7 Tips for Designing Consistency
Consistency is an important aspect of web designing. Apart from helping you as a marketer convey your message, it also plays a crucial role in brand recognition and enhancing user experience. A good web designer has a lot of things he or she needs to put into consideration for a website to work as intended. There is significant amount of fonts, colors, layouts, themes, sizes weight and many others to put together. With all these features, maintaining consistency might be a problem. We came up with this post to enable designers who have a problem with consistency in design to find their way through design challenges.
1. Use Colors Wisely
Color forms a crucial part of a website for obvious reasons. It identifies the brand at a glance and communicates its values and purpose simultaneously. For instance, successful companies such as Coca Cola, Facebook and T-Mobile are more identified with their colors than anything else.
If you want a good visual treatment for your brand, don’t ignore the color palettes when creating a website. Choose colors wisely to help users navigate the website and know they are still in the right place. Just imagine going to a website where very click you make takes you to a page with a different color. You will be left wondering whether you are still on the same website or a different one. For a perfect color combination, pick dominant color and bring in one or two secondary colors.
2. Consider Size of Texts, Spacing, and Locations
The art and appearance of printed texts should come in a stylistic manner. You need to pick dominant fonts and typefaces with considerable size. Once you have the dominant typefaces, select a secondary one with the same size. Use CSS and make specific changes to size and spacing so that each tag have the correct type option. Also, use typography in a single location to maintain consistency. If it is navigation, ensure the type is consistent throughout the element. Most users get confused if there is a different typeface in every navigation element.
3. Make the Web Elements Relate in Size
Every element in your design must relate with others in terms of size and layout. Whether it is the buttons or headlines, each of them must correlate well in terms of size. However, make sure the size of these elements obey the styling rules applicable in the design. This way, you can enable the users to identify the patterns and experience a visual flow while on your website, which enhances their level of engagement.
4. Use Space Sparingly
There is nothing more annoying to a user than a website with elements scattered everywhere as if it is a dumping site. The design elements on the site should be organized on the canvas with no photo overlap and non-uniform spacing. To organize your website perfectly, you need to form and then stick to the rules of a grid system. The grid system mainly consist of invisible framework that has vertical and horizontal lines all interchanged together to help in spacing. A grid will help you to place the elements so that they fall into a perfect harmony.
5. Choose Patterns That Can Work Naturally
A perfect design should work like other similar ones and follow the right patterns. If a website is meant for a particular group of users, design it with the accepted patterns to enable the users interact easily with it. The most popular patterns include content, markup, design and user patterns. These patterns provide useful designs ranging from style and tone to how users interact with elements on the site.
6. Use Interface Elements That Stick
Every element should behave in the same way. The element or interaction should have links open directly with buttons of the same color and recognizable icons. The websites must have footers and sidebars in a specific location. Make sure that the clickable elements function just like they are meant to be.
7. Use Attractive Visuals
Image and illustrations should be visible through all mediums on the website. While designing, don’t change the visual quality of the site regardless whether you are designing a billboard or a brochure. You can use a common set of photos if you have to. However, strive to create a high-powered visual deck that has high quality and high resolution images to create a good impression on first-time visitors.
