4 Fearless Design Trends You Need to Know

Small businesses start the year by setting goals and developing their overall plans. A major part of their plan should be to improve the appearance of their marketing tools.

You, as business owner, must observe the design trends that are working for the websites and business cards of your competitors. By choosing the right design for your marketing tools, you can acquire leads and turn them into loyal customers to increase your profit.

To help guide you in identifying which design trends would help your business this year, below are some of the design ideas bound to make an impact.

Minimalist design

When it comes to design, clean is definitely king. The idea of a minimalist design is to effectively communicate your message by doing as little design as possible.

Keeping the design of your marketing tools to its bare minimum puts more emphasis on your call to action. By doing so, you increase your chances of getting a better conversion rate.

What you should do? Read Web Designer Ledger’s post “Creating Minimalist Designs Makes You a Better Designer,” which features some of best practices when coming up with minimalist designs. For those using print products in their marketing campaigns, view Oneextrapixel’s post “50 Creative and Effective Minimalist Print Ads” for inspiration.

Responsive web design for mobile viewing

Now that smartphones and tablets are being widely used by the public, expect to receive even more hits from visitors this coming year using said devices. The convenience of mobile owners to visit websites at any time and place is the reason for the spike in viewership from this marketing channel. According to Pingdom, more than thrice of mobile visitors in 2010 are now browsing the Internet using their mobile devices in 2012. (Source)

By optimizing your websites and blogs for mobile view, you encourage visitors to keep viewing your site from their mobile until they become your subscribers or customers.

What you should do? Optimizing your e-commerce site or blog is a great way of keeping in touch with people in your market using mobile devices. Social Media Examiner discusses how marketers should prepare their business sites for optimization in their post “9 Tips for Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Users.”

For site owners using WordPress as their CMS, you may also want to check out available themes and plugins that would help translate your sites better for mobile viewing. Check out Tripwire Magazine’s post “20+ Useful WordPress Mobile Themes And Plugins” to find out which mobile themes to use.

Everything will be “bigger”

Websites will begin designing bigger text and buttons. This is to accommodate the multiple platforms where websites can be viewed. Big text and buttons are not only easier to be read on mobile devices, but also easier to tap on their screens.

Aside from function, big, attractive buttons grabs the attention of visitors, which could turn them into clients.

What you should do? On the downside, bigger buttons mean bigger file sizes, which could bog down site loading time. As part of the challenge, site owners must strike the perfect balance between using big graphics and text and regulating loading speed of their site.

Geometric and typographic design

As the emphasis for minimalist design continues, designers will merge form and function in their marketing tools and websites through geometric design and designed typography. While geometric design deal with shape and typographic design with words, both share a simplified approach of less is more. This is done by forming the shapes or words into a particular design in order to clearly express an idea.

What you should do? Learnsome of the typography design trends from last year that are still relevant today by reading Creative Bloq’s post “The hottest typography design trends for 2012.” For ideas and resources, check out the featured images at Andy Soward’s “60+ Beautiful Examples of Geometric Designs” and The Design Inspiration’s “60 Most Stunning Typography Inspiration of All Time.”

Do you have any more design trends you’ve like to share to help businesses make an impact with their marketing tools? Let us know by commenting below!