Archive: May 2018

  1. Creative Logo Creation for Impactful Branding

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    A graphic designer should know the importance of brand identity in today’s marketing world. You don’t want people to get the wrong impression of your brand, so you have to make sure to capture your brand’s identity.

    Capturing your brand’s ethos given only a small image and a few words can be a massive task to take on. How can something (seemingly) so simple have so many profound effects on your brand? And, what if you pair the wrong logo to your brand?

    Some crucial steps will have to be taken to make sure you create the best logo design to maximize your brand’s potential.   

    Assess Your Audience

    Whether you’re designing a logo for yourself or a company website, an active assessment of who you are trying to attract and to whom you’ll be presenting this logo is vital to the design. The idea here is to show, in an image and minimal text, that your brand contains the essential qualities your audience is looking for. An examination of who your audience is, what they hope to get from your business, what they might like about your business, and what you can provide them with are all excellent starting points for you to create the visual symbol of your brand.

    For example, imagine if you were tasked to design a logo for a professional sports team. Chances are that this team wants their logo and what they represent to be high energy and intimidating. So, your design wouldn’t include something lifeless and dull like a wilted flower or a teddy bear. This design wouldn’t appeal to their audience, and wouldn’t represent them as a sports team, resulting in a failed design. So, when you’re coming up with your concepts, you’ll need to keep a couple of things in mind.

    Design Some Concepts

    In all likelihood, you aren’t going to strike gold on your first try at a logo design. It’s best to come up with several designs to be able to present before narrowing it down to the perfect logo. In doing this, play around with some different designs that follow different trends, typography, and color schemes.

    For example, take a look at the highly recognized McDonald’s logo. The Golden Arches entail a very minimalist design, all while having the appearance of an M, for McDonald’s. One of, if not the most successful fast food chain has created a logo in which almost anyone connect the design to the business.

    McDonald's Logo

    (Photo Credit: Font Meme)

    The color scheme uses red — presumably to represent movement and excitement — as well as yellow, to portray happiness and youth according to Label Value when characterizing color psychology. It’s extremely important to understand the subtle intricacies you can include in a logo to determine how you want to be perceived by your audience.

    Testing

    You aren’t planning on making the final decision of something as important as your brand logo by yourself, are you?  A highly suggested measure to take is that you showcase the mockups of your logo design to see what people think about it — mostly your prospective audience. This step is vital to the process, because if your design doesn’t appeal to the audience you are trying to engage, then your brand identity campaign will flop.

    One standard way to gain an audience’s opinion of your design is A/B testing. Optimizely’s expertise better helps explain A/B testing when they state, “A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a web page or app against each other to determine which one performs better.” This comparison is another reason why it is important to design several concepts — to pit the two against each other and see which one the audience likes better.

    Testing to gain a better understanding of audience approval is perhaps the most crucial step. You can design concepts all you want, but if it isn’t appealing to an audience, you’ll need to shelve those designs and come up with one that will captivate your targeted audience.

    Sometimes a design for a logo can be decided by you, and other times the decision will be decided by the company you work for. However, every time you’re designing a logo, you’ll want to consider the steps above to come out with a design that is clever, contemporary, and captivates the right audience.

  2. The Ultimate Guide To Creating a Conversion-Oriented Landing Page

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    Building a dedicated landing page for your varied marketing campaigns can be hard if you are unaware of the best practices that you need to incorporate. As a single goal-oriented page created for a specific purpose (to generate leads or grow your email list), you need to ensure that your landing page is optimized for conversion in order to yield the maximum out of it.

    Thus, here is the ultimate guide to creating a landing page that will show you exactly how to build a conversion-oriented landing page for your marketing campaigns. Comprising of 11 best practices, this guide comes in the form of an infographic which highlights the must-have landing page components. As such, go ahead and take a look at this infographic now and make the most out of it!

    The Anatomy Of A (Perfect) Landing Page [Infographic] by the team at LeadForest

    The Anatomy Of A Perfect Landing Page Infographic

    Photo by Jens Kreuter on Unsplash

  3. The Best Ways to Speed Up Your Mobile Website

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    In a world where everything is fast-paced, it would be normal for any Internet user to want speedy connectivity at all times, especially when they’re using their mobile devices while on the go. Mobile users also tend to be less patient when it comes to the loading speed of websites. Because they’re typically always in a hurry, they just drop any mobile site that takes three seconds or more to load.

    If you value the traffic, leads, and conversion that may come from mobile users, you have to make sure that your mobile website is up to snuff when it comes to speed. Here are some tips that could help you speed up the mobile version of your website.

    Activate AMP

    If you want to make your website not just perform well, but also look great on mobile, try Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP). Mobile pages created on AMP using ultra-minimalistic HTML are specifically designed to load fast on any mobile device or distribution platform.

    Minify your site’s code

    Each website has tons of code, and those codes have so many characters that some of them might just be unnecessary. You can “minify” your code—and make the site lighter—by removing those unnecessary characters. The lighter your site, the faster its loading times.

    Steer clear of custom fonts

    Custom fonts look nice, but they can slow down your site since such fonts are code-heavy. It would be great if you can avoid them altogether, but if you had to use them, keep them to headings or somewhere else they’re needed. With lesser or no custom fonts, your site will be lighter and faster.

    Ditch the large images

    Large images are also guilty of keeping your site’s loading speed down, and for obvious reasons. If possible, don’t use images at all, save for your site’s logo or any such important graphic. If you have to use images, then you should use compressed ones and scale them specifically for smartphones and tablets. Simpler and smaller images will always speed up your mobile website and should always be a part of your on site SEO strategy.

    Do Mobile SEO

    With the Google Mobile First Index already in full swing, making your mobile website faster would be in your best interest. After all, the Mobile First Index will have Google will base its rankings and search listings on your mobile site, regardless of the platform used for the search. Boosting page speed also happens to be one of the best practices for mobile SEO, so get up and optimize your mobile website now.

    Avoid redirects

    Unless there is a need to use redirects, you should avoid them as much as possible. The automatic process of moving a visitor to another location without them having to click anything is time-consuming. Redirects are even slower on mobile networks, and you could lose potential customers that way.

    Make the signup process shorter

    It is common for websites to implement a signup process that takes seven to eight steps to complete. If you own one such site, we recommend that you streamline the entire thing by cutting the steps down to about four or so. You’ll be cutting down on the code as well, so it would make your site lighter and load faster on mobile.

    Go for a simpler design

    We understand that there is a need for website owners to make their business look gorgeous online. However, they also have to know that a beautifully-designed website also means so much more code, which, as we have been hammering above, can make the site heavy and suffer from low loading speeds.

    Then again, it’s still possible to have a great-looking website even with a simpler—and therefore less code-heavy—design. A good web designer should be able to achieve a simple and responsive design with ease.

    Turn browser caching on

    Mobile browsers can now save web data on mobile devices for later use. If you activate browser caching, the loading time of your pages would be so much faster since the browser already “remembers” them.

    Before you make any tweaks to your mobile website, we suggest that you use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool first to test your site speed. That way, you will learn exactly what needs to be done to speed up your mobile website.