Storytelling Through Content-First Design
Beautifully designed websites are a delight to look at, but if the site’s content is incongruous to its aesthetic, the website hasn’t served its main function. To translate information into meaning quickly and easily for the user, the design should be built with content as the guiding light that shapes the mood, the typography, the hierarchy, the photography, and the color palette. This website...
Strategy and Foresight: Finding Common Ground Between Chess and Design Systems
I was introduced to chess at a young age and have been a fan ever since. One of the best ways to learn chess when you're just getting started is to analyze the games of masters, to see how they approached a given situation. When doing so, you quickly learn that chess is a game of strategy, but that strategy rarely exists entirely within the present moment. Rather, the great players of chess have...
How to Choose a UI Color Palette
As a designer whose work spans advertising, illustration, user experience, and digital systems, I find that universal design principles generally hold true across mediums. Things like hierarchy, white space, and typography are applicable in more or less similar ways from printed page to screen interface. Color, though, is a trickier skill to translate. Not only does color play a critical role in...
Continuous Improvement: Why You Might Not Need a Ground-Up Website Redesign
I sell websites, but I might not want you to buy one. There are certainly circumstances where a ground-up redesign is the only option, but there’s an alternative that’s often eliminated without proper consideration: iterative, impactful improvement to an existing site. This option is overlooked because the perception is that it’s always easier to start from scratch than to clean up an existing...
Creating Better User Experiences Through Everyday Inspiration
There’s an expression in French for a specific cognitive bias: deformation professionelle . This is the bias that leads a person to see the world through the lens of their profession rather than from the perspective of a regular human. In my case, as a UX Design Strategist, it leads me to be more critical with some user experiences and interactions. And at times, more demanding of the products we...
Accessibility in Web Design
As a web designer, I know that most clients want their website to be engaging, forward-thinking, and usable. But the surface-level concept of usability often leaves many people out of the equation. Access to the Internet — now seen as a fundamental human right — is only accomplished if websites cater to all users, regardless of visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, learning, neurological, and/or...
Choosing the Right Image: A Design Blog for Content Managers
When designing a website, sometimes content isn't immediately available to work with. In this instance, two things are needed: placeholder copy and placeholder photos. Placeholder copy is typically fairly straightforward, but choosing placeholder photos can sometimes be a challenge. The goal is to try to find images that are relevant to the brand, but also find images that are professional...
Digital First — Rethinking the College Viewbook
Over the years, we have worked with many colleges and universities on a wide array of marketing materials, and we have found one common denominator when it comes to traditional student viewbooks: They tend to look and sound the same. The formulaic approach that so many colleges take to this printed brochure geared towards incoming students generally includes uninspired photography — students...
It’s Not Personal: The Art of the Design Critique
As an experienced design professional, part of my routine each day consists of giving and receiving design feedback. It’s such a regular part of my job, in fact, that it has become second nature to me. But that wasn’t always the case. As a young college student facing the prospect of hearing opinions about my work, I used to take critiques really personally. It wasn’t something I was used to, and...
Incorporating Motion Into Design Systems
During the past decade, the role of designers has changed dramatically. We’ve largely shifted from print to digital media, from designing desktop experiences to responsive mobile-first websites — and from a static environment to one that is quite dynamic. Throughout this evolution, we’ve had to adapt to several very different roles and expand our skill set and vocabulary in kind. While designers...
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