Designing a War – Getting Attention With Your Website Design

How Professional Website Designer’s Use Design to Highlight Important Events

Professional website designer’s uses many ways to attract attention to important events or items while designing a web page. The simplest technique is to change the font size of the headlines. For example, during the U.S. war in Iraq, cnn.com changed their banner headline from font-size: 20px to font-size: 48px – more than doubling it.

Using Typography to Get Attention

Changing the font size and make it colorful to get the attention is nothing new by the professional website designer’s.But it’s not just to go out and make your headline looks larger of 48px or more, you need to follow the simple rules while creating a custom website design.

1. Is this really that important?
If you’re announcing a 30% off shoe sale, it might be important to some people but making the font unbearably huge will just turn most people off.

2. What’s the standard font size on your page?
If you type everything at 20pt, then creating a 30pt headline will not look that much different. But a 16pt headline next to 8pt text might look huge.

3. Do you have standards for what font size to use in your website design?
You should decide ahead of time what types of events will trigger an increase in headline size. Once you have a plan, then even if your marketing director comes in begging to announce his shoe sale at 56pt type, you will have a standard size for that level of event.
But this is not the only way you can be successful to get attention; you can also play with the fonts.
• If you have a sans-serif font, switch to a serif font for emphasis.
• Reds are a good color to attract attention.
• Making text bold or italicized will make it stand out.

Other Ways to Get Attention

There are definitely other ways to get the attention rather then the color and font size of the website.
• Images:
The use of images and graphics are always a good way to get attention of the customers. The saying “a picture says a thousand words” is true because people are visual, and using a picture to enhance or emphasize what you want to say will do more than just words alone. Google uses pictures to emphasize various holidays and other events.
• Layout:
An exciting way to attract attention to an event is to completely change your layout. After the September 11th attacks, CNN removed nearly all of their normal navigation to give more room for their coverage of the events. Amazon thanked its customers for their loyalty by replacing their front page with a letter from the president.
• Animation:
Animation where normally you have flat images will attract attention. Many professional web designers use this in splash pages to show off their skills and make their site more dynamic.
• Use with Care
It is easy to go overboard with these techniques. If every other line of your website is animated or bold or red then nothing will stand out. And if you announce the different intensity of events in the same say like announcing the shoe sale and announcing a war, your clients will quickly understand and ignore your designs, and eventually go to a more appropriate website.