A Beginner’s Guide to Achieving Web Design Consistency

The need to be consistent in web design is one of the first things many designers learn. And despite the fact that it is a core tenant of good design, consistency can be difficult to obtain.  Whether that is due to the scale of the project or other stakeholders want to have their say, entropy is a law for a reason.

In this post we are going to take a look at some steps you can take to make sure your website has consistent design.

What is Web Design Consistency?

Consistency in web design is the practice of maintaining a uniform appearance, feel, and usability across all pages of a website. Website design consistency involves the systematic use of similar design elements and structures, such as color schemes, fonts, layouts, and navigation menus, to create a cohesive and intuitive user experience. This consistency helps users to navigate and interact with the site more efficiently, fostering a sense of familiarity and trust in the brand or company represented by the website.

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Benefits of Website Design Consistency

To put it briefly, the user experience improves when you use consistency in your design.

Consistent design is intuitive design. Having the same functions, symbols, and animations throughout your website will help the usability and learnability of your website. When your design is consistent people are able to transfer past knowledge they had about your website to other pages. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. Have you ever been frustrated by a website? Chances are it was designed with poor consistency.

If a website is designed with consistency, the user will learn things about the site without even realizing it. Imagine your website is the house you live in. You know your way around the house without having to think about it. When a guest comes over to your house the layout can be slightly confusing for them. The job of a designer is to be as consistent as possible to avoid confusing the guest.

There are three major elements of design consistency that need to be focused on to achieve avoiding confusion for your guest.

1. Visual Website Consistency

Elements of your website that are perceived the same way make up visual consistency. Visual consistency helps the user learn the website. Fonts, buttons, photos, and colors are just a few of the many elements of visual consistency. These elements need to stay the same throughout your site. Visual consistency is lost as soon one of these elements doesn’t remain consistent throughout your site.

2. Functional Web Design Consistency

Functional consistency comes down to things being predictable for the user. Having good functional consistency will vastly improve the usability of your website. The predictability that comes with functional consistency will make the user feel more comfortable navigating your site.

An example of this would be where navigation buttons are located. Are they located in consistent places throughout the pages on your website? If they are, you’re achieving functional consistency!

3. Internal Web Design Consistency

Internal consistency is the combination of both functional and visual consistency. As you continue to add content to your website you need to make sure the visual and functional elements remain consistent with past pages. An example of bad internal consistency would be updating visual elements on a page on your website without also updating past pages that contain those same older elements.

If you achieve these three elements of design consistency it will result in a better site where the users will have a more enjoyable experience.

How to Be Consistent in Your Web Designs

Now that you know the elements you need to achieve, you may be wondering how you go about achieving them.

Branding, typography, colors, space, and grid will all define the visuals of your website. These need to consistent. You’ll want to create a strong visual hierarchy, the most important things are larger than the less important things. Use the same color palette across the product. Padding and margins need to be consistent in all similar elements (buttons, forms, etc.). Everything should be ordered in a grid and nothing on the website should break this grid.

Now that you have your visuals out of the way, make sure everything functions consistently. Do the forms and buttons throughout your website all work the same way? If you have a multi-step form, do all of the boxes function the same? These are important things to double check.

Final Thoughts

Nobody is perfect when it comes to design consistency, but it’s important to strive for it. Design your website with your user in mind. Know who your user demographic is and make sure your website anticipates their needs. Combine this knowledge with design consistency and you will have a website that has no unwanted surprises and gives the user a great experience.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Achieving Web Design Consistency is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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What Are The Best Design Inspiration Sites? 

These are the five best design inspiration sites on the web:

1. Dribble
2. Behance
3. Abduzeedo
4. Awwwards
5. Pinterest

1. Dribbble

Dribbble is the best website to find design inspiration.

This site is an online community for designers to showcase their own artwork. Dribbble uses an invite-only membership system, which helps to keep the quality of artwork up. Members are given a handful of invites to freely give out to other designers. This ensures the artwork on the site is from talented designers and not someone who can just use Photoshop.

P.S. Follow me on Dribbble. 

2. Behance

Behance is another online community for designers to showcase their artwork.

What differentiates Behance from Dribbble is that anyone can join and post on the site. This gives Behance a bigger archive of artwork compared to Dribbble. The large assortment of artwork makes finding specific design inspiration much easier.

3. Abduzeedo

Abduzeedo is a design blog filled with inspiration, case studies, tutorials, and much more.

