net - UK (2020-03)

PROJECTS
Headers

Above Great design

doesn’t necessarily have

to be simple, just not

unnecessarily complex

“Using visuals as elevation is

a much better approach to

captivating the user’s

attention in the long-term”

brand at another moment in time and think fondly of

us. In any case, we want to create a personality.

Infusing the main CTAs with brand colours is

a decent way to do this. Colourful, bold, abstract

shapes (and other fancy visuals) can look very nice

but they can also be deceivingly distracting and even

hint that a product has no substance. I’m not saying

that you shouldn’t use fancy visuals but don’t use

them if they’re not needed.

TYPOGRAPHY

The typeface I’ve used is Helvetica Neue. I’m sticking

with it because it’s already tech-y, modern and many

computers will already have the font installed (yay

for performance!). In this example, we don’t need to

add anything else. Just because we can, doesn’t mean

we should. Now I don’t advocate being lazy, just

mindful. It’s a win-win, really.

CONCLUSION

Although it’s a fairly basic hero header that obviously

isn’t complete (with it being a fake business and all), it

does show us that using visuals as elevation is a much

better approach to captivating the user’s attention

in the long-term than offering instant gratification

through stunning (but otherwise useless) visuals.

A lot of the time, in fact, the visual decisions that

we make are for usability or accessibility reasons and

the fact that they make the design look nice is just a

convenient by-product.

If we wanted to complete this hero header, we

could start by styling the still-a-wireframe UI

components. The reason that we didn’t already is

because we don’t want to mistakenly gloss over

the accessibility or usability of some of the most

important aspects of our website’s design and we’re

much less likely to do that after already having

created a design that’s very nice despite how

minimalist it looks.

To summa rise:

O Accessibility and usability are fantastic when it

comes to visual design.

O Content comes first and visual design should

elevate it.

O Less is more.