Category: Web Design

If you have a goal to start a blog that’s going to be content dense, you have to put a lot of thought into the layout. The challenge with content dense sites is that it’s hard to make sure that all of your latest content and popular gets read. Instead of trying to solve this challenge on your own, take a look at these online website publications to study their magazine style layouts.

Economist:

The Economist has a great layout that uses multiple layouts throughout the site. It starts with standard featured posts and transitions into a menu layout to help users browse through to the top stories in their current issue. Each section uses a good amount of white space to help draw the eye from one section to the next and delivers an excellent browsing experience.

The Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal uses a layout that looks exactly like a print newsletter. It also uses a classic times new roman font which works well with the theme of the web design. The layout also displays different forms of content which works to ensure that all of their content gets enough visibility.

Boston Review:

The Boston Review uses a very simple and minimalist layout. It only highlights one featured post on the very top. The rest of the content is laid out in a three-column layout for around half of the page. You’re only given a different layout near the footer of the site where less popular content is shown to the users that are interested.

Reader’s Digest:

Instead of using a standard magazine style layout, Reader’s Digest uses the classic blog format for their site. The only thing that makes it different from a blog is that the side bar column has links to top stories, trending topics and different categories interspersed as you scroll down deeper into the site.

Relevant Magazine:

Relevant Magazine succeeds with a professional looking layout that makes it seem like you’re reading through a stylish magazine. The layout uses a two-column layout but has graphical cues and labels that separate different sections. This allows the reader to scan through the website and understand what section they’re currently on.

NY Mag:

NY Mag is one of the most content dense layouts you’ll come across. It seems like the designers tried to use a horizontal version of the card based layout. However, if you look closer into the layout, you see a clear grid design. There isn’t a dominant pattern to the layout and it seems the idea is to get the user to click on the headline and images that draw the most attention and interest.

Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair uses an interesting three-column layout that resembles the cover of a glossy celebrity magazine. They have a very clean grid layout that makes it easy to distinguish the different content blocks. There are also many graphical cues like arrows, wavy lines and slash marks to indicate where one content ends and where another begins.

The New Yorker:

The New Yorker has a very content dense layout like other news and culture publications. However, they different in that they focus on selling the headline and the preview rather than using the layout and images to draw clicks. This results in a presentation that’s very laid back and focused on letting the reader’s interest drive clicks.

Wired:

Wired is a popular tech magazine that uses a card-based design in their layout. Instead of letting the card based design get out of hand, they use a grid to keep it clean and use contained content boxes for each different section. This allows readers to keep track of what they’re looking at while the layout engages them.

New Scientist:

This magazine uses a very image preview driven presentation for their layout. It uses a three-column setup with a sidebar that takes up a third of the horizontal space. This creates a look that feels like you’re browsing a thumbnail preview on the content section and a magazine table of contents on the sidebar. The really impressive part of this site is that it has an excellent responsive design that uses a drop down hamburger menu for the navigation.

Esquire:

Esquire uses a standard blog layout but mixes it up by integrating slideshow style links throughout the page. This allows the magazine to feature full width blog preview posts while still providing navigation to different articles throughout the browsing experience. This works well because they use a sticky top navigation menu that the user can always refer to.

UGS Mag:

This funky online publication uses a three-column card based design accompanied by a side bar. This unorganized layout works with the look and feel that the magazine is going for. The side bar stands out from the rest of the design due to the different background colors used for each widget. They also have set up infinite scrolling to remove pagination for a fluid experience.

Mental Floss:

Mental Floss starts out with a large hero image for their featured post. This helps create the look of a magazine cover. This transitions into two-column layout – one left hand sidebar and one content section. The content section uses a varied layout that is unpredictable but very engaging. For organization, visual cues and labeling is used to categorize the content.

Forbes:

Forbes Magazine starts out with a large featured story. Then, the website layout uses a varied thumbnail style that reminds you of photo collages. The thing that makes it works is the fact that they build a visual hierarchy to make sure you pay attention to the important stories. Important stories are bigger in size and are trailed by less important stories which have smaller image thumbnails.

If you’re looking to start a blog that’s content dense, these examples should give you some great ideas on how to set up your layout. While you want these examples to influence you, you should have some trepidation about copying them blindly. You need to find a layout that works for your audience, so it’s more about testing different layouts than just picking a look.

As a graphic designer or marketer, you may find yourself in need of custom labels for products and marketing materials. Creating your own labels can help give your products an edge in the marketplace and enhance your overall branding strategy. Consumers will often see your labels before nearly any other design related to your company so label design is a great opportunity to make a solid first impression. Knowing the right tools and methods, along with some important rules and field-tested tips will ensure your company labels look professional and effectively grab your potential consumer’s attention.

