5 Things Web Designers Can Learn From Steve Jobs and Apple ~ Designer's World

Steve Jobs was obsessed with designing great products. While Apple has excelled at retailing, logistics, marketing, customer service, and cross-selling, their innovative product designs are what paved the way for it to become the world’s most valuable company.

Steve Jobs' principles of design can be applied to virtually any type of business, but this article covers 5 key aspects design that you can easily use to improve your own websites.

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." – Steve Jobs

From website designers, to web browser developers, mobile app developers and much more, many technology companies try to cram as many features as possible into their products. The thought behind this is generally either that most peoplewant many features, or that if they include a ton of different features, more people will at least be attracted to some of them, and inevitably buy the product. Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s approach has always been the opposite; to remove features in an effort to simplify their products, and make them easier to use.

Remove features from your website that are not useful to your customers or your readers. Go through each section of your site and ask yourself if each thing is useful to your website visitors. Is that elaborate background image really useful? Are links to hundreds of unrelated websites useful? Do you really need a 15px border around your images? Wouldn’t using a smaller border let your visitors see more of the photo? Is the image slideshow on your homepage serving a real purpose? Do you need the same navigation options listed 2-3 times on the same page? You might be saying ‘but I have some features that are important for SEO’, or ‘display advertisements are not useful to readers, but they are how I monetize my site’. That’s perfectly understandable, but can you include the search keywords in a way that is still helpful to people? And advertisements for the right type of products can still be very useful to people.

Steve Jobs felt that design simplicity and ease of use should be linked. That of course doesn’t necessarily mean that simple always equals good. Sometimes an overly simple design can be intimidating or unfriendly to navigate. As Job’s stated, "the main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious".

One way to do that is to leverage the experience people already have. While Apple accomplished that by doing things such as designing the Mac desktop to be arranged in a similar way that people arrange their actual desks, this principle can also be applied to web design. If you go to your website’s homepage, and blur out (or remove) all the text, would people be able to figure out what type of website it is? Specific layouts can easily imply what type of website you are on. A site with a sidebar displaying categories and sorting options on the left generally works well for ecommerce sites. Sites with the sidebar on the right usually implies a blog. A site with a grid layout listing categories often implies a directory website. Two horizontal navigation menus typically implies you’re on a magazine or news website. A large image-based content box followed by smaller text-based content boxes is a standard design of corporate business websites. While there are of course sites that follow their own layout (or a combination of these), you don’t need to re-invent the wheel.

A Common Layout for an eCommerce Website

It's easy to see that this is a shopping website before even reading any text.

2. Use a Clean Design and Color Scheme

While some newer Apple products are offered in solid black and different colors, a majority of their products over the years have been released in pure white. Apple’s design chief, Jonathan Ive, has always liked the minimalist simplicity of white, and many Apple products including the iPod, earbud headphones, power supplies, iMacs, eMacs, and many more were all released in pure white. White is often the best color option for your website’s background as well. Your focus should be on your content, and no color provides a better contrast than pure white when it comes to readability. A colored background for the body of your website can also be nice (I'd recommend keeping it light though), while using white for the background of your content boxes. Apple’s own website is a good example of that type of color scheme.

Try to keep your color scheme focused on only 2 or 3 main colors, especially when it comes to your text. While it can be fun to experiment with various color options, it can make your site look busy and unprofessional. Using many different colors on the same page may make it difficult to make anything stand out.

Include ample space between elements. Space is a very important aspect of clean website design. Add space (strive for at least 5-10px) between sections, navigational items, buttons, images, sentences, boxes and columns on your website. Space can make your website easier to navigate, and easier to read.

The Apple Website Includes Plenty of Space Between Elements

Source: Web Hosting Geeks

3. Use Rounded Corners

Steve Jobs loved using rounded corners for simplicity and elegance. Rounded corners can be seen virtually everywhere in Apple’s design - from computer screens, to windows in OSX, the iPhone, iPad, App icons, the Apple.com website and so much more. Using rounded corners on things like images, borders, boxes, and navigation menus is an easy way to add some elegance to your website.

Apple Uses Rounded Corners Frequently on Their Products

Check out both the App icons and the overal casing for the iPhone.

An example of Rounded Corners on a website

Source: Themespotter

4. Obsess Over Typography

Steve Jobs developed a fascination with typography while attending Reed College in Oregon. As he detailed in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, he took a calligraphy class to learn about typefaces, about varying the amount of space between letters, the differences between different letter combinations, and more about what makes great typography great. His obsession with typography of course carried over to the Mac, which became the first computer to have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

Typography is often one of the most overlooked aspects of web design, especially for people new to setting up their websites and blogs. For specific sections of your website such as page titles, navigational menu items, your tag-line, and post excerpts, using a different font from your main content can give your website a more elegant look, as well as making it easier for people to tell the difference between different sections of your site. Modern web browsers, combined with the ability to use things like Google Web Fonts, makes it easy to chose from a large number of fonts. Try to not get overly fancy with your font choices though, as many fonts (especially script fonts) can be difficult to read.

Apple uses Lucida Grande as the primary font on their website

5. Don’t Use Flash

Steve Jobs gripes about the problems of Adobe Flash are well documented, and whether you agree with his stance or not, it is best to avoid using Flash on your website going forward. As the world continues to move to HTML5 and CSS3, the need for Flash will most likely disappear in the near future (as Steve Jobs predicted). Being that more and more people will be visiting your website from devices that don’t use flash (such as iPads), it is best to not use it, simply to ensure that everyone is able to view your content on any device.

Source: SEO Consulatants

Designer's World