Webmasters Gallery

As consumer attention to the digital world continues to shift towards smooth user experience or interface design, the ‘dark mode’ function has become one of the essential digital interfaces. This flashy yet power-saving mode is now considered a norm; it has become prevalent with the settings of operating systems up to single applications. The current blog discusses the basics of the dark mode, how to implement it optimally, and what user tendencies inform creators about how to proceed.

What is Dark Mode?

Contrast mode is a UI mechanism where textual and graphical accents are formed in pale colors, placed on a dark background. This reversal of work on the basis of the light and dark theme gives a modern look to the product and proves to be a favorite of users who use devices with screens for a long time. Its main advantages include less stress on the eyes, longer battery life for devices which include OLED or AMOLED displays, and clearer text in dim environments.

Benefits of Dark Mode

1. Reduced Eye Strain: These include; it makes the eyes to have an easy time especially in low light as opposed to the brighter Screen glares.
2. Battery Efficiency: Some OLED or AMOLED devices naturally take less power when a pixel is black hence; they have more battery longevity.
3. Modern Aesthetic: The minimalist appearance of darkness is what makes them opt for the dark mode in order to get a class look.
4. Enhanced Focus: The matter is that adjusting the brightness lesser causes less distraction so with the help of dark mode, users can focus on the content rather than the design of the interface.

Challenges of Dark Mode Design

However, designing for the dark mode is not exempted from specific difficulties and limitations. Here are some common pitfalls:

• Legibility Issues: Since a paper’s text and background rely heavily on color, a scenario where there is low contrast between the two results in eye strain among users.
• Brand Identity: It becomes challenging to maintain the elements of brand colors and integrated visuals familiar in the dark mode.
• Compatibility: The user may experience design elements and images inconsistency in switching to dark mode since not all of them are well adapted for this mode.

Dark Mode Design Best Practices

To create an effective dark mode experience, consider the following best practices:

1. Prioritize Contrast

As it has been previously mentioned, contrast is essential in dark mode design, and dark text on a light background brings out the best of this concept. Content is barely distinguishable with low contrast, yet it is strainful to the eyes when the contrast is too high. Aim for a balance by:

• Because using white as it is will cause too much contrast it is better to use a light gray color for the text.
• Ensuring sufficient contrast ratios between text and background to meet accessibility standards (WCAG recommends a minimum of 4.5:1).

2. Use Color Wisely

That is why colors act differently on dark backgrounds. A with bright colors selected will look clearer whereas in places where less bright colors are selected will look dull. Tips include:

• Checking the color of different variants of brand clothes against the dark background to see how it looks currently.
• Not using, for example, a deep red background that makes using the Web site uncomfortable.

3. Maintain Visual Hierarchy

While organizing elements on the screen, one also ensures that the interface is easy to use thanks to the concept of hierarchy. In dark mode:

• Always select the area that you want to put in a layer and give it a humble shadow or highlight for effective layering.
• This emphasizes important aspects on the flyer; it also involves the use of the different fonts where some must be big in size.

4. Optimize for Images and Graphics

Light mode images and graphics may not be very appropriate for use in a dark theme. Ensure that:

• Transparency has proper edges or even some level of shadow for PNGs and icons.
• Pictures are altered, or cleaned up to make them stand out against black backdrops.

5. Test in Different Lighting Conditions

People use dark mode at night, during the day, indoors, and outside. Testing in diverse conditions ensures:

• Little addition of space is occupied, thereby keeping the content easily readable and having a visually appealing interface under all circumstances
• The different forms of UI elements prove to work well in severe lighting conditions.

6. Provide a Seamless Toggle Option

Option to toggle between night and day mode. A prominent and intuitive toggle ensures that:

• As mentioned earlier, the users can select the mode that they wish to use most.
• Regardless, their experience is not interrupted, settings reset or require them to change devices.

User Preferences for Dark Mode

Understanding user preferences is key to designing a successful dark mode experience. Here are some insights based on recent surveys and studies:

1. Adoption Rates: A lot of users always opt for dark mode and it has been found out that there is up to 82% of users who use it in particular areas.
2. Demographics: Specifically, it has been found that it is younger people, fans of technology, and night people who prefer the dark mode.
3. Use Cases: Users enjoy dark mode for both reading, gaming and when they spend long hours on the screens especially at night.
4. Customizability: A highly appreciated feature is a choice of interface looks and an opportunity to create apps with a dark theme if necessary.