This site is equipped with a “daily inspiration” category on their site, too. It’s curated daily, and includes interesting things/finds/work to spark inspiration.

4. Awwwards 

Awwwards is a professional web design and development competition site.

This is my favorite place to find web design inspiration. Awwwards’ search tool allows you to filter for the exact inspiration you are looking for. Since it is also an award site, you can also see the best work from specific categories. 

5. Pinterest

Pinterest is another great site to find design inspiration and craft tutorials.

I will be honest, I don’t often use Pinterest to find design inspiration. What I do use Pinterest for is to create mood boards. You can create a board for a project and add in multiple images and links to use for inspiration.  

Get Offline

If the ideas are still not flowing, it might be a good time to step away from the computer and look elsewhere for inspiration. Get your mind on something else for a while and come back to your work later. Don’t get discouraged; inspiration can come from anywhere!

A Designer’s 5 Favorite Design Inspiration Sites is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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What Is a Trend Cycle, Anyway?

If you’ve never heard the term “trend cycle” before, don’t worry—it means pretty much exactly what it says. Trend cycles are most commonly used in the fashion industry to chart the rise and fall of particular clothing trends. These cycles can be short-lived and niche, spanning only a season or two, while others can last decades or longer, becoming beloved classics that never truly go out of style.

What Causes Trend Cycles?

Broadly speaking, trends are driven by the complex struggle between the forces of nostalgia and anticipation. The most common length for trend cycles is roughly 20 years, which is coincidentally about how long it takes for a child to be born, grow up, and enter the workforce. These young professionals are in a unique position to make work inspired by the media environment of their early childhoods, encouraged by the pulling force of nostalgia. However, they are also positioned to reject trends that were popular during their later teen years, and push towards the as-yet undesigned future.

Here’s a quick example. In the early 2000s, many American children had a shared cultural experience of staying up late to watch reruns of the 90s sitcom The Nanny on Nick at Nite. Fast-forward 20 years, and these children have become the adults who determine what’s fashionable, whether they’re designing clothes themselves or purchasing these products and posting about them on TikTok. This is why items like heart-shaped handbags are currently having a moment—right now, looks inspired by Fran Fine’s wardrobe on The Nanny are having an even bigger moment.

How Do Trend Cycles Manifest Outside the Fashion World?

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with graphic design. Why should we care what type of handbags are popular if we’re not the ones marketing them? As graphic designers, I believe we stand to benefit from keeping tabs on what’s trendy, whether it be in our own line of work or in others.

If we zoom out from the fashion world to examine today’s media environment, we can see that the essence of the early 2000s is dominating visual culture right now. For example, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air now has a dramatized reboot, as does popular 2000s cartoon Winx Club. Samsung, Google, and Apple are all bringing back pastel colorways for their flagship phones. Pantone’s color of the year for 2022, Very Peri, is another pastel shade that’s explicitly inspired by our current circumstances:

“…our physical and digital lives have merged in new ways. Digital design helps us to stretch the limits of reality, opening the door to a dynamic virtual world where we can explore and create new color possibilities. With trends in gaming, the expanding popularity of the metaverse and rising artistic community in the digital space, PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri illustrates the fusion of modern life and how color trends in the digital world are being manifested in the physical world and vice versa.”

For those of you who’ve been working in graphic design since the early 2000s, I’d imagine this emphasis on the possibilities of digital design sounds very familiar. Whether you were introduced to design software as a professional using the first iteration of the Adobe Suite, or as a child playing around in Microsoft Paint, there’s no denying that these themes have re-emerged at the forefront of our industry’s collective consciousness. In fact, software upgrades to our modern graphic designers’ toolkit are allowing us to recreate the aesthetic of authentic Y2K graphics, which were often a byproduct of early 2000s software limitations. Neat, right?

How to Harness Our Current Moment in the 20-Year Trend Cycle for Graphic Design Inspiration

All creative fields follow the 20-year trend cycle, and graphic design is no different. Graphic designers know that we never create in a vacuum. Everything we produce exists in a context that’s unique to the time period and media environment we’re living in. With that in mind, it’s important to remember that the original Y2K aesthetic didn’t exist in a vacuum, either. In addition to clothing, countless magazines, websites, ad campaigns, and other artifacts were made during the late 90s and early 2000s which can provide us with graphic design inspiration today.

