Web Design, Graphic Design, UI/UX - Rediscover Your Brand℠

Trending Web Design: Card & Dynamic Grid Layouts

Whether a website design is minimalist or maximalist in style, one layout element remains true – the design must be sharp and easy for the user to navigate. Grid and card layouts have become widely used for sites of all types, but primarily for pages with a high volume of data or relevant calls to action. The popularity of cards can best be attributed to the rise of mobile usage. Though it is used widely by designers and developers – the trend will certainly continue – and for good reason. Delivering digestible information in a clear way allows a user the ability to consume a great deal of information at one time. Acting as ‘containers’ for content, their usually boxy shape lends easy arrangement across multiple devices. Originally gaining ground via image sharing and social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram, cards have become one of the go-to implementations…

Right Now: Five Packaging Trends Driving Brand Growth

Packaging design trends provide us with direct insight into what consumers feel, what problems they need to solve and what is coming next. Today, it’s all about connection, understanding and engagement. Designers are tasked with uncovering, realizing and articulating what is important to a consumer and to direct that experience. Through story, shape and structure, designers and brands can deliver the experience to make invaluable connections that last a lifetime. Brand Basic Gone are the days of generic or in house brands being a bad thing. House labels from brands like Amazon, Whole Foods, Target and Trader Joes – even luxury brands are emerging to focus on simplicity and clarity. A departure from the often headache inducing ‘world of choice’ that permeates store shelves, basic brands are the ‘unchoice’ making purchasing a straightforward affair. Heritage Nothing quite strikes a chord with consumers than a brand who has been around the block a time…

Merging Marketing, Design and Sales Efforts Into An Aligning Digital Strategy

Today, standard business operations increasingly exist primarily on digital platforms, challenging users’ relationships and interactions with an organization. Vital to a successful business, these channels must be recognized, developed and thoughtfully implemented. Acting as the fundamental delivery method of determining this engagement, the use of a digital strategy is essential for any organization. With the goal of brand awareness, increased outreach and market share gain, business owners make investments in these critical pursuits without having core strategies in place and even more worrisome – jumping into resource draining marketing plans that simply don’t align with their business goals or brand messaging. Often marketing, design and sales departments operate in linear motion with only a few essential cross functional touch-points along the way. This results in duplicate activities, watered down results and a disjointed overall experience. So how can these efforts merge – allowing a digital strategy to align with business…

Key Principles of Creating an Immersive Web Design

It’s now more important than ever to deliver an online experience that authentically delivers the perspective of the brand it represents. Leveraging a combination of visual, contextual, graphic and textual elements – a brand has the ability to make stronger connections. From initial perceptions to emotions and behavioral responses – the more connective the experience is, the deeper the loyalty between brand and user will be. By approaching a strategy inclusive of immersive web design – users are greeted with new developments in interactivity, design technique and integrated engagement. These implementations create an experience that is both memorable, useful and provides an ease of use to the user. Immersive web experiences are truly the next level of engagement, creating an environment that is seamless and entertaining to the user, but is actually quite complex. Though immersion can be any number of implementations inclusive of animation, transitions, webgraphics or micro-interactions – one of the…

A Plan To Innovate: How Companies Can Benefit From Visual Branding

Breaking into any given market is a bit like being blindfolded. You know you have a great product or service, but unless the positioning is right, the strategy has a fifty percent chance of failure. The right positioning consists of a series of elements including design, which arguably has the power to make or break the whole implementation. Design is much more than just a visual representation of a product, brand or service. Brand design or visual branding, when done right, approaches all aspects of a business – from its digital persona, user set, goals, packaging, and the list goes on. This is where the difference between ‘designing for a brand’ and just ‘designing’ comes into focus. Simply designing something creates a distance from the design to the brand, ‘designing for a brand’ engages the designer and involves collaboration with founders, marketing teams, and brand or project stakeholders. There are…

Making an Impact with Package Design In The Digital Environment

Today more than ever, packaging design matters to the customer experience. It can be an invisible element, seamless to the product’s function, or serve as an extension of the product itself. Packaging trends can be relative to the industry and product, while elements of packaging like material and appearance are reflective of cultural and user sets. Interaction with packaging has the power to connect customers to a brand for life, so it’s essential that the design and format be eye-catching, efficient to produce and reflective of the brand it represents. In addition to the constant competition on the shelves, brands have a new challenge to face – the digital consumer. Ensuring focus on specific elements will help to deliver a thoughtful and authentic experience. Storytelling While it may seem counterintuitive, online experiences have given rise to a more immersive experience than that of a face to face interaction with a…

Elements to Look For When Deciding On an Outside Team for Marketing Collaboration

From startup to enterprise, there are a myriad of challenges in hiring the right creative team for any given project. Finding the right group of individuals to handle a product launch, event campaign or website design can be a daunting task, even holding the health of the business in the balance, so choosing the right agency to partner with is vital to a positive outcome. Even if conducted solely in-house with internal teams who have an intimate understanding of the brand at hand, each branding initiative is a coordinated effort of stakeholders, accountability, idea generation and – let’s face it, ultimately – a juggling act. Even with the right internal resources, it can be a benefit for companies and brands to obtain an outside perspective from both creative and logistical standpoints. Individuals who can objectively look at assets and then engage with the material are able to design pathways and…

Life Cycle of the Web Design Process: A Unified Perspective

Achieving an optimal website design requires a strategy that aligns with the goals of the business it represents. When approaching web design, many jump right to the ‘design‘ portion. Thoughts of imagery, interactivity, and dynamic visuals come to mind. To attain the ideal UX, before entering this exciting design phase, the strategy and wireframing process should take place, with web designers taking a first step in projects through a layout strategy to suit the needs of the client and user. When discussing a site design, many think that a website is a one size fits all approach, and if not guided correctly, end up with an informational site that ends up having to be redesigned as soon as company needs change. Whether designer, developer, project stakeholder or client, it’s important to understand the technical aspects such as layout, wireframes, code, and content strategy and management. Understanding the process being entered…

Getting to Know Your Conversion Goals

Whether coming to our agency for a site refresh, rebrand or identity development – all of our clients have one thing in common: they want to make their business better. But what does that mean? Working back to establish goals and how these goals can be met is essential to determining what the conversion points will be on a digital product being designed. Is the goal increased revenue, customer satisfaction or greater market share? Setting these clear objectives when strategizing design is the ideal way to directly correlate these actions to business results. Working in close collaboration with marketing teams and brand managers, there is no shortage of business acumen. Through an immersive discovery phase, business goals are translated into actionable digital strategies. If the conversion goal is lead generation, for example, we can better support this initiative by raising awareness of the brand at large through content and visuals. What is…

Design Language: The Power of Consistency

Creating a digital experience that features consistent elements throughout is a core principle in successful design. Consistency is a critical component of user experience design, content strategy and user interface design that promotes intuitive experiences. When design elements feature consistency in both their look and feel as well as functionality, users can move about the interface with an ease of use, allowing them to focus on executing the task and not learning how the product UI works every time they switch the context. Making your website intuitive is often translated by website owners as simplifying your website. However, it goes way beyond that. While simplicity is part of it, you want your users to easily ‘get’ how to use your website. Things like organizing your navigation menu, providing breadcrumb links, and using graphics/color to distinguish interactive elements are all good examples of making your website intuitive. A visual hierarchy should…