user interface

The 5 Unwritten Rules of Design

Posted on by Mario

The 5 Unwritten Rules of Design

There are many things in design world, but there are more rules that are unwritten but as a designer you should know it since this rules will turn you from a good designer into the great one. So, whatever your major design is whether it is web designer, graphic designer and etc. you should follow some rules below.

  1. Client is a King

Like the old saying, customer is always a king. This proverb should always be remembered by heart whenever you interact with your client. There are two ways to serve your client very well; first you need to know what your client really wants through having a deeper and understandable brief. Second, you also need to remember that the client is always right, even when they are wrong.

Like or hate it, your client is the one who truly knows their business better than anyone else. Moreover, the user is the final judge of whether your design is successful, so accept their suggestion can be the best way to get what your client really wants.

  1. Get Paid Up Front

Even though the client is always right, but getting paid is your right. In fact, it is okay to ask for getting paid up front and taking a percentage as down-payment on larger jobs since it shows that your client is serious about making a commitment.

  1. Pen and Paper First

Today, we live in digital world, where gadget has replaced most of our traditional ways in designing, but nothing is more intuitive rather than a fist full of pens and some paper. Drawing sketch in a paper will avoid you into thinking which typeface to choose and how big your column needs to be. In fact, many designers agree that computers can sometimes be limiting rather than liberating.

  1. Test Your Designs Across Media

Testing pages on multiple platforms is one of the important rituals that every designer should do. According to Adrien Raphoz, senior creative at FCBInferno, “If your logo design does not work in black and white on a 2×2 cm format, it is not a legible design..”.  Therefore, always remember to look at them on paper, web, and also mobile.

  1. It’s OK to Start Again

Sometimes, in the process of designing, we will get stuck in exploring the ideas and the best way to get out of it is to move on the idea. Besides, as it is stated by Chris Clarke, chief creative officer at marketing agency DigitasLBi that there was never enough time to do something, but always enough time to do it again.

3 Questions that Help You Designing for the Future with Smart UX

Posted on by Mario

questions that help you designing for the future with smart UX

As UX designers, creating a product that not only appeal but also stay evergreen to your clients and users can be challenging. In many cases, UX designers tend to miss this problem in their work which cause them to pay the risk later. Below are several ways that can help you get out of the woods and make your designs stay evergreen even in the future.

  1. Are any features going to need updates down the road?

For some web designers, creating design features  for a website can be too amusing until they go far-advanced on the process and forget some key future–oriented which can cause their products become dull within a short time.  Therefore, ask yourself several questions before you start working on your project will help to avoid creating a short term product and spending more money on the cost of updating it, below are several questions that can help you anticipate several things in the future:

  • Are any of these features going to be obsolete in the foreseable future?
  • How many of the features in this application/ website will require consistent updates?
  1. How Does this feature impact the business model?

Even though, UX designers have to consider about how users will react to their design, but this doesn’t mean that you completely neglect your client needs. In fact, the needs of the business ought never be ignored in favor of the needs of the user because sometimes what users want may not relevant to what your clients want. For example: you choose to include three rows of blog article snippets on the homepage of a website. While an application’s users may be overjoyed with your decision, how will your clients feel in six month? when the blog articles have to be moved to make room for  feature that was reserved for phase II of development.

  1. Do You really need to build this feature?

Sometimes, it is quite a dilemma for some UX designers when you have already taken into account everything that a user could need yet still there is too much empty space on the page. In one side, it is good to know that you have put everything on it, but seeing it so simple may tempt designers to add some extra features to reduce the empty space, such as adding new sections for “To Do”, “My Tasks” or “What’s New” which are all unnecessary if your clients only need two sections for “ My tasks,” and “Announcements”.

Create the Perfect Website Layout System

Posted on by Mario

Create the perfect website layout system

Creating a good system that can represent your need sometimes obtains extra effort on it, especially for web designers who are building website layout system. If you do not have a right picture on how to create a perfect website layout system, you can take a look on the points below as your inspiration.

Multi-Column

Even though, multi column is a highly flexible technique and perfectly suitable for lists of links, like navigations, footers, search results or photo blogs, you can see that not many websites use CSS columns. This is because they are horrible to use when the article is higher than the viewport which makes people scroll down and up while reading the article. Therefore, to avoid making your users scroll up and down, you can simplify the design of your site through scrolling it horizontally and setting the height of the article to a maximum of 100 per cent of the viewport with no less than 20em for columns. It may changeling to encourage your visitors to scroll horizontally. As a solution, you could add new UI elements to clear this up or you could choose to always make sure the columns never fit completely in the viewport by doing the code below:

article { columns: 20em; /* never be smaller than 20em */ height: 100vh; /* be as high as the viewport */ width: 75vw; /* be 75% of the width of the viewport */ }

Flexbox and the Viewport

According to Tab Atkins, Flexbox is for one-dimensional layouts – anything that needs to be laid out in a straight line (or in a broken line, which would be a single straight line if they were joined back together).

For some people it sounds like float, but if you look closer, you will understand that it’s more powerful. Flexbox enables you to create simple looking layouts which are impossible to be made few years ago. For instance, if there is any white space leftover, it can tell you what to do with them, such as leave it at one of the ends, you can also distribute it evenly between or around them, or you can decide to stretch the items. Moreover, you can try using media queries, if you want the browser to simply fit as many items on each row as possible.

 Quantity Selectors

This technique provides more advantages rather than float, CSS columns, and flexbox with viewport calculations. Moreover, you can make the browser performs the task in a certain manner. In fact, you can let the browser and the content figure it out together instead of designing every possible layout for every possible screen size.

It may not always work, so at some points you will need finer control over the different layouts, and for extreme screen sizes you need to define exceptions.  In the case, media queries are a fantastic tool that you surely need.