Visual Hierarchy Hacks To Design A Super-Cool Website
When we witness chaos, our mind fails to comprehend anything. Either we wander in search for order or we sit back thinking what the heck just happened! By instinct or habit we’re inclined towards structure, relationships and patterns. This psychology helps professionals create visual hierarchy on a given website to whisk (what I’d like to call) the cream of design in to a winning product.
- Create a pleasant and memorable user-experience
- Radiate emotions and meanings towards visitors
- Ease understanding of content for the viewer
- Accentuate the appearance i.e. user-interface
- Make the message and call-to-action unambiguous
Visual Hierarchy In Web Design
Steven Bradley of Vanseo Design suggests, “Visual hierarchies organize, prioritize, and communicate visually by modifying the visual weights different elements carry.”
By now, it is obvious that a website is a compulsory branding and marketing feature of both a local and an international business belonging to any industry. Nevertheless, it is unwise to create a web design without deliberation and direction. When designing and developing a home page or the subsequent web pages, we should embrace an approach to problem-solving.
This said, hierarchy in design cannot be achieved with mere guess work. You need to research, which involves observation, analysis and evaluation of audience, competition and (your) goals. In addition, you need to test your creation. It can be done in many ways including split testing, multivariate testing, the popular A/B testing, and usability testing etc. Once you’re through reasoning out the UI and UX, you can confidently move forward with your web venture, invite visitors, and let your website be the guide of a buyer’s journey.
The infographic below is a compilation of techniques you need to attain visual hierarchy in your web design, and the possible questions that arise before even putting this method into practice.
Note that a web design doesn’t necessarily need to be jazzed up with heavy graphic plug-ins; a super-cool website can have simple HTML and CSS as long as you follow the above-mentioned techniques to organize information (images, videos, podcast, text, and navigation).
Bad Examples Of Web Design
Know that “Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking”, graphic designer Ellen Lupton says. Some websites successfully manage the balance between white space and design, but there are several examples (on the web) of sites that are a visual mess. There is no focus, path and aesthetics. If you see websites loaded with content (written and visual) and you have no clue where to click – know that is an example you must never follow. If you simply search the keyword bad websites, your search engine will show you the images of all the designs that’ll surely sting your eye. They’re traumatizing and you don’t want to give your audience a hell-like experience. Instead you should follow the league of good website designs and aspire to be better than them.
What is your most-used visual hierarchy technique?
