How Essential Is Web Design Typography

January 3, 2020 • Design, Essential

Typography accounts for 90% of website structure. The primary explanation that individuals visit a website is to understand the content, whether this implies finding information about the organization or perusing your substance. The words on your website matter, along these lines, how you present these words should hold equal importance.

Every website must pass on the goal and emotion of the business to its visitors, and in an advanced world, the most straightforward approach to do that is through the typeface. Typography is close to home and can be utilized as an expansion of a brand. It is essential to pick a sort face that is fitting for your industry, but likewise, one that praises your marking and image.

Typography maintains consistency all through a website, giving it a progressively professional tasteful. Necessarily, it can make your substance appealing and impacts the readability of your site, which all checks towards a positive client experience.

Why Typeface and Font Choice is Important

The explanation that typeface and font decision is so vital for your image or organization is that you want your fonts to bring out positive emotions and provide simple readability simultaneously.

With those two criteria driving your font decision just as your font pairing, how about we examine some other important factors you’ll want to consider.

Besides considering the emotions and readability of your font, the following factor to think about when picking fonts is your industry.

For what reason is your industry so important? It will dictate whether you pick a fun, easygoing font or a progressively genuine, professional one.

If you’re a professional web and graphic design company, you should pick a cutting edge, increasingly professional font. If you’re an online retailer focusing on young people, an easygoing, fun font may superbly suit your image.

Fun Versus Professional Fonts

How about we inspect a couple of guides to help pass on the meaning of what a fun font is versus a professional one to help direct you in your choice.

Take the Pinterest logo, for instance – it is an increasingly easygoing, scripted font that passes on friendship and fun, which are the ideal emotions that the image sticking site likely wants to inspire from their female, imaginative crowd.

information foundry

Presently, how about we investigate the logo for an increasingly good organization, such as the accompanying IT managed services organization as referenced before.

This organization utilizes a progressively direct, present-day font that brings out less emotion and passes on an increasingly professional tone, the ideal feel for an IT managed service organization.

Pairing Visually Appealing Fonts for Your Website

You may be asking why you need more than one font for your image and website.

Furthermore, you may not require one, contingent upon your industry or if your website and advertising materials are more images driven than content-driven, for example, on online retailer that spotlights on product image versus portrayals.

But, by including a subsequent font, it frequently helps to provide visual signs to what information the content offers and simple readability.

In the occurrences where two fonts are utilized, companies typically use one font for headers and the other for body duplicate.

In the model here, the feature uses a serif font and the group of content, or passage beneath the feature, a sans serif font.

If a third font is utilized, it may be used in subheaders or a CTA (Call To Action) button to visually sign the peruser that there is a connect to more information.

Basically, by utilizing different fonts, you can make pages with a great arrangement of duplicate all the more visually appealing and intelligible and is essentially an aftereffect of good typography.

Presently, where to start while picking a font pairing?

The good news is there is a simple general guideline with regards to a font that can assist you with managing you in your choice; pick a serif and a sans serif font.

A sans serif font is a font without the utilization of a serif, which is a stroke added to each character or number.

To help demonstrate what stroke is and how to identify a serif font versus a sans serif font, the font pair.co site combines the fonts.

As you can envision, on occasions where you have a great arrangement of duplicate, a good font pairing improves readability and provides that visual signal for the kind of information that is inside the content.

If you don’t know where to start, your visual originator or the firm you’re working with shouldg have the option to help around there with a couple of proposals.

Resources to Help You Choose the Right Typography

If you’d feel progressively good doing some research yourself, this post by Visme is a great spot to begin.

They provide a few images that play with various font mixes, font-weight – which relates to letter thickness or intensity – or sizes.

If you’re to a higher degree a visual individual, here are two or three other great resources to assist you with getting moving:

Font Squirrel is a great website that you can visit to download fonts that you need or quest for fonts dependent on basic pursuit descriptors, similar to grunge or exquisite. You can likewise see classifications like “what’s going on” or “hot,” which are additionally useful to look at because there are consistently fonts that are in vogue, new, or well known for specific ventures.

Google Fonts is another excellent spot to begin that enables you to look by criteria like serif, sans serif, or penmanship. It provides a visual display of every font, including what every font resembles in a section, in the letters in order, or as a numeral. You can choose a couple of fonts that you like and view them combined.

4 Essential Steps for Building a Website

December 25, 2019 • Essential, steps

Are you thinking about seizing some of the online opportunities the Internet offers? Don’t you think it’s high time you started thinking globally instead of locally?

All of this starts with building a website and coming up with an online marketing strategy that will drive your target audience to it, resulting in sales and profit.

Regardless of niche and industry, building a website is your first step to taking your business to the digital world, and that’s why we created a quick guide that covers all of the main aspects of creating a website.

