Font Usage

Font research is important for this project because I have to pick fonts that are legible by a wide demographic, but is simple enought to be understood by anyone who’s job it is to update the website.

That said the main site wide font can be a simple sans-serif font, that matches the designs of large organisations like Apples’ ‘San Fransisco’ font and Googles’ ‘Open Sans’ font.

Looking through googles’ fonts featured at (https://fonts.google.com/) there are actually a lot of appropriate looking typefaces, it is simply a case of picking one.

The reason for using Googles’ fonts?

• These fonts are great because they are completely free to use, and require no liscensing whatsoever and are completely unlimited with no caps on usage.
• Cross platform rendering is fully supported by Googles’ content delivery network meaning font stability in different browsers and devices works perfectly.
• Loading times are much faster since they are compressed and are much more lightweight than self-hosted and Typekit fonts.

The font needs to be one of the Google fonts, but also have great usability. The reason for this is that it needs to not get in the way of usage, and allow people of all ages to be able to use the cms without any issues. Therefore I picked a nicely designed sans-serif. This is the one I chose;

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The reading list: What I learnt

The art of project management

Book by Scott Berkun

 – Creative ideas can be made by everyone, not just by geniuses. Great ideas can be achieved by anyone, they just need to employ the right people.

 – Ideas can be overated. Just like how the idea of the lightbulb was 100’s of years old if you factor in the usage of fire an candles within the home. It was only with the right technology and know how was it possible to make the product.

 – When making a product, you will never make it entirely perfect on the first, second or even fifth attempt.

 – Revision is key to making a a great product successful.

 – ‘Ideas are made from other ideas’.

Undercover User Experience Design

Book by Cennydd Bowles and James Box

  – Design is the atc of playing god, they change the way we interact with the enviroment around us.

  – Scale is so big that small changes can effect thousands, millions or even billions users.

  – By using and designing for fast connections with top end handsets, we are excluding the users without this technology, the ones usually who aren’t western. Meaning that we are unethically becoming biased.

 

Science of Persuasion

  – There are six key parts to make a product interesting to someone. These are;

 1 – Reciprocity

2 – Scarcity

3 – Authority

4 – Consistancy

5 – Liking

6 – Consensus

Content Strategy for the Web (Voices that matter)

By Kristina Halvorson, Melissa Rach

 – Marketing, brand, social, earch engine optimisation, user experience and tecnology are all important factors of a successful business.

 – Prioritising the content strategy is vital.

 

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

By Steve Krug

 – If a user has to think about about a function on a site, then it can be improved.

 – Consistancy, clear navigation, buttons should look like buttons