Design Process
It starts off with a “ticket”. Our Onboarding Specialist speaks with the client and then fills out a ticket that gets delivered to a designer. In it, I’ll find design notes, example sites, and any links I’ll need.
Logo
Using a combination of client-provided images and grabs from the branding example, I created a “mood-board” and went from there. I made a lighthouse icon in Illustrator, and played with different typography and colors. Finally, I settled on these two options. Once I was satisfied with the logo, I jumped into mapping out the site.
Our content team will have already written all the content for the site and provided it in a separate document. It is my job to find a place for every headline and decide what content needs to go where.
Things I consider:
- Calls to action – I strategically place buttons and links to direct users to contact the client
- Consistency – I carefully consider branding consistency through typography, color, and layout
- User experience – My goal is to create something informative that ultimately leads to a user taking a certain action (often contacting the client or purchasing a product)
- Navigation – A clean, easy-to-follow navigation will prevent users from getting lost
- Site Speed & Performance – All media and code on the site needs to be optimized to load in under 3 seconds or we lose users immediately
- Responsiveness – All sites I make go through a rigorous QA process when I’m finished. To avoid back and forth between myself and my QA analyst, I QA the site first. I am careful to ensure that all content on the site scales down to every device on every browser.
- Stock vs Client Images – Sometimes using stock images really elevates a site but using client-provided images makes a site feel real and relatable. I try my best to find a balance between the two, when I can, to give users a real impression of my client’s business.