There are 4 decisions you’ll have to make prior to launching your site: the type of platform you’re going to use to build your website, the domain name, your web hosting provider, and the design and content for your site.

1. Choose the Type of Website-Building Platform to Go For

The initial question that you will be asking yourself is what platform or website builder to go for. Choosing the right website-building platform is very important because the choice of your hosting provider and the future of your website depends on it.

Naturally, the type of site you want is going to dictate the website builder you pick. For example, BigCommerce would be an obvious choice for an e-commerce website, since it’s a platform tailored to meet the demands of businesses that sell online.

On the other hand, WordPress is the most commonly used and most popular website building-platform, as well as a safe choice for most websites. In fact, 35% of all active websites are created on WordPress.

The reason behind this is the flexibility that WordPress offers, the variety of plugins, the huge selection of free templates, and the fact that it’s a beginner-friendly platform that doesn’t require any coding knowledge.

If you think that these are the features that your website needs, go for WordPress. If not, check out what Drupal, Joomla, Wix, Launchrock, Squarespace, Weebly, and other platforms can offer you instead.

2. Select the Perfect Domain Name for Your Site

Next is the topic of domain name. The perfect domain name will make you stand out from the competition so consumers choose you instead of them.

Here are some tips that’ll help you choose a winning domain name:

1. Your domain name should be easy to type, easy to pronounce, and easy to remember.

2. You should go with the .com extension because most people will add it to your brand name by default.

3. Choose a one or two-word domain name excluding any numbers or symbols that can create confusion or mislead your customers.

4. Invent new words or use some interesting existing words that will make your domain name stand out from the competition.

5. Follow the examples of some successful companies that have created original brand names, such as Nike, Adidas, IBM, Apple, etc.

If you follow these guidelines and brainstorm a little, creating a domain name for your business should be simple enough.

The next step is to check whether the domain name you have chosen is available and make a purchase. All of this is available at Domain Name Sanity, where you can also get suggestions if your preferred domain name is taken. They also offer web hosting, but more on that in the next section.

3. Pick the Right Web Hosting Provider for You

With so many web hosting providers available, no wonder you’re confused about which one to choose!

You should be aware that the web hosting provider doesn’t only provide you with space on a server. Every web host also offers a variety of features that are very important for the success of your website.

But first things first: if the web hosting provider doesn’t have high-quality servers, they can’t offer you high performance for your website. The loading speed of your site is also closely connected to the web host you choose. If you think that’s not too important, you’d be wrong—speed is another determining factor that will influence your rankings and the overall user experience of your website, so choose wisely.

4. Conceptualize the Design and Content

The type of design and content you use for your website has a great impact on your users. This means that if they find your site appealing, it’s mostly because they like the design and can’t wait to read your next post.

This is the biggest way in which you can attract new users and make sure the ones who enjoy your content come back for more.

You can hire a professional designer and a content writer to do this part for you, or experiment on your own at first. It all depends on your budget and which section you’d like to invest in the most.

Now that you know all the steps that you’ll need to build a website, are you ready to go for it and turn theory into practice?

— Gavin

A Web addicted Geek stuck inside Tron.

3 Essential Design Trends, November 2019

October 28, 2019 • Design, Essential

There’s always a balance between visual design and functional design. Many of the “rules” of design as we know them exist to make visuals more functional.

That’s not exactly true of all of the techniques that are trending right now. But sometimes rules are made to be broken, right? You can take these trends in and decide whether they work for you or not. (There’s no right or wrong answer.)

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

1. Obscured Text Elements

When it comes to text elements, the first thought is often readability. Not with this design trend.

More design projects are showcasing text elements that are partially obscured or hidden within other elements. And while these designs look pretty cool and are visually stunning, whether it actually works might be more debatable.

Each of the examples below uses this trend in a slightly different way.

Granyon Party uses oversized text in a layered design – background, text, animated illustration – where the words are hyphenated and in a layer behind design elements. While the obscured text is fairly easy to read, the addition of hyphenation and a monotone color palette makes it a little trickier.

Lafaurie Paris uses black text over an image layer with dark coloring, leaving little contrast between the two. This makes the main text element a challenge in terms of readability on an otherwise visually stunning design.

Ride & Crash’s Paco the Judo Popcorn has a text layer that’s behind a semitransparent animated illustration. It’s not too difficult to read, but does make you stop and really think about the words on the screen. Use of space helps draw focus and make it a little easier to digest.

With all of these examples, the design has to weigh big questions: Is the visual display worth losing readability? Will visitors understand and interact with the design?

2. Animated Spheres

Circles have always been a popular design element. They carry plenty of symbolism and meaning and can set the right tone for projects. Circles are also a little less rigid than hard-edged elements, such as buttons or calls to action.

Bigger spheres with animation are a solid way to draw users into design elements and focus the eye.

This trending element might be pure decoration or serve a more functional role.