Check out webdesignmuseum.org to view some authentic Y2K webpages, along with helpful timelines for different companies’ sites and overall web design trends. For typographic inspiration, browse the 2000s tag on fontsinuse.com. If you’d like more modern ideas, try searching for Y2K on behance.com to see how the 20-year trend cycle is being applied in real time.

One word of advice for the aspiring trend-savvy designer: remember that modern interpretations of past trends will never be 100% authentic to the time period they’re inspired by. Therefore, when searching for ideas, it’s helpful to research why certain artifacts were created and how they were received by the public in addition to their aesthetic value. If the meaning of an artifact has changed over time, I believe that can tell you as much about it as the artifact itself. With that in mind, any piece of historical media is fair game—let your imagination run wild!

The Takeaway

We’re currently over two decades out from 2000, so it’s no surprise that aesthetics from that time period are being revived and adapted to fit current tastes, as well as shaping what those tastes are. Next time you’re approaching a project for a particularly cutting-edge client, don’t discard everything you liked about the look and feel of 2010s design, but do take the 20-year trend cycle into account. If they’re really, really cutting-edge, consider creeping into the mid-2000s for some inspiration, as well. And if you’ve got a brand in need of a fashion-forward refresh, look no further than the Content Marketing Team at Go Fish Digital.

Graphic Design & the 20-Year Trend Cycle is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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The easiest way to enhance your graphics is to learn the principles of design. Each principle helps set the foundation for a successful composition. Using them together creates clear, appealing arrangements. There is some debate over the number of principles, but here are five graphic design tips to get your designs going in the right direction.

1. Hierarchy

Before placing anything on the graphic, you need to rank the importance of your information. This determines your hierarchy. The title needs to stand out more than the subtitle, and the data needs to stand out more than the footnote. Determining the importance of each piece of information allows you to arrange accordingly.

2. Contrast

Contrast is the difference between elements. These differences reinforce the hierarchy. Create contrast through the use of different fonts, colors, or sizes. Designers may set the title in a big, bold font, then set the subtitle in a smaller, darker font. This contrast tells the reader that the title is the more important element.

3. White Space

White space or negative space is the space between your elements. Providing white space helps emphasize certain elements and reduces clutter. Balance in design refers to the visual weight each element carries. Spreading your information out provides white space and brings symmetry to the composition.

4. Repetition

The use of repetition reinforces your message to your viewer. In a range of graphics, repeating elements set a standard for the design. Using these standards to create unity allows you to communicate with the audience. For example, using the same background or header layout. This tells the viewer that each graphic belongs within the set. Similarly, be consistent with the typefaces you choose. Here are some typeface inspiration ideas if you’re stuck!

5. Color

It’s important to choose the right color palette for your graphics. Color sets the tone for your audience, so understanding the basics of color is helpful. Warmer colors such as red, orange, or yellow are more exciting; they invoke action. Cooler colors such as blue, green, and purple are relaxing and comforting to the viewer. You also want to choose a color palette with enough contrast, so viewers can easily tell them apart. There are many websites for creating color palettes. You can find some useful ones using these color tools.

Final Thoughts

Implementing each of these design principles will help you make your own eye-catching graphics. The more you understand them, the more you’ll see them all around you. Find designs that inspire you, and figure out what elements they’re using. Once you are comfortable using these principles with the text and charts, try adding more. Including imagery, such as photographs or illustrations, will make graphics even more interesting.

For both new and professional designers, these principles are important and can make a big difference in quality. Using them in new and exciting ways is what makes the graphics eye-catching. If you’re looking to up your design game, check out our website design agency services.

5 Tips for How to Create Eye-Catching Graphics is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

How a word is written says as much about its intended meaning as the word itself. Context is key here — the typefaces, color scheme, imagery, and written content in your design should all feel like they’re working together, but choosing just one or two typefaces for a project from thousands of available options can be overwhelming and time-consuming if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. If you’re in need of some typeface inspiration, these five resources can help you find the perfect typeface to enhance your project.

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1. Fonts In Use

Fonts In Use is an excellent place to gather historical context on a typeface and its applications. The site showcases type in a variety of settings, including movie posters, clothing, and even the sides of buildings, as well as more top-of-mind uses like websites and book covers.

The archive stretches back decades, and each piece is tagged with the names of the typefaces it’s using, which can be very helpful when you’re trying to build a type pairing. Whether you choose to filter by typeface, topic, or even year of creation, this enormous gallery of applied typography is sure to inspire you.

