Research – Five Baking Websites for Design Inspiration!

Five Baking Websites for Design Inspiration!

Here are my favourite baking websites that I find best in terms of the design elements, user-friendly interface, delicious recipes and colourful pictures. Have a quick read!

1. Bakerella

Bakerella — and all the delicious treats and recipes she shares. Blogger is the creator of cupcake pops! She posts dozens of yummy recipes from cakes and pies to brownies to cheesecakes. One extraordinary feature of the blog is high resolution, colorful and fantastic pictures showcasing her creations.

2. SprinkleBakes

This blog is full of unique and the most creative recipes. The blog is easy to read, bright and provide a friendly reader interface. Apart from the content and the pictures, blogger has used negative space very effectively. Heather never takes long to reply to any of the queries posted by any reader.

3. Lovin’ From the Oven

Blogger, kim doesn’t not just share recipes but she also shares real-life stories along with her beautiful photographs. Kim keeps updating FAQ section for the readers that entails her day-to-day experiences. Her blog also has a section wherein readers can buy the equipments that she also uses in her kitchen. Kim is an avid photographer as well as a flight attended, therefore, content of her blog reflects her personal life experiences along with her penchant for baking.

4. Joy the Baker

Joy is an author, photographer and a die hard donut enthusiast, so her recipe index is full — and I love it! Her blog truly meets every type of eaters’ needs, and she has a book — Joy the Baker Cookbook. The best part of her blog is that it is quite engaging and has video/podcasts in there. Joy’s blog not only create conversations with the home readers but also connects with different brands. Blog has a separate section showcasing her current brand associations the blogger has.

 5. Brown Eyed Baker

Michelle shares recipes for both cakes as well as meals— such as Cajun shrimp macaroni and cheese. Michelle’s self-taught, making her recipes doable for both novice and expert bakers . Entire website is done in just two colors, i.e – pink and brown. Warmth of brown color and sophistication and romance of pink tones makes it extremely soothing for its target readers. Another interesting element in the website is the ‘archives’ section that gives readers an ease to reflect back on the recipes posted earlier by the blogger.

Research – Don’t Make Your Website a Rainbow!

Don’t Make Your Website a Rainbow

The most impactful websites are the ones that keep the use of colour to a minimum. Choose the right color for your website, it is more difficult to read text on a monitor than it is on paper, so we should be very careful while choosing the colours for a website. Some colour combinations are very hard on the eye, such as a yellow text on green background. The reason you see black text on a white background so often is that it is the easiest colour combination to read, both on and offline.

For instance:

• Green is often associated with freshness;
• White means purity; and
• Purple is associated with royalty

Colours also have both positive and negative associations. Some common colour associations are listed below:

 
Red:
Positive: Sense of power, strength, action, passion, and love
Negative: Anger, forcefulness, danger, impatience, violence

Yellow:
Positive: Brightness, warmth and joy
Negative: Caution and warning

Blue:
Positive: Cool and tranquil, patience, comfort, loyalty and security
Negative: Fear, coldness, passivity and depression

Orange:
Positive: Warmth, friendliness and cheerfulness, excitement 
Negative: Ignorance

Green:
Positive: Nature, growth, freshness and soothing
Negative: Envy, greed, guilt and jealousy

Black:
Positive: Dramatic, sophisticated and stylish, serious
Negative: Evil and death

White:
Positive: Pure, fresh, easy, cleanliness or goodness
Negative: Blind, winter, cold, distant

A major goal in marketing is to evoke emotion in your audience. By choosing the colours for your website with care, you can evoke an emotional response that will increase sales. Here are a few tips you should consider while selecting color palettes for your website:

1. Use a natural palette of colors

They are more pleasing than any of their artificial counterparts. Combine them in order to evoke the emotional response that you want to get from your target readers. Unnatural colors, such as bright green, blue or red usually cause eye fatigue and chase visitors (i.e. prospects) away.

2. Create a strong contrast between a page’s background and its text

The best combination for readability is black text on white background, but there are also other excellent combination. Besides white, other effective web site background colors are dark blue, gray and black. The situation is not the same for product promotions. When the product is the center of attention, desaturated colors are recommended.

3. Select an average of 3 different colors and use them consistently throughout the web site

Chromatic harmony is one of the most important criteria in order to create a pleasant experience for the visitors. It is strongly recommended that a moderate number of colors should be employed; four or five is ok; more than that not only will they create inconsistency, by they will also cause an eye sore for the visitor making him skip important parts of the site.

4. Be sure to take into account people with visual disabilities

Make sure that the message of your site reaches such people as well. By staying within the recognized 216 “browser-safe color selections,” you can be assured that the colors you choose will be passed on without change. This is important because certain color combinations lose their effectiveness when the level of contrast is diminished to vision-impaired viewers. Degrees of hue, lightness and saturation can be less distinguishable, which can be a significant problem, especially if the colors are being used as primary indicators.

