My Top Design Tricks
Everyone has their own unique design style, and there are some design styles that I really admire. I absolutely adore the work of Nick La from N.Design Studio — he’s probably my favorite designer and I often use his desktop backgrounds and etc. I also love the design work of 3Drops and Toffenut Design for their use of sleek interfaces.
No matter what I love most though, I’ve come to appreciate my own unique trends in my designs, and perfecting my own style has really led me to attract a certain type of client and work on certain types of websites that I enjoy designing. For anyone who may be interested in learning some of my techniques, below are a list of my top design tricks and trends that reflect my design style specifically.
Depth and 3D Space
I cannot create a web design without some sort of gradient and dropshadow; that’s just me. As you can see just from my portfolio design, I create depth by using a gradient on the header, a gradient at the top of the content area, and shadows over the space “in the background,” which is the purple, textured area. Whether it’s a small and subtle use of 3D space or a more creative approach, I always use depth in my designs.
Abstract Texture
I’m a sucker for texture. When I first began my portfolio design it was smooth with the sketched design as the main focus, but it just wasn’t enough for me. I had to add the fabric texture with it to make it more interesting. Same with the space design to the right of the image below — I could have left clean vertical lines but wanted to add some smokiness and noise.
The point is I always experiment with texture, and it’s something I can sort of get lost in. I can also keep texture pretty simple too, but always mess around with about 5 options before I’m satisfied with even the most simple of patterns or textures!
Realistic & App-Inspired Interfaces
This one sort of goes hand in hand with the depth one, but there’s a bit more to it. I love creating designs that seem real, or are app-inspired. Using a mixture of gradients, shadows, lighting and texture, I love finding new ways of making the elements I design more realistic.
I’m constantly working every day to improve with this tactic, and really admire the works of Farzad Ban and Angela of Toffenut Design.
Perfect Balance and Even Spacing
One last thing I obsess over is balance. Just check out some of the works in my portfolio and you can see how I enjoy centering things, and if I can’t center them, I even them out with color, contrast, texture, and more. All of the basic design principles are important to me, but for some reason balance stands out to me more than all of them.
I can’t create a design without rulers and finding the center point of a design, and the center point of any section of a design I’m working with. If I plan on centering an element within a section, I measure it exactly and specifically.
As it’s something I’ve focused on so much over the years, I’ve learned to spot imbalance in design very easily. Paying active attention to this and all of the other basic design principles such as repetition, contrast, and etc. is very important.
Want more design tips? Be sure to subscribe to my blog.
Good tips, Thanks Kayla.
For me, being part of the iGeneration, I’m always leaning toward making things slick and smooth, therefore I appreciate the encouragement toward textures and patterns. They are harder to integrate but when done right, really add some extra “pop”.