2nd Street uses large spheres down the right margin as a secondary level of navigation. The middle circles have a link and hover animation to help signal this action. The bottom circle is a decoration with movement that helps draw the eye and encourage users to move the mouse in that direction, activating the other circular buttons.

Eslam Said uses a large sphere in the center of the screen with simple movement to create visual interest in the portfolio website. The simple design and movement are hard to stop looking at with a soothing feel to them.

World of Incentro uses multiple spheres with small movements and subtle animation as a decorative element. Further, the design uses a red, circular cursor to encourage engagement with the design. (If you click around this site a little, you’ll also find that it makes use of the first trend mentioned here, with different layers of obscured text.)

3. Large Left Margins

This might be my personal favorite trend, as a fan of asymmetrical balance. These designs use large left margins and areas of whitespace opposite a more visually full right side with an art element that fades off the screen.

They create a beautifully imbalanced balance with visual weight that draws the eye across this screen.

But this style isn’t for everyone, especially if you really like more symmetry. The challenge with this style is how elements stack on smaller mobile or vertical screens. The result isn’t often as stunning as the desktop counterpart.

Ervaxx uses a simple animation paired with large bold text. The large font size offsets the weight of the animated blob on the right.

Lifted Logic carries a hero text element across white (ahem, black) space into a video. The use of space really pulls the eye across the text into the image and back.

Cognito uses balanced weights with text and line illustrations across the screen. Space, here, makes the design feel a little less busy with a lot of elements to take in at once – navigation menu, headline, secondary text, two buttons, animated illustration, and a chat box.

Conclusion

It’s possible to love the look of a trendy design, but never use the technique because you don’t find that it works with your content or in a way that focuses on usability. And that’s ok. That’s the beauty of trends; they spark conversation and push all designers to think bigger and better.

Do you tend to be more of a visual or functional designer? Most of us have fairly distinct tendencies and it’s good food for thought.

8 Essential Principles of Good Business Card Design

October 17, 2019 • Essential, principles

A good business card design is underpinned by eight essential principles. A business card needs to serve a purpose and be useful as a marketing tool. A business card may be the first impression many of your clients have of your business.

Continue reading below to find out the principles of good business card design.

Use High-Quality Card

There are so many choices of cards, that you may be tempted to opt for something cheaper to save money. Don’t fall into this trap. A business card may be one of the first impressions someone receives of your business, and a cheap business card simply won’t get you, customers.

Order card samples from New Era Print Solutions to see which one you prefer.

Font Size

Be aware that a business card is really small, but your font should be legible. If your font is too small, the business cards are futile.

Font Type

The style and type of font you use are just as important. Some fonts look terrible in a smaller size.

The thickness of the individual letters is another point to consider. If they are too thin, the writing will not be legible. If they are too thick, the letters tend to blur together when reading them.

Less is More

Don’t overcrowd your business card with text and graphics. They should be very simple, easy to read and minimalist with graphic use. Make proper use of white space so that people can easily skim over the card and get all the relevant information in a few seconds.

Be Industry Relevant

The design of your business card will depend heavily on the type of industry you are in. For example, a legal firm should have a professional and simple design.

A baker or artist could get away with having a more creative business card. Know your target audience and design your card to fit their needs.

Content Hierarchy

This is very important on a business card. The order of your content should be considered, and important information should be prioritized first.

If you know your target audience is mainly on social media, then the name of your business and then your social accounts followed by your contact phone number would be an appropriate order.

If your target audience is more likely to pick up the phone, then put your phone number after the business name or logo.

Stay on Brand

If you already have a website and social accounts, be consistent with your branding and match your business cards to them. Your logo should be the same throughout.

Proof Read

This goes without saying, but we really have to say it. The last thing you want to find on 2000 business cards is a typo or spelling mistake. Proofread your business cards and get several different people to review them also.

It’s better to find a mistake before they are printed.

Create a Good Business Card Design Today

So there you have it, our top eight essentials to create a good business card design. Don’t forget to make your business card industry-focused and on-brand.

For more information on graphic design, take a look at the other articles on our blog.

3 Essential Design Trends, October 2019

October 1, 2019 • Design, Essential

Welcome to our monthly roundup of the latest and greatest trends in the world of web design.

There’s a bonus trend in the roundup this month. (Four trends rather than three…but you’ll have to find it!)

Our more obvious collection of trends are visual elements – skinny vertical design blocks, a shift to tiny logos and branding rather than the oversized center logos that have been popular for a while, and dark and moody design schemes.

The extra trend is more interactive; you’ll have to click through the examples to find it. (Good luck!)

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

Skinny Vertical Elements

This might be the coolest looking trend in the roundup: Skinny vertical elements that add a fresh visual aspect to website projects. The space they occupy and the fact that they look different are engaging.

The only trouble can be with the conversion away from desktop sizes to smaller screen resolutions, but all of the examples below seem to handle that well.

