Design is rather a subjective thing, it could be argued. However over the years, mankind has discovered what is universally appealing to the majority of people in terms of typography, layout and colour matching. Our God seems to have bestowed even our appreciation of beauty with form and reason. Those of us who are trained in graphic design have had the privilege of discovering these “rules” and it’s quite remarkable.
For instance, the rule of thirds helps us divide up a page to make sure that it appears balanced and well weighted.
Because you are in control of the content of your site, it makes sense to equip you with some basic design knowledge to allow you to layout your pages and posts in an eye-pleasing manner. Here follows a few tips to help you get to grips with some fundamentals of design.
Typography
Typography is graphic design that applies to type. It includes font choice, letter spacing, line spacing, emphasis, and size. We’ll cover each of these in brief here.
Font Choice
There are literally thousands and thousands of fonts in existence, but most can be grouped into categories. At a basic level, you’ll be choosing between Serif fonts: such as Times New Roman which has little flourishes or serifs at the points of each letter; Sans-Serif fonts: such as Arial or Helvetica (the font this document is written in) which is plainer and simpler – no ‘serifs’; decorative fonts: which includes fancy font styles that have been heavily designed and embellished or Script fonts: which are designed to look like hand-writing.
Which Font Should You Choose?
Well, the best practice is to never use more than 2 fonts on the same page. You might choose to use A serif font for all your headings and sub-headings and a sans-serif font for your body text. If you go over this 2 font threshold, things start getting messy and unbalanced pretty quickly. Serif fonts such as Times New Roman are easier to read as body text as the serifs are designed to lead your eye more easily from letter to letter and word to word. On the web, most designers tend to use sans-serif fonts such as Arial for body text, presumably because it’s a bit cleaner looking. But there’s no rules about this. Sans-serif fonts also tend to lend a more modern feel.
Letter Spacing
You won’t have any control over this in Wordpress, but just so you know how it works, larger fonts should have smaller letter spacing and smaller fonts should have larger letter spacing.
Line Spacing
Line spacing is key in readability. Text that is too bunched up is hard to read. So is text that has too much line spacing. The key is to experiment and see what feels right.
Emphasis
This just means using bold, italics and underline. These should be used either for sub-subheadings or emphasising a word in a sentence. Emphasis can also be used to create contrast between a field title and it’s contents. Such as ‘Name: Joe Bloggs.’ Don’t go overboard with emphasis because suddenly, there’ll be so much emphasis, that there won’t be any at all, if you follow me.
Size
Main headings should be largest – 16pt – 24pt, sub-headings about 2-thirds smaller at 14pt-16pt and body text should be between 12pt and 14pt.
Colour
Want to know the single most damaging thing you can do to your new page or blog post? That’s right, colour. It might seem to many of us that the more colour and emphasis and difference in font and size etc, the more interesting a page is to read. Actually it works in the opposite way. We need uniformity, consistency and balance on a page, that means keeping colour to a minimum. We recommend you follow the colour schemes set up in your site already – they should be sufficient. If you must make colour changes to your text, make them a couple of shades lighter or darker than existing colours already used in the site.
The Bottom Line: more than 2 fonts, 2 or 3 colours, and 3 sizes of text in your headings and body is a big fat mess.
Image Placement and Formatting
We design our sites so that your images are automatically bordered when they are aligned left or right. All you have to do having inserted an image is to set whether it should float to the left or right. This means whether it is aligned to the left of the page so that text floats round it on the right or if it is aligned to the right of the page so that text floats round it on the left. We’ll leave it to you which looks best.
Image size
Images need to be just large enough for the visitor to be able to see what it is a picture of. If you make your image too big, it will a) take longer to load, and b) dominate the page and distract the user from reading. Wordpress allows you to insert your image at 3 different sizes. We recommend you use the thumbnail setting which will enter it at it’s smallest size.
Before you upload your images to Wordpress, it’s a good idea to resize them first in a graphics app like Paintbrush or iPhoto. That way they won’t take so long to load on your site – a crucial factor in your visitors’ browsing experience.
A Word About Photos
Bad photographs spoil your site. If you have an image of someone that is too dark, too overexposed, too blurred, too far away or rather revealingly too close, it can really ruin the lovely design that surrounds it.
Try and choose your images to go with your colour scheme if possible. Use good quality images if you’re using your own. Try purchasing some credits from www.istockphoto.com and download some professional images to upload. Alternatively, you may be able to find free images at sites like www.sxc.hu.
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