Devon’s Design Dish #2

Below is a weekly roundup of design articles I pulled this week that I thought were A) very interesting or B) useful in our PPC world. Comment below with your thoughts on the articles or what you would like to see in next weeks Design Dish.

Guide To Using Heat Maps
Heat Maps are a tool that provides actionable data specifically about how your visitors use your site. They show you how to get the most out of your site, not someone else. Heat Maps show you exactly how visitors are using your site, so you know how to design, build and layout a site to make your visitors happy and achieve your end goal.
Conclusions from heat map testing:

• Menu Bars are distracting; remove them from a homepage and landing pages
• Images receive the most clicks
• Sidebars generally are ignored
• Call to Actions work better above AND below the fold (use both)
• Remove any unnecessary fields to capture more emails

7 Habits Of Effective Web Designers
As a designer this article was very insightful to read. Its not about the skills that make a good designer, a point that blog articles belabor, but instead the habits that make an effective designer. It lists 7 habits that are key when working with an agency and clients that are going to lean on your expertise to deliver a great and effective product.

9 Awesome Tools That Pro Web Designers Use
Designers often look to tool that can make our lives easier or make our process better/faster. This article lists 9 tools to enhance your web design workflow. Being a typography-lover, I immediately installed the WhatFont extension to be able to identify different fonts on webpages to inspire my own work and build my knowledge on typefaces.

New Identity For Sonos
We constantly have our sonos on and switch between various playlists throughout the day to foster creativity and culture. That is why this article stood out to me. Sonos has undergone a visual identity “update.” The logo has remained the same but the identity around it has been remixed to advance the idea of the modern music experience. The article itself definitely provides inspiration in my work as I look to update and rework landing pages and banner ads.