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

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…

Microinteractions: the Secret Driving Force of UX

Design is in the details – and nowhere does this ring more true than with the design and implementation of a website. It is within these details that the heart of the optimal user experience resides and it is an essential task to ensure they are not missed. Designers must delve into the journey, placing themselves in the mind of the user to understand each step to reach the destination. For this purpose, microinteractions serve as the essential function to drive the core experience, ultimately leading to conversion. Defining the Microinteraction Fairly innocuous on their own, microinteractions are a series of tiny movements that lead to a wholistic experience. Providing singular moments of communication interaction, feedback and even feeling – the interface truly becomes an experience, offering seamless transitions, recognition and an more intuitive, human-centered process on the whole. These series of ‘interactions’, coined ‘microinteractions’ by author Dan Saffer, include movements such…

Increasing Engagement: Aligning Visual and Contextual Content

The simple truth is that users now depend on visuals to be the deciding factor in choosing what content is worth engaging with. In a content-first, social-first atmosphere because people are constantly bombarded with content its important to get your message across quickly, pack a punch, and make it as easy as possible to consume and engage. Without the right imagery – the audience might as well be looking at a blank canvas. There is no company or brand in the world that isn’t engaging in some sort of visual content strategy. Visual storytelling and content strategies – no matter how well crafted – all come down to the visuals that drive the message. If a great story is paired with a bad visual, it will lose credibility and therefore, be rendered uninteresting to its audience. Add in the rapid pace of information consumption by the mobile set, and visuals…

6 Ways to Improve User Experience Through Content Strategy

Designers, marketers and business owners have a great deal to gain (and learn) from content strategy. A single sentence of copy can easily be ignored with a user scrolling right past, but if called out with the right mix of design and content implementations – it can be the key to conversion. Whether digital media or print assets, beginning a design process with content strategy is a way to ensure that the brand will be shown in the most authentic and intuitive manner. When a design and content team work in tandem to create the framework for graphics and content, the user experience will be fully optimized. Content strategy can take many forms, and a team may not even know they are tapping into its benefits – here are a few ways to take advantage of better user experience through content strategy methodologies. Asset Assessment In the beginning stages of content strategy, it’s…

A Plan to Launch: Strategic Mobile App Design

A great idea, enthusiastic innovators, a solid development team, and a great UI design. It may seem simple to gather the core elements of a winning mobile app, however, the result is only as good as the makers behind it. A creative and strategic team must ideate and collaborate from concept to launch in order to deliver the most optimal user experience possible. With that first-of-its-kind idea in place, the journey and design are the next most important factors at hand. Sticking to a set of user-centered design guidelines can help to ensure a design will be used successfully and propel the app to a high rate of usage and download. Keeping a consistent layout from screen to screen will allow for a seamless flow for the user. Once the user becomes familiar with the interface, a consistent design will allow them to adopt new interactions throughout the experience. A user…