Implementing Dark Mode: Practical Tips

For developers and designers ready to implement dark mode, consider these practical tips:

1. Use System Settings: Support the choice of dark mode on the system level such as iOS and Android levels for synchronization.
2. Dynamic Themes: Employ basic theming libraries in order to simplify the operation in regard to both light and dark modes.
3. Test Thoroughly: Make a rule: check the dark mode design you’ve created on various devices and platforms frequently – this will help to avoid discrepancies between them and to improve usability.
4. Gather Feedback: Make sure to do a user test in order to know which elements can be improved for you to get a better dark mode.

Conclusion

Dark mode design is not simply an emerging design direction; it is a representation of the emerging design for the people. Understanding the customer needs and preferences, following the guidelines, and not falling short of the standard missteps increase usability and give an aesthetic and enhanced appeal to the brand’s dark mode. Let the evil in you and give people an interface to work with that glimmers even in the dark. In case you want to implement dark mode in your business, learn more about modern web design solutions in order to create engaging interfaces.

Featured image by Sten Ritterfeld on Unsplash

The post Dark Mode Design: Best Practices and User Preferences appeared first on noupe.

I wrote a post for Smashing Magazine that was published today about this thing that Chrome and Safari have called “Tight Mode” and how it impacts page performance. I’d never heard the term until DebugBear’s Matt Zeunert mentioned it in a passing conversation, but it’s a not-so-new deal and yet there’s precious little documentation about it anywhere.

So, Matt shared a couple of resources with me and I used those to put some notes together that wound up becoming the article that was published. In short:

Tight Mode discriminates resources, taking anything and everything marked as High and Medium priority. Everything else is constrained and left on the outside, looking in until the body is firmly attached to the document, signaling that blocking scripts have been executed. It’s at that point that resources marked with Low priority are allowed in the door during the second phase of loading.

The implications are huge, as it means resources are not treated equally at face value. And yet the way Chrome and Safari approach it is wildly different, meaning the implications are wildly different depending on which browser is being evaluated. Firefox doesn’t enforce it, so we’re effectively looking at three distinct flavors of how resources are fetched and rendered on the page.

It’s no wonder web performance is a hard discipline when we have these moving targets. Sure, it’s great that we now have a consistent set of metrics for evaluating, diagnosing, and discussing performance in the form of Core Web Vitals — but those metrics will never be consistent from browser to browser when the way resources are accessed and prioritized varies.

Tight Mode: Why Browsers Produce Different Performance Results originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Mark Zuckerberg’s pattern of shifting Meta’s policies to appease changing U.S. administrations and his decision to abandon biased fact-checking partnerships reveal a leader driven by corporate survival rather than public accountability. These actions highlight the urgent need for more transparent and impartial oversight of online discourse.

This article is a sponsored by DebugBear

I was chatting with DebugBear’s Matt Zeunert and, in the process, he casually mentioned this thing called Tight Mode when describing how browsers fetch and prioritize resources. I wanted to nod along like I knew what he was talking about but ultimately had to ask: What the heck is “Tight” mode?

What I got back were two artifacts, one of them being the following video of Akamai web performance expert Robin Marx speaking at We Love Speed in France a few weeks ago:

Tight Mode discriminates resources, taking anything and everything marked as High and Medium priority. Everything else is constrained and left on the outside, looking in until the body is firmly attached to the document, signaling that blocking scripts have been executed. It’s at that point that resources marked with Low priority are allowed in the door during the second phase of loading.

There’s a big caveat to that, but we’ll get there. The important thing to note is that…

Chrome And Safari Enforce Tight Mode

Yes, both Chrome and Safari have some working form of Tight Mode running in the background. That last image illustrates Chrome’s Tight Mode. Let’s look at Safari’s next and compare the two.

Look at that! Safari discriminates High-priority resources in its initial fetch, just like Chrome, but we get wildly different loading behavior between the two browsers. Notice how Safari appears to exclude the first five PNG images marked with Medium priority where Chrome allows them. In other words, Safari makes all Medium- and Low-priority resources wait in line until all High-priority items are done loading, even though we’re working with the exact same HTML. You might say that Safari’s behavior makes the most sense, as you can see in that last image that Chrome seemingly excludes some High-priority resources out of Tight Mode. There’s clearly some tomfoolery happening there that we’ll get to.

Where’s Firefox in all this? It doesn’t take any extra tightening measures when evaluating the priority of the resources on a page. We might consider this the “classic” waterfall approach to fetching and loading resources.