It’s also a technique that can be used for different purposes.

Front Pourch Brewing uses a skinny vertical bar with icons on the left side of the screen to highlight navigation elements. On mobile, the yellow bar collapses into a bottom of the screen nav with a hamburger menu. (Bottom of the screen menus are great for ease of navigating and tapping elements.)

Fila Explore uses skinny vertical navigation elements on both sides of the screen that change the hero image when you hover over them. Each word is also clickable to go to another page. The UX is the same on mobile, albeit with a different aspect ratio.

Amsterdam Ferry Festival uses a skinny vertical element on the left side of the screen with scrolling text to highlight an important event message. The area is also clickable and takes you to the call for entries listing in the scrolling text. It’s a different way to provide a scroller that isn’t at the top of the homepage. The placement is nice because it doesn’t detract from the rest of the design and the visuals could work equally well if it were removed. The placement and UX is the same on mobile, although it is a little harder to actually click/tap.

Tiny Logos and Branding

It’s best practice to place your logo, brand, or website name in the top left corner of the design. It’s not a new idea and one that users understand. (Just don’t forget to make that logo your home button.)

But there is a shift that these logos and brand marks are getting smaller and smaller.

Part of it might be due to responsive design and how many website we are looking at on phones or small devices. A big honkin’ logo will surely get in the way.

create good content first and worry about creating brand loyalty after

But more, it’s a practice of subtlety. If your content is good and what users expect when they come to your website, a large logo or brand name isn’t always contributing to the design or content.

Think about it for a minute. None of the examples below are household names, but they are all well-designed websites that serve a purpose for a specific user group. Aside from major companies such as Coca-Cola, Google, or Amazon that everyone is familiar with, the brand is often secondary to what’s on display. This applies to websites that deal in ecommerce or provide goods or services and sites that are purely informational or for entertainment.

A big homepage logo never got anyone excited; create good content first and worry about creating brand loyalty after users have already connected with what you have to offer.

Dark and Moody

Dark and moody website themes have a sleek look and aura of mystery that seems to instantly jump out. This trend really pops right now because light and white minimalism or bright, bold color palettes have been so dominant.

It makes dark themes stand out even more.

Each of these examples does it in a similar, but different way.

Warped Cigars uses a black and white theme with bold, beautiful typography. Images lack color and also have a bit of a black overlay to give more room to text elements and contribute to readability.

Vandal uses a combination of intriguing images in dark lighting. Each looks like it was taken in a dark room. Images and a dark scheme are magnified with gold accents, lettering, and lines that create a regal feel of elegance and mystery.

Hype uses a fairly traditional dark scheme with a slider of images with a dark overlay for highlight text elements. Images are both color and black and white as the slider almost allows the dark, moody scheme to flip for a moment (depending on the image) and draw you back in for another glance. The image selections here also contribute to the moody feel of the website project.

Conclusion

If you clicked through the examples above you might have uncovered another trend. There’s a growing number of websites using oversized cursor circles that help user discover interactive elements. Several of these examples use them and it’s starting to show up on all kinds of websites.

What you see is often a large circle that moves with the mouse on the screen. It might activate hover states of other elements or help you find fun divots to explore. And now that you are aware of this little goodie, take note of how often you are finding it when you browse the web.

21 essential UX design interview questions & how to answer them

September 19, 2019 • Design, Essential

Carl Wheatley is a Product Design Recruiter at Facebook with several years of experience in the design and recruiting industries. In this post, Carl sheds light on the most likely interview questions you’ll be asked in your UX design interview and how to approach answering each one.

Many UX designers preparing for an interview often focus all of their attention on the more technical questions related to their field. The reality is that hiring managers are also looking for candidates who can demonstrate qualities that go beyond the hard skills.

While you might expect to be asked intensive questions on UX or UI design, interviewers are more likely to ask things that gauge logical thinking skills and how you approach problem-solving. In fact, some companies’ favorite interview question for candidates is, “How would approach solving problems if you were from Mars?” That might sound like a bizarre question, without any relevance to the job, but they want to know how you would cope with simple problems outside of your working sphere.

The reality is, there’s no sure-fire way to fully predict interview questions or processes for any given company. However, you can certainly prepare for the kinds of questions you’ll most likely get asked. Note: UX design interview questions are often focused on five basic areas:

Questions about you
Questions about your work experience
Questions about your workflow & process
Questions about your behavior
Questions about your goals

Below is a list of 21 likely interview questions to prepare for so you can walk into your next UX design interview feeling confident and ready to shine.

Questions about you

The starting point of every interviewer is you. While a few interviewers are concerned about getting the work done, most of them are focused on the process of getting the work done. This is the time for the hiring manager to get to know your personality, your motivations, your operation processes, and everything that’ll give them a vivid picture of you.

