A Guide To Design Briefs

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Do you ever find yourself wondering how to achieve that perfect design you see in your mind? You can get it. You just need a design brief. If you are a designer or a client, the design brief will be the largest determining factor in deciding the success of a project.

This guide will help you understand the benefits of a design brief as well how to create an effective one.

What is a Design Brief?

A design brief provides your designer wth all of the information needed to reach or exceed your expectations. It should focus on the results and outcomes of the design you would like to achieve. Business objectives and goals are important to make sure your designer knows what to strive for. A design brief however shouldn’t deal with aesthetics. That is the role of the designer.

How To Write an Effective Brief?

Jacob Cass, writer for Just Creative, has a list of great questions that will help you make a great brief. If you can answer the questions I’ve compiled here, you will be 90% done. Don’t try to think of one sentence answers, but think of the questions as jumping off points.

What does your business do? Your designer will not necessarily know anything about your business. Avoid jargon, and address what your company does, as well as its history.

What are your goals? Why are you hoping to achieve those goals? The designer needs to know what you are trying to communicate, as well as your motive to decide how the design should address these issues. Let them know what makes you different from competitors. A good idea is to also provide old promotional materials to give them an idea of your promotion history.

You designer should also be given knowledge of your target audience. What is your target markets demographic? Which audiences are more important than others?

What is your budget? Knowing this will help designers reach benchmarks without wasting time or resources, as well as helping inform what size and specifications you desire.

Conclusion

Give the designer as much information as you can to help inform them. You won’t get what you want, unless you inform them.

 

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Targeting Your Audience Effectively Through Web Design

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Anytime you have an industry where creativity meets business, you face the conundrum of who to target with your work. Do you want to make something exciting and fun that other people interested in design will like, or do you want to make something consumers will enjoy?

The good news is that web designers can do both. If you have just a bit of marketing knowledge and some strategy, you can make a solid design that was as fun for you to make as it is for consumers to explore.  Any good designer should already be attracting their potential audience while making interesting designs. But what do you do if you aren’t?

The first step is to identify your target audience. If you can spot who your demographic is, everything else will fall into place.

Thankfully, identifying your audience has never been easier since you have tools like Google Analytics at your disposal. This isn’t to say this is a walk in the park, but pinpointing your customer base is much more simple and precise than it used to be.

By doing a keyword search in your analytics dashboard, you can also see what people are searching for, and what kind of people they are.

Another way to identify what your visitors like is by simply asking them questions. Blogs are a great platform for this, because you should already be trying to interact with your audience, and you can leverage to ask them what they think about different topics and to offer their opinions. It is also important to note, if you are struggling to interact with commenters because of spam overload, adding a simple Captcha is easy and rids you of most spam.

Social media also offers a huge opportunity to interact with your audience. It is easier to connect with readers on Facebook than it is to interact in the comments sections of articles. Taking advantage of social media also means your content is easier to share, which will attract more readers.

Once you know who you are designing for, you can find ways to make a great site they will enjoy, and you won’t hate making. Christian Vasile has great design tips if you’re having trouble getting started.

You don’t have to sell out and make boring websites because you are designing for a company. In fact, if you do, you are just making bad websites and your clients won’t be happy anyways.

 

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Why Aren’t We Talking About Responsive Typography?

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You’ve heard me preaching the benefits of responsive web design, but you probably haven’t seen much about responsive typography. This is interesting because for most websites, the text is by far the most important content on the page.

Well, good news everybody, because responsive typography is pretty easy. You just need to think through how you want type to respond to the changes in screen size, and then follow through.

Responsive typography has two main factors. The first is resizable type, which is obvious. Resizable type rescales itself based on the size of the screen, but it is also important that it is resizable by the user.

The second factor is optimized line lengths, which are still readable. On some screens, keeping content areas smaller actually makes more sense, though they technically could be larger.

Cameron Chapman has all the code and technical information you need at Weddesigner Depot to implement solid responsive typography. Most importantly, you should be using rems for sizing your type because they are relative to html elements, which makes maintaining proper sizing of your type very efficient. Chapman also will help you through how to keep your line lengths the optimum length, which is slightly more tricky than just making your text resizable.

Designers should never neglect their typography on the page, and making it readable for any size screen is essential. Sure, if your site is more image and video heavy, it may not be as important for you as it is for bloggers, but I doubt your site has zero text on the page. Even in those situations, you want every part of your page to work perfectly for everyone.

 

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The Secret of Personal Branding

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I’ve written a lot about branding for your clients, but do you know that personal branding is just as important to your success as a designer?

