Dear Ueno: How do you create fresh looking websites for your clients each time?
Dear Ueno is an advice column for people who for some weird reason think we know what we’re doing. Find out more, or read our old advice.
Nadir, a designer from Algeria, emailed his question to us:
Dear Ueno: How do you create fresh looking websites for your clients each time? Do you build a new design system and components for each client or do you have a barebones design system that you apply the client brand and visuals to it?
Anh, Senior Designer at Ueno NYC, responds:
Hey Nadir! Thanks for your question and for enjoying our work. Although I can’t speak for every designer at Ueno regarding their process for creating fresh websites, here are my thoughts:
Treat every problem like it’s a unique problem
When you’ve worked in the industry for a while, you may find yourself working on the same types of projects multiple times. Maybe your portfolio is full of marketing sites for fashion companies, health tracking apps, or — if you’re me — news and blog platforms.
When you’re in the middle of that fifth delivery service app, you might be tucked into a comfortable mindset where the solution seems easy because you’ve dealt with this type of challenge for this type of audience on these types of devices before. Soon you might find yourself recycling and regurgitating ideas you’ve used in previous work for the newer work and — worst case scenario — you realize that a lot of your work looks, feels, and behaves the same way.
This is a common occurrence in our industry. At Ueno, the way we combat that is to approach every problem as a unique problem. Several of our clients come from the same industry, be it tech or finance, but we constantly look for the nuanced difference in the challenges, the user and business objectives, and the target audiences.
Start from scratch
Sometimes you’ll be asked to freshen up an existing design. A recent example: CTIA, an association that represents the U.S. wireless communications industry, asked us to redesign their website and brand.
Their previous website seen above was difficult to navigate, looked visually dated, and didn’t attract the intended amount of visitors or engagement. One approach that we could have taken with the design would be to work within the confines of the existing system: re-shuffling components or cleaning up messy layouts. But this approach rarely tackles the root of the problem nor results in something new and fresh. Instead, we threw out what we knew of the previous site and started from scratch to build a new site that would meet the new objective: establish CTIA as the go-to expert on the advancement of wireless technology.
We started at the beginning by re-evaluating the type of content that would live on the site (articles, consumer guides, and industry positions) and then re-structured the site to enable users to navigate to the right content efficiently.
We redesigned article templates so that features like glossary terms and downloadable documents would pop-up in the margins, giving users easy access to additional relevant information.
We introduced a new element called channels that would funnel all the most important content on a particular topic into one, digestible feed.
We created interactive, shareable, and downloadable infographics after learning that many users look to CTIA for statistics on wireless technology.
On the visual end, we noticed that an organization steeped in technology — an ever flowing and progressing entity — had stale, static graphics. To bring this to life, we took their primitive element, the dot, and turned it into a symbol for movement. From there, we developed an entire system of animated graphics that allow users to distinguish between types of content.
We applied these visuals to alpha-numeric characters and (with the help of our friends from The Furrow) illustrations as well.
All of these new features that made the content and experience of the site more enjoyable were created because we started with the foundational questions: “Why does this site exist?” “Who is the intended audience and what do they want to accomplish?” Starting from the beginning helps us challenge existing assumptions, create new ones if the previous no longer make sense, and find a new point of view that may have gone unnoticed before.
Look around you
It’s important to be aware of what others are creating in and outside our disciplines. Every morning, I spend the first 20 to 30 minutes of my day looking at new designs online. Primarily so I can continue to slowly wake up under the guise of productivity, but also to get a sense of what’s happening in the design community. I get inspired by what I see, but I also learn what tired trends to avoid.
When we start a new project at Ueno, we’ll conduct similar research to summarize the industry landscape, see how competitors position themselves, and identify opportunities to stand out. We’ll take note of the common visual elements, color palettes, typography and tone of voice and we’ll concoct something different.
You might think that our immediate solution would be to do the exact opposite of what we see. For example, if everyone else is creating dark monotone websites, let’s create a multi-colored kaleidoscope of a site. But creating something different for the sake of being different is easy to see through and often results in unjustifiable design decisions.
Instead, we want to find new connections and offer a different perspective on something that’s been done many times before. That may mean bringing a human touch to something inherently robotic because we learned that the client offers more in-person support than their competitors. Or bringing a sense of playfulness to an office communication platform because the platform allows for informal team collaboration.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, but the best work offers clients a new way to differentiate themselves from their competitors while still making sense.
Accept that your work will never truly be ‘original’
Freshness is often tied to ideas of novelty and originality. We’re all trying to create that new, industry-shaking invention. While it’s a noble ambition that we should always strive for, we can also accept that even the freshest work is never truly original.
A lot of what we create is inspired by what we find elsewhere. We take the best elements of other pieces that make sense for our projects, mix them, and add our own personalities and experimentations. Finally we end up with something that’s been done before but now has our own twist on it.
Additionally, when designing for web we are nearly always working to solve a specific business problem: increase conversion, enhance engagement, or some other metric that is important to the business. Based on our experience, there are some best practices that simply work well in achieving these goals, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. That means that certain design principles like readability, a clear narrative, and strong, actionable items are consistent across our work.
The conclusion
In short, the best way to keep your designs fresh is to approach every project and challenge with a fresh set of eyes. Don’t assume that what worked previously is the best solution for the problem. Before you start a new project, do your research on competitors and similar companies to see what is and isn’t working well. And most importantly, trust in your ability to create something great each time.
— Cheers,
Anh
Anh is a designer at Ueno NYC who is also the company’s resident Meme master. You can find more information about her here. Want to work with Anh? See job openings at Ueno.
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