“For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.” ~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Websites that are successful don’t just happen. They are all about the details, the specific design elements that a designer chooses to use that will shape a website to be attractive and functional for both its visual-spatial users, as well as its visual-linguistic users.

Think about it. Don’t you want users to actually “scroll” your site, and not just click and go away after 5 seconds? That’s my design goal.

As an AESTHETIC 美 WEB DESIGNER, I have my favorite design elements. Below I highlight them for you.

MY SEVEN MOST IMPORTANT DESIGN FEATURES

1 • Aesthetic Elements that Delight – This is one of the most important design elements for which I aim. This is my “signature.”  I want to have something that is beautiful, or that captures one’s attention, and or that appropriately awakens the senses in a pleasing way.

2 • Minimalist and Clean Lines – Stylistically, I prefer “less is more,” that is, sites that are easy to navigate, well-organized, visually clean, and that contain lots of white space.

3 • Tasteful, Harmonious and Balanced – I want all the elements on a site: text, fonts, graphics, tables, tabs, footnotes, etc. to be visually pleasing, in good taste, and balanced proportionally so that a page is not too busy, nor too complicated to navigate, nor frustrating for a user.

4 • Visually Communicative – A study done by Constantinidou and Baker in 2002 found that using visuals was highly advantageous for all adults, irrespective of their preference for such images.  Our minds react to pictures. Well-chosen Images on a website are important.

5 • Quality and a Standard of Excellence – We all make mistakes, and even the best editors and proofreaders miss things, but…overall, I hope that I set a standard of excellence in my work that shows that the little things matter, such as spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

6 • User-Centered – The user must always be foremost on my mind when writing content. There must be straightforward, jargon-free language, unless the site is specifically dedicated to one select group of people.

7 • Golden Ratio Principle – The Golden Ratio is a principle of design in art and architecture in which a certain ratio of elements applies, the “Rule of Thirds.” “The Rule of Thirds says that most designs can be made more interesting by visually dividing the page into thirds vertically and/or horizontally and placing our most important elements within those thirds.” While not always achievable, studies show that the use of the Golden Ratio creates more visually pleasing results.

Give me a call! I’m Linda Darlene, and I’d love to design your next site.

Chinese for Aesthetic