You hopefully do, because personal branding is far from a new idea, but social media has made personal branding as available as ever before. It is also a much more competitive field now.

To make yourself a valued brand, follow this collection of tips. They will help you climb above the competition.

  1. Set Goals and Plan Ahead – Before you ever begin to define your brand, you have to think ahead and see where you want to be a few months or even a year or two from now. Are you trying to get a new job, or do you want to stay a freelancer? How do you want to grow your business? Once you know where you want to be, you can layout a plan to help get you there.
  2. Know and Understand Your Brand – The look and feel of your brand is a lot more than just a brand or a couple of social media accounts. You have to keep a consistent image in all mediums at all times. As Jacob Cass from Just Creative puts it, “The fundamental idea and core concept behind having this ‘corporate image’ is that everything you do, everything you own and everything you produce, should reflect the values and aims of your personal brand as a whole.”
  3. Create and Maintain Your Brand – One of the best ways to set yourself apart from the crowd is to have a unique visual identity that is consistent and reflective of your goals. You should also maintain social media accounts in ways that reflect your brand positively. Are you of any value to your followers and friends? Or are you wasting the biggest platforms to promote your brand?

Above all, the secret to personal branding is the same for many things in life. Plan ahead, and follow through. If you put forth a solid, planned image to the public, and follow through with valuable content, people will come to respect your personal brand.

 

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Tips for Typography

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There are infinite ways to approach typography, and you will see just about every imaginable strategy across the internet. Some go over-the-top with their typographic choices, and some, either out of ignorance or laziness, underwhelm with blah text.

There are places for both of these approaches, but there is never an excuse for outright ignoring how your text looks on-screen. Typographic choices are absolutely essential to your design, and even if you don’t have much text on your page, the wrong typographic decisions can leave viewers with a bad taste in their mouth.

To keep you from making the mistakes many pages have, I’ve compiled a list of things to keep in mind when choosing typography for your designs.

Message

One of the first things a designer should consider when starting a design is what type of message you want to send. This should be equally true when it’s decided what text you are going to use. Gabi Azilla uses the example of fliers for disaster aid programs when considering what message you want to send. In this example, you want your message to be along the lines of “hope” and “aid”, so you don’t want your text to look like something from an action movie or business memo. If that example is too specific for your current project, think along the lines of whether your design is aiming for a happier, or darker concept. Happy designs should use light, soft fonts, while darker themes rely on sharp, dramatic text.

Legibility

It really doesn’t matter what you are working on, using text that is illegible is always a negative. It may look neat, but nothing annoys viewers quicker than having to struggle to read a simple header. There are times when more abstract fonts can be good, but they should be used very sparingly for effect, rather than the main font for any aspect of your page. Think about it in terms of the heavily illustrated letters beginning paragraphs in classic, old books. They liven up the entire page, but the illustrated, complex area of text only covers one letter.

Size and Placement

This one goes overlooked often, but where and how big your typography is has a huge effect on the success of your design. Placement and size are all about balance. No one wants to strain to read your text, and overly large text is just annoying, but you also want to make something eye-catching. Make sure the typography complements the rest of the design, and effectively uses the space it covers. The general rule for designers is the header or title area should be the main focus, and everything else should be roughly half the size of the header, or smaller depending on importance. Keeping a heirarchy in your text lets readers know where you want their eyes to focus.

Conclusion

With the near infinite choices designers have for typography, it is easy to want to dive in and play with your design to create something truly wild. There is plenty of room for experimentation and innovation, but restraint is key. Remember why you are designing the current project, and fit your typography to match the point of the design.

 

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Responsive Design – Which Approach Do You Use?

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There is more than one way to do responsive web design. The most prominent seems to be adaptive web design, which is more rigid and structured because the elements of the site only change when reaching different breakpoints.

Just because bloggers and media specialists focus on adaptive web design doesn’t mean there isn’t another approach with merit. Both approaches have pros and cons, and both will help you more in certain instances.

Adaptive Web Design

The adaptive approach is best when used on sites that frequently go through design changes. Adaptive design doesn’t have to think too far into the future because adaptive designs require regular updates to make them optimized for the latest technology.

The approach uses breakpoints set with media queries as the only changing visual aspect. Usually, this results in about three different layouts, which provide a good experience on most platforms. The downside is along the outer edges of these breakpoints (for example if the range has a maximum of 620 px and the device used to access the content is 619 px) users will begin to have design issues.