Chrome And Safari Trigger Tight Mode Differently

Robin makes this clear as day in his talk. Chrome and Safari are both Tight Mode proponents, yet trigger it under differing circumstances that we can outline like this:

Notice that Chrome only looks at the document when prioritizing resources, and only when it involves JavaScript. Safari, meanwhile, also looks at JavaScript, but CSS as well, and anywhere those things might be located in the document — regardless of whether it’s in the or . That helps explain why Chrome excludes images marked as High priority in Figure 2 from its Tight Mode implementation — it only cares about JavaScript in this context.

So, even if Chrome encounters a script file with fetchpriority="high" in the document body, the file is not considered a “High” priority and it will be loaded after the rest of the items. Safari, meanwhile, honors fetchpriority anywhere in the document. This helps explain why Chrome leaves two scripts on the table, so to speak, in Figure 2, while Safari appears to load them during Tight Mode.

That’s not to say Safari isn’t doing anything weird in its process. Given the following markup:

<head>
  <!-- two high-priority scripts -->
  <script src="script-1.js"></script>
  <script src="script-1.js"></script>

  <!-- two low-priority scripts -->
  <script src="script-3.js" defer></script>
  <script src="script-4.js" defer></script>
</head>
<body>
  <!-- five low-priority scripts -->
  <img src="image-1.jpg">
  <img src="image-2.jpg">
  <img src="image-3.jpg">
  <img src="image-4.jpg">
  <img src="image-5.jpg">
</body>

…you might expect that Safari would delay the two Low-priority scripts in the until the five images in the are downloaded. But that’s not the case. Instead, Safari loads those two scripts during its version of Tight Mode.

Chrome And Safari Exceptions

I mentioned earlier that Low-priority resources are loaded in during the second phase of loading after Tight Mode has been completed. But I also mentioned that there’s a big caveat to that behavior. Let’s touch on that now.

According to Patrick’s article, we know that Tight Mode is “the initial phase and constraints loading lower-priority resources until the body is attached to the document (essentially, after all blocking scripts in the head have been executed).” But there’s a second part to that definition that I left out:

“In tight mode, low-priority resources are only loaded if there are less than two in-flight requests at the time that they are discovered.”

A-ha! So, there is a way for low-priority resources to load in Tight Mode. It’s when there are less than two “in-flight” requests happening when they’re detected.

Wait, what does “in-flight” even mean?

That’s what’s meant by less than two High- or Medium-priority items being requested. Robin demonstrates this by comparing Chrome to Safari under the same conditions, where there are only two High-priority scripts and ten regular images in the mix:

<head>
  <!-- two high-priority scripts -->
  <script src="script-1.js"></script>
  <script src="script-1.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <!-- ten low-priority images -->
  <img src="image-1.jpg">
  <img src="image-2.jpg">
  <img src="image-3.jpg">
  <img src="image-4.jpg">
  <img src="image-5.jpg">
  <!-- rest of images -->
  <img src="image-10.jpg">
</body>

Let’s look at what Safari does first because it’s the most straightforward approach:

Nothing tricky about that, right? The two High-priority scripts are downloaded first and the 10 images flow in right after. Now let’s look at Chrome:

We have the two High-priority scripts loaded first, as expected. But then Chrome decides to let in the first five images with Medium priority, then excludes the last five images with Low priority. What. The. Heck.

The reason is a noble one: Chrome wants to load the first five images because, presumably, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is often going to be one of those images and Chrome is hedging bets that the web will be faster overall if it automatically handles some of that logic. Again, it’s a noble line of reasoning, even if it isn’t going to be 100% accurate. It does muddy the waters, though, and makes understanding Tight Mode a lot harder when we see Medium- and Low-priority items treated as High-priority citizens.

Even muddier is that Chrome appears to only accept up to two Medium-priority resources in this discriminatory process. The rest are marked with Low priority.

That’s what we mean by “less than two in-flight requests.” If Chrome sees that only one or two items are entering Tight Mode, then it automatically prioritizes up to the first five non-critical images as an LCP optimization effort.

Truth be told, Safari does something similar, but in a different context. Instead of accepting Low-priority items when there are less than two in-flight requests, Safari accepts both Medium and Low priority in Tight Mode and from anywhere in the document regardless of whether they are located in the or not. The exception is any asynchronous or deferred script because, as we saw earlier, those get loaded right away anyway.

