Tag Archives: Design

Fonts to Avoid While Doing Your Site’s Web Design

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When designing a website there are many decisions which must be made in order to create a design which ensures that the information is easy to understand, and well received by the user. The site needs to serve the clients purpose regardless if they’re selling shoes, publishing information about flea medicine for pets, or running a competition. Everything on the site needs to be designed in way that makes it easy to understand, and doesn’t make people leave when they get to the site.

This can be influenced by many aspects from the colours, layout, images used, and even the kind of fonts used. Many inexperienced designers will make the mistake of overlooking the fonts used on a website simply because they don’t think it really matters. Nothing could be further from the truth in fact. Fonts are an extremely important part of any design, including web design. It’s important to carefully consider the fonts within your website for a number of reasons.

Legibility

First and foremost, the fonts on the site need to be easily read. If the font you’ve chosen to use in your design slows down your ability to read the content even by the smallest amount, then do not use it!

People these days are time poor, and certainly don’t want to sit there and try to decipher the information on the site just because of the fancy font that’s been used. They’ll probably just get sick of the entire thing and leave altogether, and that’s not beneficial to anybody.

Make sure that you choose a font that’s easy to read, and not too unusual, that way people won’t get distracted by it and they can just concentrate on the content of the actual site.

Compatibility

Let’s say you’re designing a website, and you find this sweet font that looks so cool and unique and really suits the design too. You install it on your system and design the whole site with this custom font you found. But when a user visits the site, and they don’t have the custom font installed on their system, things really start to go wrong in a big way. Here’s what might happen.

The user might get a prompt from the browser saying “hey you don’t have this font installed, do you want to go find and install it?” in which most people will say “hell no” and leave. I know that’s what I would say. There’s no way on the planet I would let some strange website start installing ANYTHING on my system ever!

The most likely result will be that the browser will just say “hey we don’t have this font… What what should I do? Oh well I’ll just replace the font with a default system font”. All of a sudden your design looks completely different! The font that the browser replaces it with has different letter spacing, it’s slightly taller than before and now it’s making your design look really weird because it’s interacting with elements of the layout in unexpected ways! Most likely the font it’ll choose to default to is “Courier” too! For those of you who don’t know your fonts, Courier is the font which looks like really old-school typewriter printing and it’s hideous! Now your whole website looks like junk because although the presentation of the layout is nice, the text looks like it’s been produced by some World War 2 era typewriter! Rest assured people will leave the site and never come back when that happens.

How do you decide?

When you’re deciding on a font to use for your site, there are only a few decisions to make, and they’re really easy. First decision is if you should use a Serif font, or a Sans-Serif font. Serif’s are the little fancy edges that appear on more contemporary fonts. Just Google is and you’ll instantly understand what I’m talking about.

So a Serif font is a more contemporary style font, and a Sans-Serif font is a more modern style font. Just remember it by thinking Serif = fancy edges, Sans-Serif = without fancy edges.

There are a lot of different fonts to choose from within that range, however try to use a relatively common system font. Don’t choose one that’s ugly, there are many nice quality system fonts which you can specify that will mean you won’t have any missing font compatibility issues, and will complement your web design just fine.

If you follow these simple rules you’ll never have any problems with the fonts used within your web designs. The information will always look neat, clean, and will be easily read by your visitors. The font you choose may seem like a very minor thing, but try to remember that all of the content on your site is communicated to the user via the text on your website! So in many ways it really is one of the most important aspects of the entire site.

If you’re still unsure on how to choose a font for your website, or for any other advice relating to web design, please feel free to contact me via the link below.

Web Design Trends in 2016: Capitalising on Improvements From 2015

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One-and-a-half decade into the 21st century, the Internet has probably become one of the biggest influencing technologies on earth and is arguably man’s biggest invention till date. Hence, it’s quite obvious that all industries associated with the Web itself have grown in magnitude and prominence. Web design has also evolved in the same way, and in fact, the internet has become the greatest platform to showcase creativity. No wonder that so many web design agencies worldwide have gathered steam. But, into the 2nd quarter of 2016, what has happened to the design trends that were followed until now?

Getting down with it, there is not just a single design philosophy that might lead the charge in 2016, but in fact quite a few of such. Here, let’s have a look at some of the design trends that have either already emerged, or are on the verge of prominence.

  • Bold Colour Patterns: This is a definite winner. If you just look at some of the biggest brands and their websites, everyone around the globe is going for a bolder, more colourful look and feel. This is also the reason that contrast is preferred. So, rather than simple, muted colour combinations, expect trends to follow bolder colour patterns.
  • Slicker Animations: We have already almost adopted this. With GIFs taking social media by storm and websites becoming sleeker by the day, it is time to evolve for the animations that you are so used to. Going forward, stop expecting plane-jane animations and those age-old hourglass-loading animations (okay, that has already been dealt with).
  • Material Design Language: With shadows, and subtle animations to emphasise interactions, Material design was originally a design philosophy invented by Google back in 2014. But rather than just being restricted to smartphones, it is now being progressively used by numerous websites, and a large chunk of them already display webpages on mobile devices based on Material design. Website design trends in 2016 are sure to continue in the same vein, and you can expect even more prominence for Material design in the near future.
  • Notifications, Personalisations: You might have already noticed this. Quite a few websites now support push notifications from browsers like Google Chrome, and this shall prove to be an integral point for websites dependent on content sharing and even online businesses. And yes, add personalisation features to that checklist as well.

The above sneak-peak will definitely give you an idea in terms of the web design trends that your website shall follow, and the ones that you can expect to garner popularity going forward. But yes, there is one tiny detail that we are missing here: design is abstract, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Any design could work for you, sometimes even the ones that defy all trends as stated above. The key is to get advice from website design companies and look for flexible options in the sector. In a nutshell, expect the trends from last year to come back with greater finesse in 2016.