Choosing Label Design Applications:

Perhaps the most commonly used application for creating labels is Adobe Illustrator. This professional design program allows you to create scalable vector graphics that can be resized to fit on any surface without loss of quality. Adobe Illustrator works by plotting points and lines on a canvas that can be reduced to a mathematical formula and replicated on various scales. This differs greatly from standard raster image types most often used by Adobe Photoshop and other applications. If your label will contain photo-realistic images and graphics, you will want to have access to Photoshop as well, as it’s better for details like those found in common photography. Using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop together is a great way to create scalable label designs for any product. If you need a free alternative to Photoshop or want to make your labels in open-source software, try GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for your vector or raster designs.

How To Best Make Label Backgrounds:

One of the best ways to get started making your label is to find a stock graphic online with free commercial usage rights. Freepik is a popular source for these types of graphics. Download or create a basic vector background that reflects the tone of your product and company. Many backgrounds are available on this site and others contain embellished borders, drop-shadows, and textured canvas areas that can give you a great head-start on your label.

Label Fonts and Typography:

If you already have WordPress hosting then you may be familiar with plugins like WP Typography that can allow you to import fonts and another typographical styling to your interfaces. Use the same fonts and typography that you generate for your website on your label to give your company a coherent and uniform branding. Make sure all the fonts on your label are well legible, as many consumers want to read even the smaller print before making a purchase or consuming products. Limit your font variety to no more than three fonts per label to avoid looking out of sorts and unorganized.

Matching Colors for Labels:

Another important aspect of your label is the coloring. All colors found on your product label should match or at least be compatible with the colors on your website and printed marketing materials. This will help keep your branding recognizable and make it appear that your product line is well established. WordPress hosting users can use the TinyMCE Color Picker tool to select the best colors for their site and labels. The colors that sit opposite each other on the color wheel are usually great matches, so if you get stuck just match two colors like Yellow and Purple or Green and Red.

Content for Labels:

Don’t forget to add all the content to your label that consumers will be looking for as they shop. This includes ingredients and allergy information, contact information for your company, as well as branding and a short marketing pitch. Try to sum up why your product is a great choice for two or three sentences that engage the potential consumer without confusing them. Some humor may be appropriate depending on your product type. Use a sharp and easy to read font for the smaller text on your labels like your company address and any copyright information so that users can quickly decipher this information.

Creating your own labels is rewarding and gives your products a custom and professional feel. Make sure to use colors that complement not only each-other but the general color schemes used on your website and other marketing papers. Select fonts that reflect the mood and tone of your company but make sure they are easy to read while on the go such as for someone who is shopping in a store or glancing at your product on a shelf.

Add in all relevant information to your label so you don’t leave consumers confused, but keep your product description and sales pitches to a minimum to avoid frustrating potential customers. Consider combining design applications like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to make the most of your canvas and incorporate vector and raster images and graphics. Tools like typography plugins for WordPress and Color Selectors that you may already be using for your websites can also be used to make sure your labels look great and conform to your company branding and style guides.

Logos have been around for centuries. If you do not believe this, think of the show ‘Game of Thrones’. This is a medieval fantasy that was based on real events during the Middle Ages, specifically, the War of the Roses. In the show, and even in our own history, the way people show their allegiance is through brandishing their lord’s arms or family crests. You can go as far as to say that their house words work like a brand tagline. Fast forward a bit to the Crusades – soldiers chosen for the Knights Templar who wears a big red cross on white and on their shields. And that cross has become a marker that this knight works for the interests of the church.

Recounting the history of logo designing:

In a more related commercial context on how we use a logo design now, it used to be a way to differentiate merchant shops from each other. Remember that trading was the norm, and the game involves carrying exclusive items like spices, silk, and other rare goods.

It was not until the mid-20th century that logos started to become part of building an identity. Designers started thinking about how to communicate with buyers through the logo and how they can encapsulate company values and its essence through it. This produced some of the cleanest and modernist designs that have become iconic today, taking into account the following elements: simple, memorable, and no frills. And you can see this practice today through logos from Apple, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Nike.

Smartphones and its influence on logo design:

At present, designers are not just creating logos for classified ads or posters, they are creating distinct icons for the digital platform. The rise of smartphones has also brought with it the minimalistic style. In this new logo trend, companies do not just want to make it memorable and simple, but that it has to be flexible enough to be redesigned for smartphone interface. If you look at your phone’s home, all those icons you see are not merely made for you to know which app you are using. You are literally carrying and interacting with brand logos in a way that was not as personal before.

