Making It Look Good: Visual Styles and Aesthetics
In Chapter Nine of Jennifer Tidwell’s “Designing Interfaces” we really begin to examine design and various principles used in websites. Tidwell explains that the Stanford Web Credibility Project rated the design of a website number one on their list of how users judge website credibility.
One of the reasons why it is so important is that it establishes your brand, “A brand identity is important because it establishes familiarity and sets expectation for someone’s experience with an organization’s products.”(Tidwell, p.270) Of course a lot of time with social media the product is you, so the question is are you representing and branding yourself right?
After reading this chapter I began to think about my social media profiles and if I designed my pages appropriately. Then I spent some time looking around on MySpace and other social media websites where people can design their page using css elements and I saw a lot of common mistakes that Tidwell addressed in this chapter.
Take a look at three mistakes that I see a lot of people make and see if you are doing any..,
Typography:
“Avoid italicized, cursive, or otherwise ornamental fonts: they are unreadable at small sizes”
I can’t tell you how many pages I see with cursive writing, people don’t realize how hard it is to read. “But it looks pretty.” Pretty but unreadable, what is more important?
“All-caps is too hard to read for body text , though it’s okay for headlines and short text, if the font is chosen carefully. Capital letters tend to look similar, and are hard for a reader to differentiate.”
I have found bloggers on MySpace that write in all caps. Genius… well not really.
Use of White Space:
“Crowded design can evoke urgency or tension under some circumstances. Why? Because text and other graphic elements need to “breathe”-when they’re colliding against each other, or against edges or borders of the page, they cause visual tension.”
This is a problem I see not only on social media pages but also blog sites as well. There is nothing wrong with some white space, there isn’t a need to have every single space filled with widgets, ads, images, text, and whatever else.
Are you making any of these design mistakes?
Tags: desiging interfaces, Jennifer Tidwell, social media design, Social-MediaRelated Stories
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