It can be difficult to move forward in your design journey. Whether you’re just starting or you’ve decided to have a refresh, there are key basics we all need to be reminded of every now and then. User experience is the basis of successful design and can make or break a website or branding. 

Reflect on these basic design suggestions during your journey and help to push for successful design.

Wear Your Audience’s Shoes

It’s important to get into the shoes of your audience. Seeing your designs from the desired audience will help you make adaptations and create less room for unsuccessful final products. Show your work to as many people as possible. This will get you an honest opinion from outside perspectives that will help push your design forward. 

Remember, you don’t have to take on all the changes suggested by other people. But be reasonable and reflect, try it out and if you’re still not satisfied that those suggestions will work for you – then leave it behind and try something new. 

Choose Your Audience

You don’t want to be creating for everybody. Design with a specific audience in mind and make that your target. You can make changes to adapt your design to be more universal for a wider audience, but narrowing it down, to begin with will help you get the workflow moving without overcomplicating your design. 

Research the audience, look at other UX designs that are created for the same bracket and take elements and make them your own. Use colour grabs to extract successful, trendy colour palettes to help draw in your audience and create your colour palette from previous successful ones.

Maintain Simplicity 

Your designs don’t have to be overly simple, but they need not to overload the user. Resist the temptation to put too much all in one design. Keep typography simple and clean, information to a minimum and look at maximising white space to help the work breathe. 

This can be applied to all types of design. Being a successful creator means applying your knowledge to each area of your work whether that’s UI, Graphics Design, Illustration, Vector Creation, Logo Design, or Web design (and the list goes on). Grab your audience’s attention by focusing on an area, rather than overloading and making it difficult to digest.

Visual Communication

Before adding type, can you say it via imagery? Look at how you can approach your visual communication. A great example of this is to consider colour theory and how applying a specific hue can alter your user’s perception. Creating visuals that are easy to understand will help your audience to stay interested.

Most social media platforms discourage imagery that is loaded with type, typically because it is seen as spam. Say it with vectors and communicate with colours before adding any type when it’s necessary. 

Organised and Understood

Possibly one of our most important basic design suggestions. When communicating lots of information, dissect it accordingly. Most audiences appreciate the simplicity and carefully selecting key information will keep the information logical and help it to be retained. Tell one story at a time and make it short and punchy.

This also applies to being clear with what you’re trying to say. Don’t contradict yourself as the public needs to see that consistency to understand what you or your brand is about. 

In conclusion, many factors can be followed to ensure you create a successful design. Make sure you focus on making the very first thing your audience sees and reflect as you go. If you’re a company or brand that needs the weight of design work (including web, content creation, video editing and more), why not consider hiring an agency to lighten the load? 

Here at Be My Social, we can assist in many ways and have a team of highly skilled creatives ready to take on your brand. We hope these basic design suggestions have been of use.