How To Manipulate Tight Mode

This might make for a great follow-up article, but this is where I’ll refer you directly to Robin’s video because his first-person research is worth consuming directly. But here’s the gist:

• We have these high-level features that can help influence priority, including resource hints (i.e., preload and preconnect), the Fetch Priority API, and lazy-loading techniques.
• We can indicate fetchpriority=`“high“andfetchpriority=”low”` on items.

<img src="lcp-image.jpg" fetchpriority="high">
<link rel="preload" href="defer.js" as="script" fetchpriority="low"

• Using fetchpriority="high" is one way we can get items lower in the source included in Tight Mode. Using fetchpriority="low is one way we can get items higher in the source excluded from Tight Mode.
• For Chrome, this works on images, asynchronous/deferred scripts, and scripts located at the bottom of the .
• For Safari, this only works on images.

Again, watch Robin’s talk for the full story starting around the 28:32 marker.

That’s Tight… Mode

It’s bonkers to me that there is so little information about Tight Mode floating around the web. I would expect something like this to be well-documented somewhere, certainly over at Chrome Developers or somewhere similar, but all we have is a lightweight Google Doc and a thorough presentation to paint a picture of how two of the three major browsers fetch and prioritize resources. Let me know if you have additional information that you’ve either published or found — I’d love to include them in the discussion.

Spotify’s hidden Star Wars Easter egg turns the playbar into a glowing lightsaber when playing certain official Star Wars playlists. This playful feature delights fans by adding a touch of the Force to their listening experience.

The list of attributes available in HTML is long and well-documented. Even if you haven’t memorized them (and there’s totally nothing wrong with an author… er… random person off the street, who has), there are a bunch of places where HTML attributes you’re familiar with will have different or more specific jobs. Let’s take a look.

name

You may have heard of the name attribute, giving a name/label to information sent through a form. And more specifically you may have used it to bring together a set of radio buttons, but you can also use it with the details element to have only one of a set of accordions open at a time.

Like if you have more than one refrigerator in the office at work, any respectable person would only open one door at a time. Right, Bob?

<details name="office-kitchen">
  <summary>Refrigerator 1</summary>
  Lunches, condiments, yogurt et al.
</details>
<details name="office-kitchen">
  <summary>Refrigerator 2</summary>
  More Lunches, leftovers from client meeting, stray cans of off-brand soda et al.
</details>
<details name="office-kitchen">
  <summary>Refrigerator 3</summary>
  Cookie dough someone bought from somebody’s child’s fundraiser, expired milk, unidentifiable meat et al.
</details>

See the Pen Name [forked] by Undead Institute.

title

You’ve probably heard of the universal attribute title. It’s typically thought of as the built-in tooltip text, but three elements have special semantics for the title attribute: input and the rarely used gems, the definition (dfn) element, and the abbreviation (abbr) element.

If you’re using a pattern attribute on an input to provide some regex-based error correction, then you should definitely tell the user how to meet the criteria you’re using. The title attribute can be used both as a tooltip and as the message shown when the user doesn’t meet that criteria.

<form method="post" action="#">
  <label>Who took my <em>well labeled</em> yogurt from the company fridge? I know it was you, Bob.<br>
    <input type="text" pattern="Bob [A-Za-z].+" title="There are many Bobs. The only question is which one it was. Please limit your answers to Bob and his/her last name.">
  </label><br>
  <button type="submit">Submit</submit>
</form>

See the Pen Title – Input [forked] by Undead Institute.

For a dfn element, if you use the title attribute, then it has to include the term being defined. dfn should still have text in it, but it can be an abbreviation or a different form of the term.

<p><dfn title="Office Yogurt Thief">OYG</dfn>’s are a pox on humanity. Stealing yogurts from the office fridge even when they are labeled.</p>

See the Pen Title – dfn [forked] by Undead Institute.

A title on an abbr element not only sets the tooltip but explicitly has the expansion of the abbreviation or acronym. As it says in the spec: “The [title] attribute, if specified, must contain an expansion of the abbreviation, and nothing else.” That’s the specification’s equivalent of threatening a mafia hit if you aren’t careful with your title attributes. You have been warned, Bob.

When dealing with a suspected yogurt thief, we must create a <abbr title="Human Resources Special Task Force on Yogurt Theft">HRSTFYT</abbr> to deal with the problem.