The upsides to adaptive design are you don’t have to test it at every conceivable width to ensure it renders properly, and it makes sure the majority of users will have a good experience. Unfortunately, if you aren’t using the most recent and popular devices, you are more likely to have a problem, and it requires periodic changes to keep up to date.

The Fluid Approach

The fluid approach responds to different viewing widths allowing the design to create a suitable layout on nearly every platform. The viewers are able to get a good experience that is catering to the dimensions of their device, but for the designer, the fluid approach requires a lot of time spent checking the site at different widths to see where the design breaks.

The design doesn’t have a “true form”, but an ever-changing appearance molded to fit the needs of the viewer’s device. The ability to achieve this type of design comes from keeping all of the aspects of the site proportional. Everything is rendered based on the size the screen is viewed on.

The best part of this type of design is fluid designs are practically timeless. It is impossible to really predict what will happen in the industry in a few months, let alone years, but fluid designs have the ability to still look aesthetically pleasing on all devices for much longer than adaptive designs.

Conclusion

Both design approaches have their merits. Adaptive design is feasible to be able to make routine changes to stay current, and offers an almost universally pleasing experience with little testing. Fluid designs don’t require the regular updates of adaptive designs, but you will likely end up spending the same amount of time testing widths.

No approach is ever perfect for everything, but these two should keep you covered in most situations.

For more technical information about these two approaches, read Jamal Jackson’s article from 1stwebdesigner.

 

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Why Are You Redesigning?

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Sometimes it is clear when you need a redesign. For example, if your site is still using Flash, it isn’t viewable on many smartphones, and you definitely should consider redesigning.

Other times, it can be less clear. Sometimes even bad designs are meeting the needs of your client, so it can be hard to give a good reason why they need a design. Why pay money to improve something that is working at the time?

Usually the reason most designers cite for needing a redesign is to make their site “look better.” This isn’t really a viable reason for clients however. Kendra Gaines, writer for Webdesigner Depot, has a different argument for redesigns that your clients will love.

Redesigns aren’t only a way to offer clients the latest design trends or “make things look better.” Redesigns can be a way to entirely revitalize a brand or business. A redesign can be enough to breath new life into a business or brand that might be stagnating.

Gaines uses examples from business such as Keds, who subtly redesigned their product line to re-invigorate their popularity, but doesn’t tend to connect the ideas to web redesigns. This is interesting because Webdesigner Depot just did a massive redesign of their webpage.

The website redesigned to a responsive web layout allowing their content to be available on all platforms, but it also helped refine their image. The site seems more efficiently laid out, and they have made social media buttons readily available at all times.

This redesign acts as the perfect example of what you should be thinking when trying to redesign for a client. The site was brought up to date with the current design standards, as well as adding usability features that are great for users, but they also used the opportunity to help refine their brand as a whole.

When you are preparing to do a redesign for any brand, try to remember these ideas. If you are just trying to add the newest trendy features to a site, all your work will be undone when the next wave of features hits the industry. If you subtly try to help the brand define itself, your work will be making a lasting impact on the company in a positive way.

 

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Consistency Key to Online Branding

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Online branding ruins everything you thought you knew about branding. It is no longer strictly a marketing activity for multinationals with million dollar budgets. Online branding is simple and practically free.

The internet allows businesses of all sizes to participate with their webpages, secondary sites, social media outlets, and company blogs. These areas are also exactly where it is important to establish a successful branding strategy. But how?

It is first important to remember branding is a lot more than a name and a logo. It is a philosophy encompassing the values and way of doing things. Branding alone can increase the perceived value of any kind of product by creating an image that depicts the product as more than its actual value. Gucci is just a clothing designer, but because of the image cultivated around the brand, their products are perceived as higher value than most others.

Ray Vellest, writer for Web Designer Depot, argues the most important aspect of creating this type of image is consistency. Making sure all of your messages are on point establishes an idea in potential customers’ minds.

People associate Gucci with luxury because they only present images of their products with luxury settings. The people in their ads are always dressed in some form of high fashion, and in an extravagant setting.

Similarly, Louis Vuitton has had a long running campaign of images of pop culture icons with their luggage, and they choose these celebrities carefully. Sean Connery, Madonna, and Keith Richards have all been in ads for Louis Vuitton, and the imagery suggests that of the “rebellious” upper class.

When bringing this strategy online, think digital presence consistency. Start with your username, or profile. Using the same username across the web is a big step towards creating brand consistency online. It brings continuity to interactions customers have with the persona or company through various methods.

