nahoms blog

Web design with a clear and clean architecture with a focus on content is much more intuitive for the end user. Removing the nonessential elements and simply focusing on what is needed not only improves the user experience but also benefits your site in other ways such as improving load times and improving user engagement. Take a look at these 30 minimal web designsthat I have collected to showcase these points.

This is a guest post by Nisha, if you want to guest post on this blog, pleasecontact us.

It’s widely known that a great company is only as good as its brand identity, but this is perhaps one of the hardest parts of establishing a business. Often, companies come across the consumers as sterile, unapproachable, or overly professional. In their drive to appear successful, they erroneously make themselves appear too professional, not human, and out of reach.

It can be said then that a good brand identity is one which turns a successful company into a friendly person, greeting new and existing customers with enthusiasm each time they stop by the website or storefront. That can be done pretty easily, with a few tips and tricks.

[Twitter use a bird for their mascot]

It might sound superfluous, but consider that there are insurance companies which succeed because they’ve hired a talking lizard as their primary spokesperson. It’s been my experience that even websites can benefit from “hiring “their own mascot. Instead of a live action, real-world mascot, site designers might consider pairing the company’s logo with a small, illustrated animal or person. That person would then accompany customers throughout the website.

Once a mascot is established, it can be used as faux-spokespersons for the company’s products and services. It can interact with customers, explain prices and features to them, and guide them around the company’s site. It puts a human face on a company’s presence that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise and, because it’s illustrated, it’s as approachable as a Disney character.

There might not be a strict rule that determines which font a company users, but there are avenues of user perception that pertain to each type of font. Generally, we can classify fonts into two categories: serif and sans-serif. A sans-serif font is one that is rounder, gentler, and has less hard edges; a serif font is one like Times New Roman, which appears very rigid, proper, and professional.

A company which hopes to build a customer-centric brand identity would almost certainly want to use a sans-serif font. This can be as basic as Arial and Helvetica, or as complicated as a self-designed typeface with rounded edges. The lack of edges can make a logo seem more “pedestrian” and approachable by the average consumer. It takes away the stigma that is often associated with Times New Roman: that of corporate memorandums, university research papers, and official communication from any number of entities.

A good brand identity is one that consumers relate to, and they’ll certain relate to a sans-serif font more than the rigid and stuffy appearance of a serif typeface.

A typeface isn’t the only thing that can lead to a static and stodgy brand identity that consumers will have a tough time relating to. Another way to push consumers away is to appear unresponsive to both their needs and the wider world. The best brand identity is one that appears fluid and able to respond to external conditions.

The best example of this is the Google logo. It has gained quite a reputation as being a social barometer, a public ticker of holidays, and a create expression of the collective consciousness. The Google logo responds to people, conveys the world, and is always in motion.

Experienced companies and branding professionals all agree that this isn’t just fun and creative, it’s also a genius way to brand a company. Remember that consumers want a company which “gets them.” They want to relate. The best way to relate, in the experience of myself and my colleagues, is to turn a logo into a bulletin board. Have the logo wish shoppers a happy Halloween, or have it comment on the particularly cold weather that’s been going on lately. Relating is half the battle of selling, and this is a great way to do that.

The idea behind a good brand is that it should be as accessible to a consumer as their best friend, their mentor, or a trusted advisor. Companies need to use their logo, website, and physical presence to make this happen. Leaving behind stuffy fonts, static websites, and overly professional content is the best way to retool a company as young, fresh, relatable, and authoritative.

A short little piece that covers some of the most basic elements of getting your artwork ready for print, such as colour space, resolution and bleed/trim areas. Works great as a simple introduction to designing for print.

This is a similar article to the previous, with just a bit of a different perspective. It also briefly touches on a few extra areas, such as the importance of deadlines and packaging files. Just be aware that the discussion of black focuses primarily on text, not on larger areas of black.

Here is yet another brief article to help you prepare your artwork for print. Again, some of the same ideas are repeated, but this one has a very nice discussion about the importance of plain black for text rather than four colour, processed black.

This article focuses on some of the key important concepts surround both the RGB and CMYK colour spaces, and covers some things that you need to consider when converting and image from RGB to CMYK.

This article will help explain the critical difference between plain, single colour black and rich, processed black, helping you avoid the disappointment of getting your printed piece back and finding faded, dark grey where you expected a deep black.

If you have one of the recent Adobe suites that includes Photoshop and Illustrator, there is a pretty good chance that you may also have InDesign sitting somewhere on your harddrive too. Perhaps you’ve never opened it, or perhaps you have and were simply unable to make an real sense of it.

Well, while it shares some similarities with Illustrator, it is not a native vector application. It is a page layout application—exactly the kind of software package that we need for creating beautiful books, magazines, leaflets and other printed matter. And, while it is certainly not the only application of its kind (its main competition is Quark), it remains my application of choice, primarily because it comes bundled with my other Adobe products.

The thing that I like about InDesign over another application, like Photoshop, is that it is specifically engineered to help designers create work for the printed page. As such, it allows you to create multi-page documents, and set options for bleeds, slugs, crop marks and so on. It also contains a huge and versatile set of typographic tools that make Photoshop’s character and paragraph palettes very limited in comparison.

So, for many web designers, InDesign may be the natural page layout application to turn to. To help in this area, SpyreStudios has an extensive seven part series called “Getting To Grips With In Design,” which covers most of the key areas of the application. Reading through these will offer a very solid foundation for InDesign:

After having come to grips with InDesign with the SpyreStudios series, here is an awesome tutorial about how to create a simple magazine cover in InDesign. this is a perfect opportunity to put what you’ve learned to use. It’s also written by Terry White, a really great Adobe instructor (I’ve personally attended one of his seminars).

Now that we’ve covered the basics of setting up your artwork for print and started down the path to learning page layout, we can start looking at some tips and requirements for going through the prepress stage, and actually getting designed artwork ready to send off to the printer.

This is a nice little article that covers some of the things that you need to do to prepare your artwork in the prepress stage. By this point, some of the content will be familiar to you, but there is a nice little discussion of the concept of trapping, along with the uses of registration marks and colour bars for the printing process.

This is just a short little piece about how to actually prepare your InDesign files in a single package that you can send off to the printer, using the application’s Package functionality. It’s a nice little time saver that is definitely worth knowing and this article functions a simple and straightforward introduction.

Even if you’ve covered all the basics that you would have learned from many of the previous cited articles, there are still some tiny but important details that will need to be considered before actually going to press. This article works as a kind of checklist of a number of other things that you will want to address or consider before going to press. The topics here are directed more at a somewhat experienced print designer, so its probably not the best article to start with, but is definitely a valuable resource that you might want to bookmark.

Here’s an article that I wrote a few weeks ago, dealing specifically with font issues and print. It covers some basic things that you can do to help minimize font issues when sending artwork off to the printer. If you check this one out, also be sure to read the comments, as there is some helpful discussion there too.