1. Can you tell me about yourself?

Most job seekers especially designers are often confused with this question. Consider this question an alternative way of saying “what’s in your resume”? You don’t have to go too detailed or personal but do share a bit about your work experiences that are related to the job you’re applying.

Your answer should be focused on your educational background or qualifications, internships, and/or previous jobs. You may also want to talk about your current job and why you’re considering a move. This is an opportunity to tell the interviewer why they should hire you.

2. Can you tell me why you chose a career in UX design?

Don’t miss this opportunity to shine. Talk about your passion and why you feel excited about UX design. Focus your answer on the skills that make you the great designer they should hire, including:

Your empathic personality: How adept you are in studying customers’ behavior in order to provide a perfect solution to their problems
Your problem-solving skills: Your devotion to details and the ability to understand the cause of problems and solutions to them
Your curiosity: Your eagerness to learn new tips, stay updated with technological trends, and follow up with identified negative customers’ behaviors.
Your time-management skills: Adhering to project deadlines.

You can also talk about other UX design hard skills including your visualization, storyboarding, and wireframing.

3. Why do you want to work for us?

Almost all interviewers want to know why you’re interested in working with them. Your answer to this question should be centered on the company’s values, mission, and overall purpose.. If it’s a tech startup, it may make sense to assert that you love the fast pace and innovation they possess. A big corporation? You may want to convey that you appreciate the stability and expertise from their team of seasoned UX designers you’ve heard so much about.

4. What is your area of focus — UX Researcher, UX Designer or Visual Designer?

This question is simply asking where you think you are strongest among the various design disciplines. This is not the time to claim that you’re an expert in all the areas. In fact, it is very important to understand their job vacancies and which role best suits your skills before going for the interview. This will show the interviewer that you took the time to research the various roles at the company and will help you walk the interviewer through the why behind your strengths in your chosen discipline.

Questions about your work experience

Questions concerning your work experiences are the big deal questions. Hiring managers want to understand what you’ve worked on before to better gauge the value you can bring to their business.
This is your time to shine and to prove your expertise. Work experience questions often seem direct but deserve some expanded answers centered on what you’ve achieved and why you believe you can help them achieve even more.

5. Can I see your portfolio?

This is one of the most predictable UX design interview questions to expect. The question may seem direct, but it doesn’t mean handing your portfolio over to the interviewer. The hiring manager simply wants to see you walk them through your portfolio so they can see your creativity and general way of thinking. Do you have any peculiar designs and a reason for designing them the way they are? Don’t fail to tell them why you added that special touch. Did you create your designs for the target market, the problem you were trying to solve, or just fancy the design that way? Be bold to tell them.

6. Which design process did you adopt for these projects?

This is a direct question desiring a simple and direct answer. The interviewer wants to know your thought process and how you came to make the designs in your portfolio. Walk the interviewer through your thought process and explain why you approached the problem the way you did, as well as your process for solving it. Your confidence in answering this question truly matters — showcase your expertise!

7. Can I see your favorite project?

Your favorite project should be included in your portfolio already, but be careful which one you call out as your favorite. Your personal favorite may not truly be as attractive as something else. It’s not uncommon that a stand-out project isn’t the most aesthetically beautiful. Ask mentors or your trusted design community to take a look at your designs. Have them pick their favorite and explain why they made that choice. Note: your interviewer may not be a designer, so it’s good practice to also have a non-designer look at your designs.

Your interviewer may not be a designer, so it’s good practice to also have a non-designer look at your designs.

Next, you should be able to articulate what made your favorite project special. It may not be the design or the working process but rather your passion for the project and what you learned while handling the parameters. If it was a very challenging project that caused you to think and approach it in a different, innovative way, share that experience with them. Through this process, you’re already demonstrating you can handle difficult tasks on the job.

8. Tell me about a time when a project didn’t go as planned. How did you fix it?

Research reveals that 8 of every 10 interviewers are likely to ask, “Tell me about a time when something went wrong”. What the interviewer wants to understand is your problem-solving skills and how calm you can stay under pressure. Undoubtedly, you’ve been faced with various challenging projects in the past — use them as examples. While you can cite examples of past challenging projects, make sure you avoid using examples where the problem was complete negligence on your part.

9. What are some websites or apps that have great design?

This question may not only mean the interviewer wants to know what kind of designs catch your eye — but they also may infer how you appreciate other professional design efforts. Explain why you love the designs in question. Are they customer-friendly? Do you think their loading speed is extraordinary? Is it the combination of colors that makes customers stay longer on the website pages? Do they inspire your own design work? Talk about the simplicity of Google as a search tool, talk about Netflix and its brilliant search recommendations, talk about the websites that you feel meet their users’ satisfaction. Be comfortable talking about all of these with your interviewer, and you’ll be amazed at how much of their favor you’ve won in the process.