Another method of establishing consistency is visually. You begin working with the company’s logo, keeping it absolutely consistent across all platforms. But it is also important to design a secondary logo that will fit within the square profile image space alloted by social media platforms. The second logo has to be a visual continuation of the first.

When interacting with potential customers online, you need to be keeping a consistent voice as well. Many companies have multiple people handling their social media accounts, but their voice needs to match the voice of the company. To do this, define your tone by finding one that matches your brand image. Law firms should maintain a serious and formal tone, while a record store, for instance, has more liberty to be less formal and maybe opinionistic.

By creating a consistent image all across the web, you can begin to cultivate the type of branding that huge corportations spend millions on every year. It is as simple as keeping everything focused in the same direction, and sending the same message.

 

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Does SEO Limit Web Designers’ Freedom?

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Now as much as ever, the web design industry and the SEO industry are intertwined. The question that arises anytime a business industry and a creative industry become so connected is whether the business side limits the creative side or not.

Most in the web design industry will agree that SEO shouldn’t limit web designers at all. SEO is important, but limiting art isn’t necessary.

One of the most important things for web designers and SEO professionals to be concerned about is load times. Lots of designers want to make amazing headers, but these lead to slow load times. There are sites where load times do matter less. Portfolio sites should have plenty of quality graphics of work, but in these instances SEO doesn’t matter.

For commercial websites however, fast load times are essential because customers will go elsewhere rather than wait.

For those that think standard navigation practices limit their artistic license, think about this. The job of a web designer isn’t just to create an aeshtetically pleasant site, but to make one that is also functional and user-friendly. Breadcrumbs and easily accessible navigation systems make users happy, and it allows them to see all of the well designed areas of the site.

Overall, if you aren’t designing overly flashy sites, SEO shouldn’t be limiting your abilities as a designer. The latest SEO practices rely on quality content, and the designer’s job is to to deliver this content is a good looking package. If anything, SEO guidelines will help you understand how to create a site your viewers will like.

For some more pros and cons of the relationship between SEO and web design, Rean Jean Uehara has a great article at 1stwebdesigner.

 

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The 11th Principle of Good Design

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Most designers are aware of Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design, and, if you aren’t, you should definitely check it out. Rams created the entire visual language Apple is still using, and products he designed over fifty years ago are still being made today. He made the ten principles in 1970, when he decided he needed an objective way to criticize his own designs.

The list was originally made to critique physical products, but lately web designers have been using the principles for interactive design. While the list works wonderfully with interactive design, there is one issue stemming from how long ago the principles were established. In Rams’ time, there was no interaction design, UI, or UX. It doesn’t take into consideration the constantly changing software out today.

Fourty years ago, when Rams created the ten principles, designs were mostly for print or physical products, which rarely were updated. This is as far from true now as imaginable. That’s why Wells Riley, designer for Kicksend, has proposed an eleventh principle of design. 

Good Design is Iterative

Iterative design is flexible, and reduces the friction created from growth and change. It is common to think of every project with an “end date.” Designers usually consider themselves finished when they hand in a design, and get their money. Unfortunately, that manner of working will usually result in a total breakdown when it comes time to integrate new features.

Fixed, complex designs lead to complete disasters when it is time to update. Big companies have the money to invest to overcome this issue. Small companies, which normally need to update at a much quicker rate than huge corporations, can’t afford to not iterate on design just as quickly as engineers can code.

So how do you make an interative design from day one?

  1. Responsive Web – Responsive layouts allow pages to respond to different mobile and desktop browsers, which makes for much easier design changes. Sites using responsive layouts can make small changes constantly to continuously mold their entire product and brand image.
  2. Less is More – Designers love to build complex and interesting sites, but aside from possibly confusing visitors, these intricacies are also blocking fast updates from happening. Instead, stick with only what is essential. Minimalistic approaches to design allow for innovation. Think about Google’s front page. It is simple and clean, which makes it spectacular when Google Doodles show up to highlight an important day in history. If the page was cluttered with extra nonsense, the doodles would be harder to implement, and their effect would be severely diminished.
  3. Ship Every Day – Don’t ever let your design go stagnant. As any art student knows, there is always room for improvement in a design, and you should always be working on improving it. Use customer feedback and research, as well as your constantly growing knowledge of what is new, so that your designs grow at the same rate you grow as a designer.

The Ten Principles Rams set down 40 years ago are still an important way to critique your own designs, but, as with any list 40 years old, it needed an update. By adding a focus on iterant design, you will be able to criticize your own work objectively while making sure it works for the constantly changing field of web design.

 

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