See the Pen Title – abbr [forked] by Undead Institute.

value

The value attribute is well known for setting default values on inputs, but you can also use it on a list item (li) within an ordered list (ol) to change the number of that item and all that follow it. It only takes integers, but you can use it no matter what type of ordered list you use (numeric, alphabetical, or Roman numerals).

<h1>Favorite Co-workers</h1>
<ol>
  <li>Tina</li>
  <li>Keesha</li>
  <li>Carlos</li>
  <li>Jamal</li>
  <li>Scott</li>
  <li value="37">Bob</li>
  <li>Bobbie</li>
  <li>Bobby</li>
  <li>"Rob"</li>
</ol>

See the Pen Value [forked] by Undead Institute.

datetime

You might have used a datetime attribute on a time element to provide a machine-readable format of the time and/or date represented in the time element’s text:

<time datetime="2024-12-09">Dec. 12, 2024</time>

The same attribute can also be used with the ins and del elements (used for notating an addition/insertion and deletion of content, respectively). The datetime attribute on ins and del provides a machine-readable date (and optionally a time) for when the change was made. You can show it to the visitor if you like, but it’s mainly intended for private use.

Check out the edits of the original version of an earlier example:

When dealing with a <ins datetime="2024-11-17">suspected</ins> yogurt thief <del datetime="2024-11-17">, like Bob,</del> we must create a <abbr title="Human Resources Special Task Force on Yogurt Theft">HRSTFYT</abbr> to deal with <del datetime="2024-11-17">Bob</del> <ins datetime="2024-11-17">the problem</ins>.

See the Pen Datetime [forked] by Undead Institute.

As an added note, screenreaders do not announce the datetime attribute in this context.

cite

Sticking with our oft-neglected friends ins and del, the cite attribute that you use on blockquote and q elements to provide a URL of the source of the quotation can also be used on ins and del to provide the URL of a document explaining the changes.

When dealing with a <ins datetime="2024-11-17" cite="https://codepen.io/undeadinstitute/full/VYZeaZm">suspected</ins> yogurt thief <del datetime="2024-11-17" cite="https://codepen.io/undeadinstitute/full/VYZeaZm">, like Bob,</del> we must create a <abbr title="Human Resources Special Task Force on Yogurt Theft">HRSTFYT</abbr> to deal with <del datetime="2024-11-17" cite="https://codepen.io/undeadinstitute/full/VYZeaZm">Bob</del> <ins datetime="2024-11-17" cite="https://codepen.io/undeadinstitute/full/VYZeaZm">the problem</ins>.

See the Pen Cite [forked] by Undead Institute.

Again, these dates are not announced in assistive tech, like screen readers.

multiple

You probably know the multiple attribute as that more-than-meets-the-eye attribute that transforms a dropdown menu into a multi-select box, like a co-worker who lets you choose two donuts from the box. (I’m lookin’ at you, Tina.) But it has two other uses as well. You can add it to both a file input and an email input to accept multiple files and emails, respectively.

<form method="post" action="#">
  <label>Upload complaint forms (about Bob) <input type="file" multiple> </label><br>
  <label>Email all of Bob’s bosses: <input type="email" multiple></label><br>
  <button type="submit">Submit</submit>
</form>

Just be sure that the emails are comma-separated.

See the Pen Multiple [forked] by Undead Institute.

for

In your travels across the internet, you’ve probably come across the for attribute when it’s used to associate a label element with a form field (input, select, textarea, etc.), but you can also use it to explicitly associate the elements of a calculation with an output element.

Unlike a label–input relationship, which is a one-to-one relationship (i.e., one label for one field), the for attribute used on an output can hold an unordered, space-separated list of IDs of the fields that contributed to the calculation.

<form method="post" action="#" id="comeuppance"> 
  <fieldset><legend>Defendant name</legend>
    <label>First Name: <input name="fname" type="text"></label>
    <label>Last Name: <input name="lname" type="text"></label>
  </fieldset>
  <label>Number of yogurts stolen (unlabeled): 
    <input name="numunlbld" id="numstolen-unlbld" type="number">
  </label> * 
  <label>Unlabeled Multiplier: 
    <input name="multiunlbld" id="multi-unlbld" type="number" value="0.5">
  </label> + 
  <label>Number of yogurts stolen (labeled): 
    <input name="numlbld" id="numstolen-lbld" type="number">
  </label> * 
  <label>Labeled Multiplier: 
    <input name="multilbld" id="multi-lbld" type="number" value="1.5">
  </label> = 
  <label>Suggested prison term (in years):
    <output id="answer" for="numstolen-unlbld numstolen-lbld multi-unlbld multi-lbld"></output>
  </label>
</form>

See the Pen For [forked] by Undead Institute.

target

Just like you can use a target attribute to open a link in a new tab/window, you can use the same target attribute and value _blank to have a form open the response in a new tab/window.