Questions about your workflow & process

Many UX design interviews include a question or two about UX design processes. What is your general concept of UX design and how do you make your designs? These kinds of questions will give you the opportunity to explain how you handle your design projects and even how you’ll handle their design process once you get the job.

10. What’s your definition of UX design?

Heads up: This is one of the most-failed UX design interview questions. It isn’t asking you for the textbook definition of UX design nor the Google or Wikipedia definition. Rather, this question gives you the opportunity to expand upon the practical description of UX design based on your experience. Don’t forget to tell them that UX design is everything that makes products, apps, and websites very easy to use and customer friendly. Show the hiring manager your practical approach that backs your definition.

11. What Are the Differences between UX Design and Other Design Disciplines?

Some interviewers use this question as a follow-up to the question above. This question is asking for a direct response as to why you think UX design is different from product design or graphic design.
You don’t have to go too deep. A simple answer like, “UX design is focused on making things functional while other design disciplines including UI, graphic, and web design are focused on making things beautiful or attractive.”

This may seem short and direct, but that is exactly what your interviewer is waiting to hear—especially if the company has two different teams handling UX and UI design. You can also consider giving an example where you worked with a team of designers on the same design project and your primary focus was on project functionality, while your teammates engaged in the other roles relating to the interface or graphic design.

12. What inspires you to create your designs?

While answering this question, you need to be current. If you take inspiration from outdated design topics or trends, your designs may be outdated too. Do you have any favorite magazines, blogs, and websites you rely on for inspiration? This is the time to talk about them and be sure to tell your interviewers why they are your favorites.

Stay up to date while talking about your motivations or inspirations—it shows that you’re current and forward-thinking in your learning.

You can also talk about some newsletters you subscribe to or conferences you’ve attended online or offline. Discuss some of the design books you’ve read and your connection to your mentors. Talk about why you chose your mentors and how you keep in contact with them to this day. Stay up to date while talking about your motivations or inspirations—it shows that you’re current and forward-thinking in your learning.

13. How do you choose the features of your designs?

This one’s tricky! One way to address it is to use a real-life example of when you rejected your company’s hypothesis. Here’s where you need to claim your expertise and how valuable your expertise would be to the company. Take time to explain the relationship between any business goal and customers’ desires. Go further to explain why some business goals may need to change if they aren’t in line with customers’ needs and how you would detect and address that. Go further to explain which steps you would take to put customers’ needs first and use them to shape the business goals to ensure that users are fully satisfied at the end, and the business doesn’t lose anything in the process.

Take your time to address fully how:

You sample the target market
You discover the target market goals
Your design features solved the target market’s problem

14. How do you discover the needs of your users?

Out of all design disciplines, user experience is termed the most user-centric because it fully revolves around the experience of the user, which is a determinant of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Here, you can tell them you “always wear the shoes of your customers.” You can expand further and explain to the interviewer how you learn the needs and wants of your customers utilizing research or even creating personas.

15. What kind of research method do you use for new projects?

Please, please, please be honest here. Don’t discuss any process(es) you haven’t used. And if you’ve used a research method but wished there were enough resources to use a better one, say so. For example, you can tell your interviewer you always engage in online surveys and use self-structured online questionnaires to collect your information due to time constraints and limited project budget. You can also stress the importance of face-to-face research methods or interviews and how you long for such research methods given enough resources.

You may also go a little further to explain the challenges faced with the research methods you currently use, and why you would try something else if you eventually get the job.

Questions about your behavior

Behavioral questions, while challenging, are critical for the interviewer to best understand what gets you motivated and inspired. They need to realistically know whether they can foster an atmosphere where you’ll be able to thrive. Some of the behavioral questions to expect from interviewers may include:

16. What are your weaknesses?

Telling an interviewer your weaknesses may seem like condemning yourself already. However, it’s a common question interviewers ask to know what makes you feel uncomfortable and how you overcome it. While it’s advisable to be as honest as possible, answering this question with positive weakness could be the best thing to do for yourself.

For example, you can frame your answer to describe a positive weakness like, “I can get bored if I’m not staying busy or if I’m not challenged with a difficult task.” This also implies that you enjoy working on difficult tasks or you’re always busy during your working hours. Once an interviewer asks you about your weaknesses, be prepared for their next question concerning your strengths.

17. What are your biggest strengths?

This is the time to show pride in your skills and display your expertise. However, don’t go outside the company’s job description. To provide a solid answer to this question, every UX design job seeker should revisit the job description to best match their strengths with the role requirements. Think about the personality characteristics you have that add to your technical skillsets as a UX designer and make you that much more valuable.

18. How do you handle critical or negative feedback?

No one likes negative feedback. You know that and so does the interviewer. Think about and answer this question as a whole. You could say something like, “I’m always open to all kinds of feedback because it motivates me to improve the next time.’’ You can share that you’d rather have internal negative feedback rather than launch a project that receives negative feedback from external customers. With this, your interviewer will come to understand that you’re open to corrections and learning.