2. Typewolf

If you’re searching for “what’s trending in type,” check out Typewolf for current popular finds. Typewolf is particularly good for web design inspiration, and like Fonts In Use, it lists out the names of the typefaces used by each webpage. Though the site does lack a search function, you can google the name of a particular typeface plus “Typewolf” to see how others have used it in the past.

Once you’ve found the typeface of your dreams, you may be dismayed after seeing its price tag. Well-designed type is often expensive, and licensing full type families can cost hundreds of dollars. This is where Typewolf’s most useful feature comes in. On each typeface’s dedicated page, Typewolf lists a match for its nearest neighbor on Adobe Fonts, the next resource on this list.

3. Adobe Fonts

If you pay for an Adobe Creative Cloud plan, you have access to Adobe Fonts, a seemingly endless library of typefaces that syncs across all your Adobe apps. This library can be filtered by detailed typography terms such as x-height and figure style, or simpler adjectives like “funky” or “friendly.”

If you’ve already chosen one typeface for a project and are looking for one or two more that complement its style, these advanced search tools will help you narrow the field. The broadest categories available are Sans Serif, Serif, Slab Serif, Script, Mono, and Hand, but if you’re searching for a truly wild typeface, check out the hidden Decorative category by using this search query.

4. Google Fonts

If you don’t have an Adobe account, there’s no need to worry; Google Fonts has you covered. Google Fonts filters aren’t as jargon-heavy as those on Adobe Fonts, so if you’re new to the world of type pairings, this is the site for you. With free and simple licensing, plus the ability to download multiple type families at once, Google Fonts makes it easy to build a collection of typefaces that live natively on your computer. If you’d like to learn more about a typeface on Google Fonts, just click on its page to see all its weights, its full glyph list, and some popular pairings with other Google typefaces.

5. Dieline

Our final resource for typography inspiration is Dieline, a packaging design site that showcases both concept work and real products that are available in stores. Though the site can be a bit confusing to navigate and lacks the typeface identification and search features listed in the previous examples, it provides a refreshing perspective on the role of type in branding and marketing. Their curated Best of the Month lists showcase some truly polished, inspiring work that can get your typographic juices flowing during an art block.

Need to create something elegant and refined? Check out the Spirits and Liquor category. How about something cute and family friendly? The Kids and Baby category definitely has something for you. No matter what style you’re looking for, you’re sure to find a few wonderful examples here.

The Takeaway

Making informed type choices is all about context. Focus on defining the tone of your project, then use the above resources to find typefaces that amplify that tone if you need some inspiration. And if you’re interested in seeing some typographic wizardry at work, reach out to our website design agency. Happy type hunting!

5 Typeface Inspiration Ideas for Graphic Designers is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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From Accessible to Universal

The Seven Principles of Universal Design

Equitable Use

Provide Flexibility in Use

Simple and Intuitive Use

Perceptible Information

Tolerance for Error

Low Physical Effort

Size and Space for Approach and Use

Size and Space for Approach and Use ensure ease of approach and use regardless of the user’s mobility. This is another principle intended for physical design, however, it can apply to web design as well. One of the easiest ways to ensure ease of use is by making large, clear buttons. Especially on mobile, this helps users with less dexterity. Providing ample negative space also allows users to avoid unwanted actions.

Universal Design and Marketability: How to Improve the Inclusivity of Your Website is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Color plays a significant role in design; it helps create emotions, draw interest, and convey messages. Color is even more important when it comes to design accessibility. According to the World Health Organization, “it is estimated that at least 2.2 billion people [globally] have a vision impairment or blindness.” Inclusive practices, like accessible color schemes, ensure that people with physical or situational disabilities and socio-economic restrictions can interact with your website or graphics. It also ensures that no one visiting your website will miss out on information or functionality. 

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To help create a more accessible world, designers can follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The WCAG are a set of accessibility standards that designers can follow when they are creating graphics and web images.  And, by following these guidelines, designers can use accessible color schemes to reach a wider audience. 

While designers can create their own color palettes, there are many tools available that help designers with this task. Below are five color tools that will make your next design more accessible: 

Khroma

Khroma is an AI-powered color generator driven by your color preferences. You start by selecting a minimum of fifty colors you like from the provided palette. Then, it analyzes your choices and provides an endless selection of color combinations. There are also options to search for specific colors and adjust how much your bias affects the color combinations produced. To ensure your design is accessible, you can turn on “Never fail WCAG” in the settings menu. Khroma is one of my favorite websites for choosing a color palette because it remembers my preferences.