<form method="post" action="#" id="comeuppance" target="_blank"> 
  [...]
</form>

disabled

You may have used the disabled attribute to knock out an individual form field, but you can also use it to disable every descendant of a fieldset element.

No matter what HR says and its innocent-until-proven-guilty ethos, we all know Bob did it. Don’t we?

<form method="post" action="#" id="comeuppance"> 
  <fieldset disabled><legend>Defendant name</legend>
    <label>First Name: <input name="fname" type="text" value="Bob"></label>
    <label>Last Name: <input name="lname" type="text" value="McBobberson"></label>
  </fieldset>
  [...]
</form>

See the Pen Disabled [forked] by Undead Institute.

Attribute Selectors

While not technically an HTML tip, attributes can also be used as selectors in CSS. You put square brackets around the attribute name and you’ll select all elements that contain that attribute.

<style>
  [title] {
    background-color: red;
  }
</style>
<h1>List of <del>Suspects</del><ins>Co-workers</ins></h1>
<ol>
  <li>Fred</li>
  <li>Rhonda</li>
  <li>Philomina</li>
  <li>Cranford</li>
  <li>Scott</li>
  <li title="the guilty one">Bob</li>
  <li>Bobbie</li>
  <li>Bobby</li>
  <li>"Rob"</li>
</ol>

See the Pen Attribute Selector [forked] by Undead Institute.

There’s actually a whole lot more you can do with attribute selectors, but that’s the topic of another article — literally.

Wrapping Up

Okay, now that we’ve learned some trivia we can use to properly prosecute Bob’s office and yogurtorial transgressions, do you have a favorite HTML attribute I didn’t discuss? Show off your personal life-of-the-party energy in the comments. (And, yes, cool people have a favorite HTML attribute… really cool people… right? Right?? Right!?!?!?!?!)

A professional font can improve the user experience by 40%. Choosing a font for your website may seem like a minor issue.

In reality, typography is a pretty important web design element to pay attention to.

Think about it. Your marketing messages consist of words. If your target audience can’t read those words, then what good is your message?

How can people know how awesome your product is if something as simple as a font can get in the way?

In this article, we’ll explain the importance of an attractive, readable, brand-consistent font and how to choose the right one to boost user engagement.

Why Is Typography in Web Design So Important?

Typography in web design because it impacts how your audience perceives and interacts with your content. 

A well-chosen font can enhance readability, convey your brand’s personality, and improve user engagement.

Helvetica, for example, is a popular font known for its clean, modern look and excellent readability. This makes it effective for engaging users.

Beaches of Normandy Tours, a tour agency focused on WWII historical tours, uses Helvetica in its blog articles to attract history enthusiasts, veterans, soldiers, and relatives. They use Helvetica’s clear and simple design to create a sense of professionalism and trust. 

For example, their article about The Liberation of Paris combines Helvetica with historical photos, making the content easy to read and visually appealing. This approach makes blogs more user-friendly and keeps readers engaged by presenting reliable historical information in an attractive way.

The Psychological Impact of Fonts: How Different Fonts Evoke Emotions

Different fonts can evoke various emotions and perceptions, which influence how users feel about a website and its content. This is called font psychology.

With their traditional and elegant look, Serif fonts often evoke feelings of reliability and sophistication. With their clean and modern appearance, it’s no wonder why about 85% of fonts on the web are Sans-serif fonts.

Their simplicity and clarity make them universal fonts to use in a variety of industries and websites. 

On the other hand, script fonts can appear personal and creative, while decorative fonts add a unique and distinctive flair. 

StudioSuits, a brand that sells seersucker suits for men, uses simple fonts on its website. It uses the custom font Unna for its headings and a Sans-serif font for its text. This combination creates a sophisticated and engaging experience that aligns with the brand’s simplistic design ethos.

How to Choose the Right Fonts for Your Website

Now, with that out of the way, let’s look at some best practices to consider when selecting website fonts for a beautiful, user-friendly design.