19. What would you do if asked to hand over your project to a developer?

Answering this question correctly will prove your collaboration skills. Do you willingly hand over your projects to someone else or do you struggle to hold onto them? As a good team player, you shouldn’t have any problem with someone else handling your project. Stress the fact that you do care about your projects, but you don’t have any problems signing them off as long as you know they’re in safe hands.

Questions about your goals

With goal-related questions, the interviewer will try to understand what your plans for their company are. They want to know if you plan to stay working for them in the long term. Are your company and career goals in line with theirs?

20. Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Most of the time, setting long-term goals may seem hard. It’s ok if you aren’t sure where you plan to be in the next five years, but do try to give the interviewer a hint. You can talk about what a UX design career looks like to you and why you’ve chosen the path. If you want to become an expert in a particular field of UX design, talk about it and explain how that additional field will help you expand your skillset and elevate this role. Express that your growth goals are aligned with those of this role and the company at large.

21. Why are you passionate about this position?

Are you excited only about the pay, or are you coming in to add some value to the company? Your answer to this question is critical because your interviewer wants to know how serious you are about this position. This is the time to talk specifically about this role and this company. Discuss how this position will help you add some major value to the business and further your skills to become a better designer.

Conclusion

Now that you have a better understanding of the nature of questions you’ll most likely be asked in a UX design interview, it’s your turn to dig deep into how you’ll personalize and best communicate your answers. At the end of the day, remember that hiring managers especially want to see that you are a stellar communicator and have confidence in your expertise. Focus less on the technicalities of UX design and more on clearly talking through your thought process, and you’ll be well on your way to nailing that next interview!

For more design hiring resources, check out Carl’s blog post on how to land your first job out of design school or bootcamp.

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About Carl: Carl is a Product Design recruiter at Facebook. Before recruiting, he was a UI/UX designer working with many tech startups to design mobile apps. Carl is also the co-founder of a Meetup called Global UXD  where he helps connect designers with eachother and create new opportunities. Having completed Bloc and Designlab bootcamps before becoming a recruiter, he’s an expert at helping designers land their first design roles. Find Carl on LinkedIn.

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3 Essential Design Trends, September 2019

September 3, 2019 • Design, Essential

Every month we present a roundup of the trends we expect to see in the weeks ahead.

This month’s collection of design trends focuses on a bit of a slow burn – design techniques that appeal to millennials (maybe) and Generation Z.

Gen-Zers are those born between 1997 and 2012, meaning part of this generation is in grade school. This generation is impacting design trends already because they are the most digital savvy generation yet. And they start using digital tools at even younger ages, making it no surprise that they have a significant influence on website design.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

1. Youthful Appeal

Content and design with a more youthful appeal is trending.

It’s a little complicated to fully describe; but when you see it, you’ll probably know it. These projects are a little more bold in color, imagery, and voice. Remember all the light blue that dominated the website design landscape for so long? You won’t find it here. Color palettes are meant to grab your attention and make you feel something.

The overall imagery features plenty of action, in the form of actual animation or video or shapes and design elements that infer motion and activity. The common theme is that the design is busier, lighter, and incredibly active. Three examples that do it in quite different ways:

Gonzo Media features fast-moving video with young people and bright colors for data points. The language is direct and they want you to understand youth feel and marketing (it’s part of their brand).
The gamification of Wimbledon by Ralph Lauren pulls together two things that aren’t typically connected with “youth” in a new way that’s fun and inviting; the game brings a fresh idea to something that spans generations visually and interactively.
Preventure uses color and young faces again to get a message across. What’s interesting here is that while the content is about teens, it’s targeted at their parents and caretakers. The design has a youthful appeal that’s used to speak another generation; that shows the power and influence of this trend overall.

2. TikTok Aesthetic

The New York Times claimed that TikTok is “Rewriting the World” earlier this year. The social platform which features short videos is super popular (and growing) and features a style that’s a bit harsh, and even brutalist by design.

The TikTok style features short video clips, often with filters or glitchy effects. It has a feel that’s more instant and almost oddly organic. It’s not polished and things that look like (or actually are) mistakes are just par for the course.

How does this turn into a design trend?

We’ve seen a resurgence in brutalism overall, but what you get from this social platform is a less professional look to projects with more risk-taking when it comes to design style and effects. Projects have a look that says, “I just did this real quick, and it’s awesome anyway.”

Think of the style as not quite brutal and somewhat arrogant. It’s bold, fresh and works.

These projects are somewhat disruptive from what we’re used to seeing and draw attention. That’s the whole goal for most web projects and here it works in a number of different ways.

Lyst uses the glitchy video effect that’s dominant on TikTok.
100 Everyday has a more static display with a brutalist style and interesting use of space.
9 Elements is more polished, but also with glitchy effects on a light animation and plenty of high design.