Material Design Color Tool

The Color Tool by Material Design allows you to choose colors for your website and test your palettes on six different UI designs in real-time. To test your choices’ accessibility level, this tool determines the legibility of white and black text in various sizes on your backgrounds. 

Colorsafe

Colorsafe creates color palettes with WCAG-approved contrast ratios. To use this tool, simply input your desired background color, typeface, font size, and weight, and it will provide a range of accepted options for your text color and the contrast ratio of each choice. 

Accessible Brand Colors

Accessible Brand Colors tests how ADA-compliant the colors in your palette are. Your results populate in a chart where each color appears as either a text or background color, with a pass or fail. This chart allows you to see all of your options and choose the color arrangement that works best for your design. 

ColorBox

ColorBox by Lyft Design is a tool that uses an algorithm to build accessible color ranges. You can choose the starting and ending colors, the number of steps between the two, and the curves of the hue, saturation, and brightness. You can also lock in specific colors if you’re working with a set color scheme. 

Designers and businesses alike should prioritize accessibility. Increasing accessibility ensures that your entire audience has access to all of your site’s information and functionality. You never know who these changes benefit. 

To learn more about accessibility and design, check out “Universal Web Design: A Guide to WCAG Compliance” by Alison Iddings.

Design is the process of communicating visually, and we should strive to reach the largest audience possible. The growth of technology has led to so many tools that make our job a lot easier, so don’t be afraid to use them when you’re creating. If you’re not sure about your site’s color scheme, reach out to our website design agency. 

5 Color Tools That Will Improve Your Design Accessibility is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

For example, imagine a pair of earbuds that play music clearly, don’t ever get tangled in your pocket, and stay in your ears through the entirety of your workout. You might think to yourself, “Wow, these were designed really well!” And they are – not because they’re your favorite color, but because they serve their purpose well. THAT is the fundamental and primary function of design.

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It’s important to find ways to make a design as user-friendly as possible. This can include making it easier to read, navigate, find, digest or understand. It can be hard for a beginner or a non-designer to know the differences between strong and weak design. Luckily, there are a few quick and basic rules you can learn to help you get there!

Pick Current and Complementary Fonts

There are three fundamental rules for choosing fonts: 

1. Limit your fonts 
2. Keep it simple 
3. Make sure they match your design style

Another rule that I believe is just as important is to make sure you’re not dating yourself when you’re picking fonts! Fonts come in and out of style just like anything else. Here are just a few examples of fonts that have fallen out of style. (Papyrus, Curlz and Comic Sans).

To avoid this faux-pas, make sure that you’re keeping up to date with the latest design trends. It’s easy to do this by following great designers on sites like Behance, Dribbble, and Instagram. You can also read a ton of great articles on sites like Medium, Invision, and Creative Bloq.

Again, when using more than one font, keep. it. simple. You rarely need to use more than two fonts for one project, especially when using “fun” fonts. Don’t get me wrong – fun fonts have their time and place. But, sometimes the time and place is never and in the trash (I’m talking to you, Curlz). Though if you do want a font with some flair, make sure your secondary font is straightforward, easy-to-read and definitely unembellished.

Pick Colors That Contrast Well

Good use of color will seem effortless and will attract people to your design just as easily. But a bad use of color will jump out at your viewers and can even turn them away. Finding the right color combinations can be difficult, especially given that we see so many in our day-to-day life. Well, I’m here to tell you a couple of hard truths. Red and green may look great on your Christmas tree, but not on your Holiday flyer. Red and blue look perfect on your jersey, but not in your logo. That all-white look might seem pretty and cohesive on your Insta-feed, but it will not go over well when your clients can’t read your business cards.

As with anything, however, a good understanding of how colors work well together comes with practice! A few tools I like to use are Adobe Kuler, and ui Gradients. For an even easier solution, you can simply type “color schemes” into Pinterest and you’ll get a ton of results that can help you along!

Use White Space as a Tool

A good use of white space is fundamental to great design. White space relaxes and guides the eyes, so when it’s used effectively, your audience should be able to find your important information with ease.

To that end, don’t be afraid to use white space as a way to avoid cluttering your designs. Even if you do have a lot of content, simply try to separate it into groups and sub-groups with plenty of white space in between so it’s easily digestible. 

