This week brought me to experimenting with Abobe’s “Capture” app in relationship to Adobe illustrator and branding designs.

Basically the app allows you to capture the ‘look’, ‘colour’, ‘brush’, and most importantly ‘shape’ of an image. The app then automatically connects to your adobe account and uploads these images and shapes, now vector graphs straight into your illustrator side bar. I had a practice with a few images of the web of Lana Del Ray and experiment with capture and colour.

Although simple enough  it will take some time to get use to the app and how to produce the best vector images, here’s a few practice designs from my first session using the app.

When creating a successful website, I undertook research (found here: http://everydaydesigner.net/design/top-10-successful-web-designs-trends-of-2015) into finding what works and what doesn’t, making ultimately this core list of basic website design elements to succeed:

• A responsive layout (Mobile friendly and easy to use).

• Clean and Simple (Visually pleasing and easy on the eyes).

• Minimalism (Keeping everything tidy and accessible).

• Parallax imaging (Making scrolling enjoyable and desirable).

• Fixed Headers (Keeping your brand always visible and reminding users where this information comes from).

• Background imagery (although this can take away from a minimalist approach, it can make a website more welcoming).

• Story telling/ Galleries (imagery and designs will attract users to revisit websites and further develop their interests within the product).

• Animations? (In the case of some websites animations and interactive design making the experience feel more unique and user friendly).

• Single page scrolling (Keeping everything to one page stops new pages and over loading of the website which can look messy and become annoying).

• Know your audience (Understanding what an audience wants and what fits in with the ‘theme’ of the product is the most crucial element into making the website work).

When creating an app, key elements that need to be included as standard:

• Easy to use (Interaction works well app loads correctly).
• Ruthless (some features may not make the final cut, perfect it so it’s perfect).
• Global Guidelines (The app must meet these)
• Contents (The app needs to be easy to understand and informative)
• Creative (The app needs to feel unique, inviting and stylish)
• Design (The app needs to look good, be designed simplistically and appear ‘clean’.
• First Impressions (User interface and design)
• User Input (Forums?)
• Feedback and communications (Provide technical and useful help for the app and allow feedback).

http://www.creativebloq.com/mobile/10-principles-mobile-interface-design-4122910

The evolution of branding has changed so much that you have to look at what defines branding to understand why there is a need for change.

Key elements can factor a companies decision to rebrand including:

– Keeping up to date with the latest trends within branding.

– Opting for a simplistic look to become more recognisable.

– Changing their branding to support different formats such as computers, mobile phones, Tablets and Business branding.

– Following the footsteps of larger and equal companies who’s branding change has made them more successful (Amazon, Google, Youtube).

By following elements it is easy to see why so much branding has changed recently and arguably suggest parent companies lead to way into global marketing and advertising when deciding how to design and represent a specific company.

Good Logo design can be seen within “apple’. Simplistic and stylish, apple has now become a globally recognised company due to its products and it’s professional branding, the choice of colours remains largely the same from silver to black, each year,  and the logo itself changes only slightly whilst keeping the original design.

Good branding will get you recognised, promote your professionalism to the world and ultimately sell your product or idea.