How to Build a Visual Language on Your Website
The visual language of your website is how you communicate your brand to potential customers. DRC Web Design would like to walk you through the person of creating your own visual language for your website.
While the written language of your content is designed to sell your products or service, the visual language is designed to connect with a certain community. There are many elements that make up your brand’s identity, from colour to style, photography and illustrations. The combination of these elements establishes this in a way that is structured in a way people can immediately understand.
Of course, the visual language includes the written elements of your website, as well as every design, photo, icon, logo and item that your website’s visitors see. The trick to brand identity is that users aren’t aware of its existence but they know that they recognise your brand because of its distinctive visual language.
Let’s walk through a guide of how to create a visual language.
1. Build a Colour Palette for Your Brand
Something that will stand out to website visitors is a strong colour palette. Consistent use of colours that are well-known and connected with your brand and website design, users know will get to know and recognise your business. This will help your brand to not be lost in the mess of the rest of the website because you are telling them through the visual language that they are interacting with your brand.
Obviously, the colour palette can’t be super unique to your website as there’s only a finite amount of colours but it should be applied to everything that your brand does – website, social media profiles, packaging and business cards.
Finally, your colour palette should reinforce the values that you want your business to project.
2. Typographic Hierarchy
The hierarchy of your text is just as important as the fonts you choose for determining how they will be used within your website.
This visual hierarchy will set the tone of your website and whether you talk, whisper (small text) or yell at your users (large text/all caps). Although there is no correct or incorrect way to speak to your customers, you should do what works best for the people you attract.
To create the perfect typographic hierarchy, each level of text should be just different enough from the others around it to enable users to easily notice the changes.
3. Grid World
The spacing of the elements of your page and where they sit can often be as influential as the actual elements themselves. Your website’s visual composition depends on how you want to showcase your business. Should it be clean and organised or a little more chaotic.
This is where your grid comes in and FreeCodeCamp offers this explanation of structure:
“A modular structure offers the possibility to work with entire engineering teams. Thus it could quickly produce products suitable for all platforms. If you are creating conceptual designs from a message sense, the integration method will be more useful.”
Essentially, you need to work out what the complexity of your website communicates about your business to your visitors.
4. Library of Components
You should build a library of components to use across your website, from buttons to icons, cards or popups, so that your branding is always consistent no matter which page users are on.
For example, a button shouldn’t be one colour and style on your home page and another colour and style on your About Us page. These kinds of inconsistencies on your website will make users question whether they are still on your website as the styling will abruptly change.
This library should also include rules for how they are used in a page depending on the device they are being used on. Nowadays, there are so many different screen sizes where people are viewing web pages that you need to make sure elements are responsive and change scale depending on the device.
Initially creating the elements will be hard work but once you have them, making new pages will be super easy.
5. Choose an Image Style
What kind of imagery are you going to use on your website? Are they going to be photographs, videos or illustrations? Choosing a visual image style and sticking to it is very important to your website’s visual identity. After all, they are one of the strongest assets in your visual arsenal and will be what is remembered and recognised by users who visit your website.
The styling of these images is also important, including how your images are cropped (tight or wide), use of filters, the speed of videos and the overall style of the composition.
Once you have established your website’s visual language it needs to become a style guide for all new pages and be enforced across your website. Your brand’s visual identity is very important to your success and shouldn’t be left to chance. Humans think and learn visually so your website’s strongest element is the language it uses to connect with customers.
Source: Website Designer Depot
