Web design, as well as fashion, is always changing together with new trends coming and leaving. If you want to build a website, which would look professionally, you are to be aware of the latest tendencies in web designing. It is very important to make a good first impression like when you get acquainted with a new person.
Web design includes all the design rules (colour combination, proportion observance and etc.), but you won’t get good results and customer’s pleasant comments unless you obey some rules which exist in web design.
There will be some examples of the most important rules below. In fact, each non-observance of rules is a mistake. That’s why I will name the rules that you shouldn’t stay away from.
– Nowadays it’s generally accepted to make designs basing on the twelve-column grid : a grid of 12 columns, which can be found in all popular frameworks for HTML/CSS-coding.
Here is the photoshop design billet: the design template for Bootstrap 4
The analogical template can be found or can be done for any other graphics editor and for any other framework. You should remember that almost all website elements, practically without exceptions, have to begin and end on the vertical guides of the twelve-column grid.
– There are some standard screen resolutions under which the design is being developed. I.e. the webpage design can’t have an arbitrary size and scope. If you want to gain a good result, use the template that you can download from the reference above, and there should be no problems with page resolutions and scopes.
– The fonts. You are to use 2-3 fonts on all the website pages and not more. Otherwise, the website is going to be heavy and some problems with pages’ speed loading will appear. Maybe you will be interested in reading our article named “Optimization of the website speed loading. Why does the website load too long?”. There shouldn’t be extremely many font sizes. If the website has all the font sizes from 14px to 110px, the page will lose its integrity.
– The sizes of the elements and spaces between them . In order not to turn the design into a muddle, all the elements and spaces should be standardized.
– Colours. The more colourful the website the more it resembles a coloring book.
– The empty (white) space. Quite a lot of designers are afraid of making indents of sufficient size between the design elements. Big empty spaces look really bad, but elements that are not separated from each other spoil the appearance of the page.
– Text on the images. You shouldn’t make inscriptions on a heterogeneous and meaningful images . The thing is that responsive design presupposes that the text will be represented differently on different devices and it’s sometimes even impossible to make the image save its meaning and to make the text not to fall into the meaningful part of the photo. Illustrations, which are put as a filling of the block of particular sizes, should be chosen very carefully. With the changing of its dimensions through the responsiveness the cutting of the image will happen depending on the size of the screen. You shouldn’t forget this and this should be taken into consideration.
– Icons. For the icons, it’s necessary to use icon fonts or to generate fonts in order to make the icons of the same style, small weight and it would be easy to use them while building a page.
This doesn’t have a certain attitude toward web design , but worrying that the HTML developer will have to do double work and the customer will have to pay for it I’d like to point out that it’s necessary to get to the coding only when the structure of the website and the web-design of a page, the design of which is necessary to convert into HTML, are completely finished.
Here I wrote about the stages of building a website, while working with clients
By the way, the structure of a site and prototypes I’d recommend you to build in Microsoft Visio.
So, that’s all. I wish you inspiration and creative success. Always broaden your mind, be aware of trends and create new things! However it may seem that the rules of the web design narrow its borders and make it boring, in reality, they make it logical, rather simple and give an opportunity to every person with taste and patience to study how to create a masterpiece. And the last advice. People get used to standards, which already exist, and hardly adapt to innovations. That’s why do not complicate anything and don’t try to make a know-how, because the design should be intuitively understandable.
I wish you success and good luck!