People have a habit of holding Apple up as an example of business and technological excellence, and for good reason. Apple has gone from being the cult choice to being the No. 1 option for handheld devices, from smartphones to tablets. Now it has even re-emerged as a major contender for laptops, thanks to its PowerBook line.
But one element of Apple’s success that people tend to overlook is what it has done for graphic design. There has been a rather specific tone set and maintained consistently by the new and improved Apple of the last decade. Through this image, you can learn a great deal about effective presentation and marketing through design.Whether it is the look of its main site, its iOS interface or the now-classic design of its iTunes store, here are seven lessons that we can learn and utilize in our own graphic design projects in the future. I guarantee they will be amazingly applicable for any commission.
[h=2]Lesson No. 1: Always Keep It Simple[/h]Nothing from Apple uses Flash. In the past, many people have seen this as a con and complained that it limits usability. But the fact is, Flash is glitchy and buggy and is always crashing. It is worse for mobile clients and browsers that have Flash as an add-on. Adobe has never bothered to fix the problem, nor even seemed to care that it was there.Further proving this (as well as Apple’s point about avoiding it), Adobe announced recently that it is ending all development for mobile web applicationshttp://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396094,00.asp. That seems to be the next step in the demise of the product. Because, let’s face it, everything is becoming mobile these days.
[h=2]Lesson No. 4: Utilize Grids for Clean Layouts[/h]One of the best things you can do for a website design is use a basic grid system for the layout. It creates clean, simple columns that can hold a ton of information without appearing cluttered or running into the next section of the page. It looks good, is functional and makes it efficient to build a page on a boilerplate.Apple pages use this a lot. They have the top categories in the border along with drop-down menus at the top of the screen. Then, everything else is put into side-by-side columns with a header. Finally, there is a breakdown beneath with a different link and a picture – elegant and informative.
[h=2]Lesson No. 5: Maintain, Maintain, Maintain[/h]Always keep up with regular site maintenance. That means regular usability testing, checking for broken links, looking for alignment issues with text and categories, updating information and keeping up with any social media associated with the account.Apple has whole departments dedicated to this purpose, and you should be able to build your own, smaller-scale version of that. Get someone to keep up with social media profiles and blogs. Have someone else regularly go through the site to check for errors.
[h=2]Lesson No. 6: Make Interaction a Core Focus[/h]
Apple can teach us a lot about graphic design. What are some of the lessons you have learned about website creation from the technological megagiant? Let us know in the comments.[FONT=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]
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