Are you starting your journey as a web designer? Well, then you will get a lot of opportunities to show off your designing skills, but with great opportunities comes challenges. Moreover, it’s too easy for a beginner to get lost in the mad scramble to get your designing tasks completed in time, and finding new work. But, you can make you life easier and focus on delivering high-quality designs by following a few simple tips and tricks.
Through this post, I’ll share some tips and tricks that every designer should know to boost their productivity and speed up their workflow.
Before You Start
Remember that a web design is not only about giving shape to your design idea, it includes various things just like to convert psd to html files, design innovative frames, graphics etc. You also need to make your design innovative and interactive enough to easily capture your users attention. Right from your website layout, to typography, dealing with images, etc. – there are plenty of things you need to pay heed to when working with a web design. But, as you may know, dealing with each of these elements can be tedious.
Now, let us proceed and discuss the tips and tricks that can save hours of your time in working on the most crucial aspects of web design.
Easy-to-Follow Tips and Tricks For Novice Designers
1. Creating Layouts
Creating a professional and clutter-free web design layout can be challenging for novice designers. With too many options available online, it’s easy for novices to become overwhelmed and stressed. Fortunately, there are several design tools over the web that might prove useful for you in creating user-friendly and responsive layouts.
Despite the evolution of technology, many designers still prefer the old-fashioned paper and ink approach to creating basic sketches for their web design project. So, if you’re one of those designers you’ll definitely love the InterfaceSketch tool. It facilitates designers with a few PDF (free to use) templates – that are designed specifically to match different mobile device screens. All you have to do is to take a print out of the available PDFs, and then create a sketch of your initial designs using those PDFs. Even though, this will only help you deal with the basics of web design, but it’s useful enough to visualize what you want to create.
Grids are considered to the best way to structure and balance a website design. In fact, “The best websites are designed to a grid,” as quoted by Rhys Little, Strategy director at Plug and Play. However, setting up grids in Photoshop all the time can be exhausting. But, thanks to Guide Guide you can make the process of creating custom grids in Photoshop a breeze.
This tool helps save your time in designing responsive pages manually. The Responsive Web CSS tool helps add
elements for each section of a web page, and then set the size of each div based on how you would want it to look on varied devices. And, after keeping all the elements in their desired place, simply download an HTML+CSS skeleton for your website.
A few other tools you can consider for the task of creating layouts are StyleTiles, Wirefy, etc.
2. Dealing With Images
While adding images to a web design is essential for enhancing the look and feel of that design, but you can’t deny the fact that images can also increase the load time of a page. And so, it becomes important to optimize images for improving your design loading time. However, image optimization is not a cakewalk, and is rather an art that is difficult to master. But there are several image optimization tools out there that can help in reducing your image file size. Some of the best image optimization tools are:
• Smush.it
Smush.it is one of the most popular and extensively used image compression tools – that helps in reducing the size of image files.
Often when adding images to our web designs, we end up stuffing the design with unnecessary bloat in the form of metadata. You can avoid such a situation, by stripping (i.e. cleaning or removing) any unwanted metadata (junk) from image files of different formats like JPG, JPEG, PNG, and JFIF.
Apart from using image optimization (or compression) tools, you can even use tools that can help make the process of creating fluid images a hassle free task. This is where the Adaptive Images website comes in handy.
It’s a well-understood fact that loading a desktop-centric image on smaller device screen will make your design load slowly. And so, you’ll most likely need to hard core changes within your markup to make your images adaptive to any device screen size. Of course, a beginner might find this task somewhat daunting, but Adaptive Images can help make your image fluid and adapt to the viewers’ screen automatically.
3. Look Out For Color Inspiration
The color scheme you use in your web design can have a profound impact on your viewers, which can be either positive or negative. Using the right colors can help in creating a good first impression on your target audience. Bear in mind that color is an important design element that can help in creating a huge difference in increasing your design’s conversion rate online.
One best way to find the perfect color schemes for your design is to search for color inspiration for your design projects. There are many websites and tools that can help inspire you to make use of the right color hues. Let’s have a look at such sites and tools:
This website helps in searching for color inspiration beyond a color palette. Designspiration let you choose up to five color hues from a full-page palette, and uses that color combination for all the images that need to be displayed in its database.
It’s a community of creatives where members (from around the world) share their color ideas, designs and much more. In this website, you can find inspiration for using color palettes and patterns. In addition, you will also find many articles regarding the latest web trends and so on.
Kuler is one of the most widely used cloud-based interface designed by Adobe – that helps create brilliant color schemes. You can browse for color schemes and can even build your choice of color schemes through the site. What’s more? You can even share your color schemes using the Adobe Air app on the desktop, or using the dashboard widget of Mac OS X system.
Wrapping Up
As a novice designer, you’ll certainly find working on web design projects challenging in today’s competitive web world. However, you can make your task less tedious and troublesome following the tips and tricks covered in this post. Although, the list of tricks we’ve listed in the form of tools is far from comprehensive, but it hopefully it will help you work on the web design basics in an efficient manner.