3. Futuristic Feel

Nothing says “next generation” like a futuristic style design. More of these projects are popping up thanks to the influence of virtual reality and AI themes.

What’s especially neat about these projects is that everyone’s vision of futuristic is a little bit different. The examples below show that with both light and dark themes and imagery that feels realistic or totally unreal.

The best part of a futuristic design theme is no one really knows what the next thing looks like, so it’s all imagination. That can make these design concepts interesting and intimidating to tackle.

Common design themes when it comes to future-feel right now include bright color, animation, robotic imagery, lack of photos, and code themes. You might also find design elements that fade into the horizon, something you can see in all three examples below with lines or design elements that almost seem to go forever.

Conclusion

The best part of trends that are more of a long game is that more of these projects will pop up and each one will evolve these concepts a little more. It’ll be fun to look at these ideas again in six months or a year and see how they have changed.

You are probably already starting to feel pressure in client proposals to design for a more Gen-Z audience. And it’s doable without going too over the top. Incorporate some of these ideas to find just the right look and feel for projects in the pipeline. Don’t be afraid to look at trends outside of website design to influence your work. (That’s where many of these ideas started.)

3 Essential Design Trends, August 2019

July 29, 2019 • Design, Essential

Every month we present a roundup of the trends we expect to see in the weeks ahead.

Each of the design trends we are spotting this month have to deal with over-the-top techniques. It’s interesting because these big effects don’t always pop on the radar of what’s trending, but these concepts almost begged to be featured with a large number of projects showcasing these design elements.

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This type of trend is interested because designers either love them or hate them. Take a look and see if these are concepts you’ll use. Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

Exaggerated White Space

So much white space.

These websites feature exaggerated amounts of whitespace and strong minimal themes with very little color or design ornamentation. And if you are like me, you can’t stop looking at them.

How does a design with so little visual information work?

The design trick here is disruption. If you see one of these designs, they are vastly different than almost any other site you are visiting. That makes you stop, and look, and think about what you are seeing. With the right content it can be quite effective.

While each of the designs here use exaggerated amounts of white space and practically no color, they don’t all look the same and use complementary effects to get a message across.

VS Company uses a subtle animation with text blocks that appear next to the oversized “POST” and “MGMT” lines. The text provides additional content and information about the website and uses a black color that makes it easy to read.

Lundqvist & Dallyn asks a question to pique user interest. The image on the home screen and throughout the scroll feature hover animations that encourage clicks.

Jillian Hobbs uses white space to help users hone in on the words – in this case project names – to interact with. It’s a risky concept for a design portfolio, but it did encourage clicking through to pages with the same visual pattern, but featuring images and color.

Sharp Edges and Lines

While brutalism has never fully taken off as a widespread design trend, it is influencing designers. Sharp edges and lines are one way that we’re seeing it manifest.

Most recently, projects have had a softer feel with gradient coloring, real images or illustrations, and softer shapes. The projects below feature more hard edges, thick lines and square shapes. These shapes can be paired with different elements to establish a feel. The result is a design trend that’s a little harder, stronger, and harsh. It almost demands that you look at it.

Future London Academy uses bold yellow and black to create the most brutalist feel of the collection. Even the typography has an edge to it.

Purple Rock Scissors has an animated twitch to the hard lines on its homepage, which creates a feeling of unease for users. Why is everything twitching and moving in this way? It almost forces you to scroll. All of the video clips on the site use the same effect, which feels a lot like what we are seeing with the TikTok social network.

The Unshift portfolio focuses on shapes and animation with almost no color to draw users in. The moving cube is intriguing and enough to generate interest.

Screen-Centered Headlines

Hero headlines aren’t a new trend at all. But have you noticed a shift in the placements of the big text on homepages?

It’s vertically and horizontally centered.

The placement makes sense when you think about it. The eye will go right to the middle of the screen and then spread out to other elements. But do you love the super symmetrical feel?

The other benefit to this design technique is for the mobile versions of websites. It fits just a nicely on a mobile screen as desktop. Conversely if the text is positioned strong to the left or right, it often has to be moved when you shift from a more horizontal to vertical screen orientation.

This is one of those neat trends that’s heavily influenced by technology and how we use and interact with devices online.

The only thing to be aware of with a trend like this is that while perfect symmetry is harmonious and visually appealing it might not work with all backgrounds or imagery. It can also start to seem somewhat boring if everyone does it.

Finally, think about the length of words and messaging. With too many characters this style can feel heavy and overwhelming and works best with short blocks of text, such as each of the featured examples below.

Conclusion

When it comes to over-the-top design ideas, what works for you, do you prefer color, space, or typography? While you can see some influences of these trends on each other, what makes them work is that the focus is on one strong design element.

Love these ideas or hate them, each project above has a design style that encourages users to take a second look and consider engaging with the design.