Brand is the cornerstone of application design. It answers the question "How should users feel when using an application".

First of all, you should determine your main target groups or industries: children, teenagers, professionals, mothers, students, doctors, designers, the elderly and so on. The design style of the application must be consistent with the brand, so as to establish a stronger brand awareness and eliminate users' doubts.

For example, social applications designed for the elderly should use large fonts, while stock trading applications should strategically use security lock icons to make users feel safe. If possible, we should also consider finding a mascot for the brand. Mascots can personalize the brand and strengthen the impression left by the application to users.

Second: color scheme

The color scheme determines the image of the application and should be the expansion of the brand theme color.

It is the core of visual design because these colors can be used anywhere in the application. First of all, you need to choose a theme color that can enhance the brand image. For example, the theme color of Evernote is green. Then you should create a color scheme around the theme color. Bright colors can attract people's attention, so they are suitable for those consumer applications; Intermediate color can make people concentrate on the information itself, so it is more suitable for professional application.

The theme color of Fable is "Tangelo orange", so we chose gray as the main color, which is also in line with our consistent fashion creativity. Another example is SnapChat, which attracts young users with gorgeous and bright color matching.

Third: intuition

In the highly competitive application market, users simply don't have time to savor your application-we pay attention to "love at first sight". The application that can make you understand its function at first sight is the best application.

A useful little method is to study how popular applications are made and try not to confuse users. Then we should comprehensively test all interactive links and optimize the application. Before reaching the most important interactive link, the user's operation can't exceed three steps, for example, posting to Meerkat only takes one click, and posting to Instagram only takes three clicks. Some users are familiar with the specific interaction mode on the platform, and the effect will often be highlighted when using it.

Fourth: pleasure.

The primary criterion for users to evaluate applications is experience.

To get die-hard users, you must provide some unexpected fun. As time goes by, these pleasant experiences will leave a deep impression on users, thus making applications a necessary part of their daily lives.

The animation that appears when you click Share in Pinterest and Parable, and the animation that refreshes SnapChat are good examples.

Fifth: refining

Excellent visual design is all about details, and every pixel should be perfect. The first is typesetting. Font is the face of application, and a good font can make your application stand out.

You can carefully select one from more than 50 iOS fonts; Of course, it would be better if you could buy your own homemade fonts-in short, don't hang yourself on the tree of default fonts. Serif font is suitable for long articles; Three serif fonts can use more font sizes without making the page look crowded. Compact fonts can display more words on the screen, but it will be strange to put them together with ordinary fonts. Next, let's talk about icons. Icons that can accurately convey emotions are the best. You can use some free icon resources, and then make some changes in Photoshop to become your own icons.

When creating solid color icons, sticking to a single color can avoid making users feel crowded and confused. Finally, let's pay attention to visual resources. Post-era makes resource development easier. We should render in the code as much as possible to minimize the application package. When adding resources, you need to ensure that they can correctly match the screen size; One of the main manifestations of shoddy work is the pixelation of resources.

Sixth: Simplify

Developers always like to add some complicated navigation interfaces or use irrelevant information, which leads to a chaotic interface. This simply makes users crash.

Keep everything simple! The screen layout should be kept clean and tidy, and the information should be arranged in layers, with the important ones at the top and the unimportant ones at the bottom. Only show the details with high correlation, analyze which actions are useless with statistical tools, and then delete them. You can learn from Apple's philosophy that nothing is perfect. Analyze the following concise Pinterest personal homepage.

It puts users and the block display area together, and the most important attention and praise buttons are carefully placed in the right place. In order to make the best application, we need to implement this principle more deeply and make the content dynamic, for example, the navigation bar should be hidden with animation when scrolling, and the buttons should be hidden when interacting in multiple steps.