Whatever you do, don’t get into the mindset that white space = empty space. White space helps your viewers get a better look and understanding of your design. The space you decide to leave out is just as important as the elements you include.

Scale Appropriately

For the sake of the sanity of graphic designers everywhere, never stretch or resize typefaces or images to something other than their original, intended height and width.

Great typefaces were created with incredibly close attention to detail, helping with legibility and of course to add style. To stretch and transform them out of their intended shape essentially ruins them.

If you need an image to be a specific size, use the crop tool, not the transform tool. Also, know that images cannot get bigger than their original size. Make the size work or get new images. If your audience sees wonky or pixelated images on your website, they’ll immediately hit the back button.

Simplicity

Graphic design is a tool that helps us guide our audience. Artists are graphic designers but graphic designers are not artists. Every designer has made the mistake of creating designs that appeal to their own tastes and preferences before realizing that it doesn’t serve their intended audience. Unlike a work of art, a design is never the star of the show. The content is always what is most important. So, keep your designs simple and to the point. Your clients will be happy, and so will their users.

The job of a graphic designer is to make life easier for the user with the additional benefit of making their designs look beautiful. If you follow the key points I outlined above, you’ll be creating effective and attractive graphics in no time. 

What are some of your tips on making a design user-friendly? I’d love to read through them in the comments below!

Graphic Design Basics You Should Know is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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1. Corporate Ipsum

For when you need to sell the next big tech product. Corporate Ipsum is full of big techy words like “nanotechnology,” “ROI,” and “cross-platform.”

2. Doggo Ipsum

Do you ever find yourself lurking on reddit.com/r/rarepuppers and want the client to know about your love of doggos? If so Doggo Ipsum is the perfect generator for you! This ipsum generator contains words such as “fluffer,” “bork,” and “smol.”

3. Coffee Ipsum

Do you find yourself in the breakroom making coffee more often then you are at your desk? If so, Coffee Ipsum should pair well with your caffeine addiction. This ipsum generator contains words such as “cappuccino,” “arabica,” and “crema.”

4. Pirate Ipsum

Did you just binge watch all five Pirates of the Caribbean movies this weekend? Then ye’ best commandeer this Pirate Ipsum generator for yer next bounty. This ipsum generator contains words such as “squiffy,” “matey,” and “starboard.“

5. Office Ipsum

You know those hour long meetings that should have been an email? Now you can relive all those meetings using this Office Ipsum generator. This ipsum generator contains words such as “bandwidth,” “deliverables,” and “synergy.”

Have Fun!

A quick Google search can help you find many more unique ipsum generators. Now go have some fun adding some personality and humor to your mockups!

5 Quirky and Useful Lorem Ipsum Generators is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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1. Bulleted Lists

Problem

Bulleted lists are a great way to summarize your talking points, but often look boring and outdated in slideshows.

Solution

Break up the bulleted list’s text into columns across the page with icons above them. The icons help you quickly communicate the information while also keeping things interesting!

2. Column Text

Problem

Sometimes there is a need for text to be split into two columns on a slide. Although there might not be a lot of text, it can still look like a wall of text to the viewer.

Solution

Use a light grey background and draw two white rectangles to type the text into. You can also add a subtle drop shadow to the rectangles and add images to help separate the columns even more.

3. Screenshots

Problem

Screenshots can often look weird on a slide. If there are multiple screenshots on a slide, it can be daunting trying to keep them organized.

Solution

Place the screenshot(s) onto a picture of the device associated with it. Here is a tool that I use to do exactly that mockuphone.com/#ios. You can also combine web and mobile screenshots to give the slide a more organized look.

4. Multiple Images & Text

Problem

Sometimes you need to use more than one image to get your point across. When you start adding in the images, they may be different shapes and sizes, and it makes the slide look like a weird collage.

Solution

Crop or mask the images so they are the same size and arrange them in a grid-like fashion to either the right or left side.

5. Tables

Problem

The default table styles are often way too wild and can be distracting.

Solution

I personally like to keep my tables as simple and minimal as possible. I do this by removing any outlines, gradients, and drop shadows. I then use a simple bright colored header row with alternating light grey rows to help differentiate the contents of the table.

Conclusion

Hopefully by following these tips you can create a beautiful slide presentation. If you need further design help be sure to check out my posts on selecting colors and fonts.

A Designer’s 5 Basic Tips to Improving your PowerPoint Slides is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.