobile SEO so important?
Mobile SEO is crucial because it helps you reach your your customers in the right place at the right time and and give them the very best experience. Mobile traffic has now eclipsed desktop traffic. Every day, more and more people are discovering the enormous advantages of the smartphone. Our whole lives are in these devices – it’s almost scary to see how attached we’ve become to our smartphones. Many people call it an extension of themselves and something they can’t live without. To reach these people you need a mobile SEO strategy.
Mobile does not necessarily mean on-the-go. Studies have found that people often grab the nearest device to look something up quickly and more often than not, that’s their smartphone. They use it to inform themselves about products before making the decision to buy something, any time, any place. According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. They’re focused and ready to buy. It’s your job to be there when they are looking for your products or services.
Mobile SEO vs. desktop SEO
There’s quite a difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO, but the goals are often comparable. You want to reach your audience and convert them into paying customers. In some ways, desktop SEO tactics also work for mobile SEO, but in a slightly different form. Three major themes still apply: focus on performance, user experience and content. In desktop SEO you’ll often focus more on the general public, while mobile SEO has more of a local focus.
Google’s mobile-first index
The importance of mobile SEO is made even clearer by Google’s recent announcement. At some point in 2018, Google will switch to a mobile-first index. What does this mean? For the first time, Google will determine rankings based on the quality of the mobile version of the site instead of the desktop version. A new Googlebot will crawl your mobile site and determine if its performance, content and user experience are up to scratch. If so, you get a better ranking. If it is lacking, other sites will rank higher and you could lose out. Even if you’re not focusing on mobile you will still be judged by your mobile site, so now’s the time to take action.
What’s more, in January 2018, Google announced that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches from July of that same year:
“The “Speed Update” applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
Things will change
Right now, nobody knows exactly how the mobile-first indexing process will play out. We do know, however, that you must keep your mobile site crawlable by taking down all possible barriers such as poorly loading scripts and not blocking stuff in your robots.txt. It also has to load lightning fast if you want to be indexed well.
You can no longer present less information on your mobile site than on your desktop site. Your content has to be identical on both, because, soon, you will only rank based on the information on your mobile page.
Blog coutesy of https://yoast.com/mobile-seo-ultimate-guide/#important
Qualities of a Great Graphic Designer
I have just created this graphic but I quite like it maybe for a rebrand one day...
What makes a great designer? Is there some secret formula? Where is that sweet 5-step process to becoming a killer designer? Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no such formula. However, when I study and watch successful designers, I see common qualities. Working at a creative agency has proven to me that there are eight qualities of a great graphic designer.
A great designer is…
1. Always Learning
Who likes to be told how to do something better than or different from the way we were taught? Usually, we start to short-circuit and lose our cool. But what if they’re right? What if that Photoshop trick saves you three hours of production time?
Many great designers started out very humble. They became sponges and took it all in. They took notes and tried new things. They were receptive and grew because they listened to the people around them. There wasn’t an attitude of pride or arrogance, but a conscious decision to be humble, to be teachable.
2. Able to Take Criticism
When I was in college, like many art students, I had to sit through critiques. My professor would group us all together around our lovely design work and just go to town on what was right and wrong about every single design. Then, she would open up the floor for all of us to chime in on each other’s work. You know what happened? (insert cricket noise here) Silence. I mean it…dead silence. No one wanted to give any kind of criticism! I was just as petrified to speak up as the next guy. It was bad enough taking in all the criticism; why in the world would I want to dish it out?
Criticism is a tricky thing. As a designer, we must learn that when our work is under criticism there’s no need to take it personally. There’s no reason to get defensive and make up lame excuses. Be receptive and open-minded.
3. Constantly Looking for Inspiration
How do you start your day? We all have our rituals. One of the things I do as soon as I get to work is visit three to five websites full of design inspiration. Rarely have I met a talented designer that does not practice the same habit. You must be exposed to what’s going on in the design world. I’m constantly looking at what is getting noticed and talked about in the design world so that I can apply the same professionalism to my work. I can also keep an eye on what the current design trends are and where they are going. Keeping a pool of design inspiration has also proven helpful. When I start a project, I can go back to it and find inspiring design work that I’ve saved to help kick start my creative process.
4. Out of the Comfort Zone
Ask any successful designer and they’ll tell you they were willing to learn and explore new design tricks. It’s hard! I get that. However, how will a designer ever grow or learn if they’re never pushed beyond their limits? Almost every day, I am confronted with a design problem and I think to myself, “OK, they never taught me this in school, what in the world am I supposed to do?”
FEAR CAN GET THE BEST OF US. IT CAN CRIPPLE US. GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE, LEARN AND THEN JUST TRY.
In this day and age, it’s so easy to learn new tips and tricks. Take advantage of the vast knowledge that is out there. Listen to your colleagues around you and don’t let fear stop you from creating amazing things.
5. A Chameleon
My art director told me that being a chameleon is one of the most important characteristics of a good designer. He’s right. Don’t get me wrong, having your own personal style and flair is important and your style is probably what’s helping you succeed today. However, as a designer we have to think about what will be appropriate for the client we are designing for. We need to rein in our design habits and tendencies to be in the client’s best visual interest. What will visually carry their message the best? Are they sporty? Maybe they lean toward being very homegrown and historic. Maybe they’re sleek, high fashion and modern. The point is to not get stuck in one overall style. Be flexible and expand your design aesthetics.
6. A Professional Collaborator
It’s important to get along with others. I know, this may sound like preschool all over again, but it’s true. Collaboration is an important quality I’ve seen in many successful designers. It’s important to be a team player within your agency as well as with clients. The times I’ve had to work in and with a group of people, everything goes much smoother if I’m flexible and collaborative with the other professionals around me.
7. An Ethical Designer
A lot of designers out there steal other people’s work for the sake of convenience. Not only is this lazy but its morally wrong…bottom line. There is no excuse to steal another designer’s hard work and claim it as your own.
EVERY SUCCESSFUL DESIGNER HAS EARNED THEIR NOTORIETY WITH HONEST AND LEGITIMATE WORK.
I spend a lot of time on designs, and I would hate to see my work stolen and repurposed for something else. A good designer thinks about what they have time for and decides what to create from there.
8. Designing On The Side
If you ask any creative individual, they’ll tell you that the creativity never stops. Most great designers I’ve met have told me they are always working on the side. This habit creates a great outlet for designers to have complete freedom of restrictions, a way for each of us to create something truly original and something self-fulfilling. Having something on the side is important for a designer to let loose, experiment, and create something that he can truly call his own. This also allows us to experience trial and error, making the work we do for clients that much better.
In Conclusion
I believe that great designers share these eight common qualities. I’m sure there’re quite a few more qualities that can be added to this list. What are some that you would add? I’d love to hear about them.
Coutesy of Vtldesign.
https://vtldesign.com/brand-development/graphic-design/qualities-of-a-great-graphic-designer/2/