And if you still don’t know yet, brand logos used to come with a manual detailing how to use it for different means. For instance, if you have a firm that distributes collectibles to retailers called Pop Culture Central, firms will not just create a logo for you, but they will tell you how you can position that on your trucks, and the dos and don’ts on using it on paper.

But the digital culture made that a little irrelevant. Let us take Nike as an example. Their famous check or “swoosh” mark did not actually get the attention that it was gunning for back then. In fact, people were a just “meh” about it. However, incessantly marketing it and channeling tons of creative power to it has made it one of the best examples of a simplistic logo that is globally recognizable.

Another example would be the Snapchat logo – A white ghost drawn in a scrawly manner, on a yellow background. The story was that the founder drew that ghost himself and chose the color yellow because there are not a lot of apps that are colored as such. Together with the app’s capabilities to share ridiculously filtered video and photo messages with friends and marketing power, the Snapchat logo has earned a universal reputation. Right now, once you see yellow, Snapchat would be one of the first things you will think about.

When it comes to logo design, it is not only about using it as a visual communication tool. Yes, it is important that designers are able to get a brand’s values and essence and turn it into an icon. But with the marketing platform perennially changing, it is also important to create marketing strategies that will not only help make the logo memorable, but also to give the company a feeling of ownership towards it.

Hiring A Good Web Design Agency

Hiring a web design agency is no easy feat because there are many pitfalls. You need to avoid hiring an agency that seems experienced but actually outsources cheap and ineffective labor. Here are several tips that will help you to hire a good web design agency:

Ensure that they have a full development team

If you need web design services, make sure that you hire a web team. Many web design agencies have a portfolio that is full of business cards, logos, and letterheads. You should not base your opinion on just that.

If you want a redesigned front-end Word Press site, experience will not matter. However, if you want to build a website from scratch, make sure the agency that you hire has enough knowledge to do it.

Make sure their marketing goes beyond development and design

According to Colby Richards, the owner of a web design agency in Portland, most people who have businesses on the web know that SEO, or search engine optimization, is essential to promote your site properly and get it to the top of the search engine results.

If you do not want to spend a fortune on Google Adwords for every lead, SEO is the best option.

If a web team builds a wonderful site that is aesthetically appealing and functional but lacks metadata and picture descriptions, what good is it?

You can avoid this scenario by hiring a design agency that has enough tools to make your site searchable. Moreover, you should not believe any agency that tells you they provide SEO services without going into details.

Ask about their testing platforms

There is nothing as annoying as spending a lot of money on a website only to realize that it is full of bugs. You need to ask the agency that you want to hire how they perform testing before completing their projects. What support do they offer for making changes to the site once it is complete?

The client should not be tasked with looking for oversights and bugs. This job belongs to the web design agency.

Ask for references

Just because a company claims to have done work in the past does not make it true. Can their previous clients vouch for them? Make sure that you get several references to ascertain that you are hiring a capable team.

Look at their corporate website

Is there anything about the agency’s website that you do not like? You should bring it up with them before you make any final decisions. If their website is poorly built, what makes you so sure that yours will be any better?

Consider the budget information, deadlines, and cost

Asking for cost information in advance is a wise move. Most companies might hesitate to hand over this information right away, but you have to insist. A good web design team should be able to work with your budget.

If you provide a deadline, the agency needs to meet it. If they can work with the set parameters, you should consider hiring them.

Ask about their process

Asking the agency about their action plan is a good starting point. The process varies from one company to the next. While some have flexible steps, other companies have a more stringent module. The key lies in finding out what the process is and how they plan to implement it. What overall impact will it have on the overall project?

Choosing a web design agency that fits your set criteria can be very useful if the right questions and areas are explored. Although the process of choosing a good web design agency takes time, it will be worth it in the end. However, you need to be careful, especially if it is your first time choosing a web design agency.

Designers are extremely busy people. Fact. Not only do they have to make time to find inspiration for their next project, manage feedback, attend meetings, and communicate with their clients, they also have to find the time to actually sit down and do the work.

Let’s not forget the time and effort they have to put into mocking up an idea, creating a visual for sharing or keeping abreast of modern design trends. The role of a designer is so much more than just ‘colouring-in’.

To ease the workload of time-poor designers, Precision Printing has compiled a list of the best software, apps, tools, skills, websites and resources that no designer can live without. Each of these tools has been carefully selected for its ability to help you streamline your work, find inspiration easily, show off your amazing design skills, and make collaboration easier.

Check out Precision Printing to find the list of all of these software, apps, tools, skills, websites and resources that are essential for every designer.