Understand Your Audience 

Understanding your audience can help you choose the right font for your website because different demographics have varying preferences and expectations. Knowing your audience’s age, interests, and cultural background can guide you in choosing fonts that resonate with them and enhance their user experience. 

For example, Cruise America, a leading provider of RV rentals in Denver, serves the travel industry and aims to evoke a sense of adventure and freedom. The brand incorporates a script-type font for its headings to create a stylish and inviting feel while keeping the remaining fonts simple for readability. 

It uses a custom font called Recklame Script, a handwriting font that adds a unique, stylish look, helping to engage its audience and reflect the excitement of travel.

Some tips for choosing fonts that resonate with your audience:

1. Look at the fonts your competitors use.
2. Consider your industry. (e.g. Tech = sleek, modern; Luxury = elegant, serif)
3. Analyze website analytics to understand how your audience will interact with your content.
4. Conduct A/B tests with different fonts to see which ones perform the best in terms of conversions.

Match Your Brand Personality

Marketers see a 30% increase in customer engagement when they use fonts that are consistent with their brand. 

So, when your font choices reflect the personality of your brand, it creates a sense of authenticity that resonates with your target customer. 

For example, a professional corporate brand might benefit from clean, Sans-serif fonts that convey reliability and a sense of trust.

On the other hand, a creative brand might opt for decorative or handwritten fonts that convey innovation and playfulness.

A marketing agency would be a perfect example of a brand that can use more expressive typography. Note the screenshot below. Level Agency uses a bold, creative font to grab attention and convey its innovative approach to marketing.

Prioritize Readability

Only 30% of websites consider font accessibility for visually impaired users. Don’t be part of the other 70% with incorrect letter spacing or Times New Roman font at 8 points with no white space.

No matter how attractive a font is, if it isn’t easy to read, it’s not going to delight your visitors. That means they’re more likely to leave your site, especially if they have a visual impairment.

So, test your chosen fronts across different devices and screen sizes to ensure legibility. Avoid decorative fonts for body text. If you must use them, save them for headings or accent elements.

Make sure there’s enough contrast between your text and background. Dark text on a light background, or vice versa, usually works best.

Consider Font Pairing

Add visual interest to your web design by choosing complementary fonts. Consider using a more expressive, bold font for headings. Choose a simpler, more readable font for body takes. Make sure the fonts you pair have contrasting but harmonious styles. 

You can also use different font weights (bold, regular, light) to establish a visual hierarchy. This can help you guide users through the content smoothly.

Final Thoughts

The font(s) you choose can take your website design to the next level. It’s a small piece of the web design puzzle, but an important piece nonetheless.

Test out different styles and capture the essence of your brand. Think about your customers and the industry you serve. 

Following these tips can help you find the right font combination that complements your overall web design and ensures a smooth user experience.

Here’s to your success!

Featured image by Natalia Y. on Unsplash

The post Typography in Web Design: Choosing Fonts that Enhance User Engagement appeared first on noupe.

Getty Images and Shutterstock are merging in a $3.7 billion deal, creating a powerhouse for visual content with expanded libraries, cutting-edge AI tools, and integrated solutions for creatives. This merger promises to streamline access to assets and innovate resources for designers.

This article is a sponsored by Cloudways

Product launches and sales typically attract large volumes of traffic. Too many concurrent server requests can lead to website crashes if you’re not equipped to deal with them. This can result in a loss of revenue and reputation damage.

The good news is that you can maximize availability and prevent website crashes by designing websites specifically for these events. For example, you can switch to a scalable cloud-based web host, or compress/optimize images to save bandwidth.

In this article, we’ll discuss six ways to design websites for high-traffic events like product drops and sales:

1. Compress and optimize images,
2. Choose a scalable web host,
3. Use a CDN,
4. Leverage caching,
5. Stress test websites,
6. Refine the backend.

Let’s jump right in!

How To Design For High-Traffic Events

Let’s take a look at six ways to design websites for high-traffic events, without worrying about website crashes and other performance-related issues.

1. Compress And Optimize Images

One of the simplest ways to design a website that accommodates large volumes of traffic is to optimize and compress images. Typically, images have very large file sizes, which means they take longer for browsers to parse and display. Additionally, they can be a huge drain on bandwidth and lead to slow loading times.

You can free up space and reduce the load on your server by compressing and optimizing images. It’s a good idea to resize images to make them physically smaller. You can often do this using built-in apps on your operating system.