Research – Digital Media Influencers Every Web Designer Should Know

Digital Media Influencers Every Web Designer Should Know

Take any creative field and you’ll find well-known influencers who are responsible for leading the way, either with new interpretations, technical approaches or ideas. Of course, the world of web design is no different. We’ve got our own champions and leaders, although it’s surprisingly difficult to pick just a few names every web designer should know.

1. Ethan Marcotte

One of the web’s best-known designers Ethan is a regular and popular speaker on the conference circuit and, in his own words, the one who “started that whole ‘responsive web design’ thing”.

2. Chris Coyier

A world-known CSS expert and HTML guru, Chris Coyier writes one of the most popular CSS blogs on the web, CSS-Tricks.

3. Karen McGrane

UX expert Karen McGrane motto is simple – ‘On a good day, I make the web more awesome. On a bad day, I make it suck less’. A content strategist and user experience designer, Karen has over 15 years experience of making big, complicated websites.

4. Andy Clarke

Andy is a well-known speaker on the conference circuit, and is the founder of a Welsh-based design studio, Stuff and Nonsense, that boasts clients including the likes of The Home Office, STV and the International Organization for Standardization. Andy is perhaps best known for his book, Hardboiled Web Design, which combined the idea of progressive enhancement with responsive web design.

5. Dan Cederholm

Dan is the author of five web design books covering everything from standards-based code approaches to Sass. As well as writing, Dan is a practicing web designer, and a popular speaker. Alongside Rich Thornett, Dan is a co-founder of the popular dribbble.com show-and-tell website that allows designers to upload micro-shots of their work in progress.

Research – List of a Few Website Disasters

List of a Few Website Disasters

After a thorough research, I have compiled a list of of the biggest mistakes in web design.

1. Bad Search

Search engines should be user friendly, overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. In this digital era, almost everybody is searching for content online, making it the user’s lifeline. Everything stops when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that’s what users are looking for.

2. PDF Files for Online Reading

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work.

3. Non-Scannable Text

A verbose copy doesn’t add to an interactive experience. It’s intimidating, monotonous, boring and painful to read.To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:

• subheads
• bulleted lists
• highlighted keywords
• short paragraphs
• the inverted pyramid
• a simple writing style, and
• de-fluffed language devoid of marketese

4. Fixed Font Size

CSS style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser’s “change font size” button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny , reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms — not as an absolute number of pixels.

5. Not Answering Users’ Questions

Users are highly goal-driven on the Web. They visit sites because there’s something they want to accomplish — maybe even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for.

Research – Important Web Design Elements One Should Know

Important Web Design Elements One Should Know

The design of your blog or website is equally important to engage with your readers. Design is one element which can not and should not be ignored. You can implement any conversion boosting tactic in the world, but if it looks like crap, it won’t do much good. The more you learn about design, the better results it will generate.

Here are a few important design elements that I could think of.

1: #Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is one of the most important principles behind good web design. It’s the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees.Certain parts of your website are more important than others (forms, calls to action, value proposition etc), and you want those to get more attention than the less important parts. If you website menu has 10 items, are all of them equally important? Where do you want the user to click? Make important links more prominent. Hierarchy does not only come from size. Amazon makes the ‘Add to cart’ call to action button more prominent by using color:

Visual hierarchy suggests there is a proper way to view content visually: in a hierarchical way. In other words, there is a pecking order to things…some content should be viewed first, some second, some third, and on down the line. The most important content is at the top of the hierarchy. It’s the visual element you look at first, which then directs you to what to look at next.

2: #Hick’s Law

Hick’s law says that with every additional choice increases the time required to take a decision. This law is about the Paradox of Choice – the more choice you give people, the easier it is to choose nothing. The more options a user has when using your website, the more difficult it will be to use (or won’t be used at all). So in order to provide a more enjoyable experience, we need to eliminate choices. To make a better web design, the process of eliminating distracting options has to be continuous throughout the design process. In the era of infinite choice, people need better filters!

3: #Rule of Thirds

The best images follow the rule of thirds: an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. See how the image on the right is more interesting? That’s rule of thirds in action.

The Rule of Thirds is perhaps the most well-known principle of photographic composition as well.

4: #White space and clean design

White space (also called ‘negative space’) is the portion of a page left “empty”. It’s the space between graphics, margins, gutters, space between columns, space between lines of type or visuals.

It should not be considered merely ‘blank’ space — it is an important element of design. It enables the objects in it to exist at all. White space is all about the use of hierarchy. The hierarchy of information, be it type, colour or images.

A page without white space, crammed full of text or graphics, runs the risk of appearing busy, cluttered, and is typically difficult to read (people won’t even bother).

5: #Load Time

Everybody hates a website that takes ages to load. Tips to make page load times more effective include optimising image sizes (size and scale), combining code into a central CSS or JavaScript file HTML (compressed to speed up their load time).

Mindfulness is the key to a peaceful life!

We often lose emotional stability in life!