Brick-and-mortar stores use everything from décor and lighting to music and fragrances to engage their customers’ senses and create an ambiance that complements their brand. After all, creating the perfect shopping experience is the key to selling more.
As an ecommerce store owner, you don’t have the same luxury. With average bounce rates for websites hovering between 30-55%, it might even seem like you’re at a disadvantage. Therefore, you need a compelling website design strategy that conveys your brand’s messaging to its audience and encourages them to explore the products you have on offer.
When it comes to web design, most entrepreneurs focus on the website theme design alone. While an aesthetically designed theme is crucial to achieving an attractive website, you can also use graphic design to breathe new life into your design endeavors.
In this article, we’ve shortlisted 12 helpful Magento graphic design tips that you can use to boost your website design strategy.
Magento Graphic Design Tips
- Pick the Right Tool
Choosing the right design tool is an essential step in creating an attractive graphic. You no longer need to be an Adobe expert with Photoshop and Illustrator skills to create high-quality designs.
There are several user-friendly tools available on the market that you can choose from. While Adobe offers some of the best ones, most of its tools come with a steep learning curve and a hefty price tag. You can opt for freemium tools like Canva and Adobe Spark that allow you to use a drag-and-drop style user interface to create professional-looking designs.
The key here is to choose a tool you’re comfortable with so that you can focus on letting your creativity flow instead of losing time learning a new application.
- Have a Plan
Once you’ve settled on a design tool, the next important step is to create a plan. When you’re starting a new graphic design project, we recommend creating a ‘mood board’ to put down your ideas and build a blueprint for the final design. Doing this can help you organize your thoughts and consolidate your design inspiration.
Mood boards are an excellent way to collect different elements used to define your brand’s aesthetic. You can use it to describe the look you want to achieve, elements you wish to use, and the feeling you want the final design to invoke in the mind of your audience.
- Keep it Consistent
When designing graphics for multiple pages on a website, you should ensure consistency across all your layouts. This is essential to create a design strategy that seamlessly flows from element to element and across your website pages.
Creating template files for different graphics like Instagram posts, featured images for blog posts, and downloadable infographics will help you integrate new graphics into your existing design effortlessly. Most popular tools allow you to save templates for graphics even when using their free versions.
It’s also worth mentioning that including your brand’s logo or colors in your design is a subtle yet effective method to improve brand familiarity in your customers’ minds.
- Understand Visual Design Hierarchy
Understanding how the visual hierarchy in graphic design works will help you guide your customers to where you want them to look without making it obvious. This means arranging elements in a way that accounts for common page scanning patterns and taking advantage of audience tendencies to focus on the most prominent elements on a page.
Working with users’ ingrained tendencies rather than against them will make your design endeavors seem more natural and intuitive. Use these tendencies to guide your viewer’s eye to follow the path you’ve designed to portray your products or messaging. You can also use a mix of colors and strong fonts to make certain elements stand out more than others.
- Incorporate Lines into Your Design
Lines are an underrated element that can elevate a design instantly when used appropriately. Whether it’s free-form, horizontal, vertical, patterned, or solid, you can use lines in your design in several ways. They can connect content, add emphasis to content, direct customer attention to the call to action, and even create design patterns.
Incorporating lines into your graphics can help you communicate your message to your target audience more effectively. They can help you add balance to your design, add weight to different design elements, and improve user attention by making a graphic more appealing. Lines can be an excellent tool for organizing elements and even setting the tone in your design.
- Leverage Industry Trends
Web and graphic design trends can change faster than fashion trends; therefore, keeping up with the latest ones can be challenging, especially when you aren’t a full-time designer. What works for a business in the automotive industry may not work for another in the food industry.
Familiarity with industry trends and the preferences of its customer base will help you create targeted designs that are relevant to your audience. Top Magento website designers prioritize keeping up with the latest design trends to ensure their designs are fresh and innovative.
- Use White Space Effectively
Several designers use white space or negative space in everything, including logos, product packaging, and website design. They don’t view white space as a waste of design real estate or simply a background element but treat it as an active element in their design strategy.
White space can help you provide your viewers with a cleaner layout that decreases stress and Zoom fatigue. And contrary to popular belief, white space doesn’t always have to be white. You can use any color so long as it doesn’t pull the viewers’ attention from the call to action or primary design elements.
- Use Colors with a Purpose
Successful marketers have been using colors to invoke emotions and convey messages for years. Researchers have found that colors are responsible for influencing brand perceptions in consumers’ minds. The presence of white, yellow, and pink hues has been linked to portraying sincerity. Similarly, colors like black and purple have been linked to representing sophistication.
Using the right colors in your graphic design is a fantastic way to supplement your content and messaging. You can use colors like orange and red to add excitement to your design or incorporate shades of blue to convey trust and efficiency. For example, a Magento development agency Staylime uses a mix of purple, green, and white on their website to portray sophistication, competence, and reliability.
- Experiment with Textures
Incorporating textures into a digital design might seem strange at first. Still, textures are a great way to add depth and dimension to an otherwise flat design. You can add textures as overlays, backgrounds, and even elements inside your graphic to highlight different areas or add an element of surprise.
However, you must also be judicious when using textures, as too much of a good thing can be harmful. Sometimes, mixing multiple textures can hurt your design goals instead of helping them. Implementing natural textures is a great way to bring an organic feel to a modern design. The key here is to ensure a distinct contrast between the naturally textured background and the foreground.
- Be Clever with Your Typography
Typography is an art form that consists of arranging text to impact your audience and convey your message efficiently. After all, the goal is to get your message across to your customers.
Several factors influence the legibility of fonts and impact how well your message is conveyed. These include:
- Weight
- Style
- Line height
- Line length
- Tracking
- Leading
- Hierarchy
Each of these factors requires careful consideration when creating an attractive graphic design. But finding matching fonts for multiple elements can be a challenging task. Browsing websites like Typewolf can work wonders when you’re struggling for inspiration.
- Choose Backgrounds Wisely
Backgrounds create the foundation for your graphic design. They impact the overall feel of the graphic and influence how easily your message is conveyed. A carefully curated background can be the difference between a successful and a failed design project.
You can implement endless background options in any design, from solid colors to patterns, gradients, and images. The key here is to be highly selective with your choice, as a poor selection can hurt your design significantly. You can use websites like Pexels, Unsplash, and even Adobe Stock to find background images for your website and graphic design.
- Don’t Shy Away from Using Icons
Icons are a great way to make designs more engaging and to illustrate key points visually. However, overusing them can make a design appear cluttered and out of place, especially when used with heavily textured backgrounds. Icons are best used on solid backgrounds in contrasting colors.
Graphic design tools like Canva include in-built icon libraries for you to choose from. If you find their selection inadequate, you can always use other icon services like Iconfinder that offer both free and paid options.
The Bottom Line
Using the design tips in this article, you can create graphics that can help you convey, convince, and convert your website visitors into buying customers.
A well-thought graphic design strategy can help you differentiate your brand from your competitors and create a unique identity in the mind of your audience.
About the Author
Jan Guardian is the Chief Business Development Officer at Staylime, a Magento design and development company headquartered in Redwood City, California. He is a Member of the Magento Association and an Adobe Sales Accredited Magento Commerce professional.
Jan is responsible for developing and leading the sales and digital marketing strategies of the company. He is passionate about eCommerce and Magento in particular — throughout the years his articles have been featured on Retail Dive, Hacker Noon, Chief Marketer, Mobile Marketer, TMCnet, and many others.
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