The Designers Guide to Designing Good Designs

The Designers Guide to Designing Good Designs

I knoooooooooow. I’m trying realllllly hard here, but it’s all from a place of love. I want to talk to you about designing good, designs…and we’re talking about website design specifically just to make sure we’re on the same page. Hopefully, this guide expands in the future, but for now here are 5 things (as opposed to 4 or 6) that make designs really stand out.

….also, how many more times should I use the word “design” before it’s too much? Anyway, let’s get this thing going! 

White Space

In 2021, you better be including enough white space around elements. I’ve seen it time and time again. A designer creates a comp and each element and/or text is within 10px of the next section. This makes things feel tight and suffocating. 

You gotta let your design breathe! So use white space to create separation and breakpoints between your different content sections. This doesn’t mean you should go crazy. Ultimately your design needs balance and understanding this will make you a better designer. And, being the best you can really help a business shine.

Image sourced from here…(it’s a pretty good article too!)

Shape It Up

If you’re only using square shapes, then you my friend, need to expand. Rounded corners, circles, and abstract shapes are in style. We have more freedom now than we’ve ever had before to design something that’s engaging and interesting for the user.

Be careful not to get carried away because fancy shapes can also take up too much space. You have to balance your creativity with practicality. Remember, the user always comes first.

Rounded corners often give the user a sense of calm and friendliness while square shapes feel sharp and analytical in nature. Playing around with shapes in a website design can really help elements stand apart from each other. Deploy these tactics wisely.

Use Color Appropriately

Funky colors are in style, but just like creating unique shapes, don’t get too carried away! Mix and match colors! Don’t be afraid of steering away from traditional color palettes like navy blue with gray and white. Try shades of blue with purple, orange, and magenta. You might be surprised by the color combinations you’re able to come up with.

Keep color psychology at the forefront of your mind, but don’t let it debilitate you from deploying your own sense of creativity and style. After all, designers have style and you should be able to show that off no matter the piece you’re working on.

Create Repeatable Sections

Think ahead and design sections that can be repeated across the site like testimonials, calls-to-actions, trust logos, content highlights, and more. This keeps your design consistent across all pages of the site.

Using something like Adobe XD will allow you to make quick changes to components across all artboards. You can learn about Adobe XD components below. Gone are the days of tweaking every single color across all elements and one at a time.

Use this to your advantage! 

No Walls of Text

Hopefully, you’re already doing this one, but the days of having walls of texts on websites are over. Don’t do this. Content precedes design, but at the same time design informs content.

So, take the content and chop it up so that it’s more digestible for a user. Using bullets, small blocks, images, charts, and more can really help the flow of a page. Use additional headlines and sub-headlines to separate content even more. Everything you do here will help the user quickly scan the page to find the information they’re most interested in.

Wrapping It Up

These are just some of the things that you should be deploying to create really great designs in 2021 and beyond. You’re likely doing these things already but if not, there’s no better time to start than now.

To learn more about Adobe XD design, check out my series here. To learn more about designing for conversions watch CROW on YouTube.

Once again, thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you again next time!