There are also online optimization tools available like Tinify, as well as advanced image editing software like Photoshop or GIMP:

Image format is also a key consideration. Many designers rely on JPG and PNG, but adaptive modern image formats like WebP can reduce the weight of the image and provide a better user experience (UX).

You may even consider installing an image optimization plugin or an image CDN to compress and scale images automatically. Additionally, you can implement lazy loading, which prioritizes the loading of images above the fold and delays those that aren’t immediately visible.

2. Choose A Scalable Web Host

The most convenient way to design a high-traffic website without worrying about website crashes is to upgrade your web hosting solution.

Traditionally, when you sign up for a web hosting plan, you’re allocated a pre-defined number of resources. This can negatively impact your website performance, particularly if you use a shared hosting service.

Upgrading your web host ensures that you have adequate resources to serve visitors flocking to your site during high-traffic events. If you’re not prepared for this eventuality, your website may crash, or your host may automatically upgrade you to a higher-priced plan.

Therefore, the best solution is to switch to a scalable web host like Cloudways Autonomous:

This is a fully managed WordPress hosting service that automatically adjusts your web resources based on demand. This means that you’re able to handle sudden traffic surges without the hassle of resource monitoring and without compromising on speed.

With Cloudways Autonomous your website is hosted on multiple servers instead of just one. It uses Kubernetes with advanced load balancing to distribute traffic among these servers. Kubernetes is capable of spinning up additional pods (think of pods as servers) based on demand, so there’s no chance of overwhelming a single server with too many requests.

High-traffic events like sales can also make your site a prime target for hackers. This is because, in high-stress situations, many sites enter a state of greater vulnerability and instability. But with Cloudways Autonomous, you’ll benefit from DDoS mitigation and a web application firewall to improve website security.

3. Use A CDN

As you’d expect, large volumes of traffic can significantly impact the security and stability of your site’s network. This can result in website crashes unless you take the proper precautions when designing sites for these events.

A content delivery network (CDN) is an excellent solution to the problem. You’ll get access to a collection of strategically-located servers, scattered all over the world. This means that you can reduce latency and speed up your content delivery times, regardless of where your customers are based.

When a user makes a request for a website, they’ll receive content from a server that’s physically closest to their location. Plus, having extra servers to distribute traffic can prevent a single server from crashing under high-pressure conditions. Cloudflare is one of the most robust CDNs available, and luckily, you’ll get access to it when you use Cloudways Autonomous.

You can also find optimization plugins or caching solutions that give you access to a CDN. Some tools like Jetpack include a dedicated image CDN, which is built to accommodate and auto-optimize visual assets.

4. Leverage Caching

When a user requests a website, it can take a long time to load all the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript contained within it. Caching can help your website combat this issue.

A cache functions as a temporary storage location that keeps copies of your web pages on hand (once they’ve been requested). This means that every subsequent request will be served from the cache, enabling users to access content much faster.

The cache mainly deals with static content like HTML which is much quicker to parse compared to dynamic content like JavaScript. However, you can find caching technologies that accommodate both types of content.

There are different caching mechanisms to consider when designing for high-traffic events. For example, edge caching is generally used to cache static assets like images, videos, or web pages. Meanwhile, database caching enables you to optimize server requests.

If you’re expecting fewer simultaneous sessions (which isn’t likely in this scenario), server-side caching can be a good option. You could even implement browser caching, which affects static assets based on your HTTP headers.

There are plenty of caching plugins available if you want to add this functionality to your site, but some web hosts provide built-in solutions. For example, Cloudways Autonomous uses Cloudflare’s edge cache and integrated object cache.

5. Stress Test Websites

One of the best ways to design websites while preparing for peak traffic is to carry out comprehensive stress tests.

This enables you to find out how your website performs in various conditions. For instance, you can simulate high-traffic events and discover the upper limits of your server’s capabilities. This helps you avoid resource drainage and prevent website crashes.

You might have experience with speed testing tools like Pingdom, which assess your website performance. But these tools don’t help you understand how performance may be impacted by high volumes of traffic.

Therefore, you’ll need to use a dedicated stress test tool like Loader.io:

This is completely free to use, but you’ll need to register for an account and verify your website domain. You can then download your preferred file and upload it to your server via FTP.

After that, you’ll find three different tests to carry out. Once your test is complete, you can take a look at the average response time and maximum response time, and see how this is affected by a higher number of clients.

6. Refine The Backend

The final way to design websites for high-traffic events is to refine the WordPress back end.

The admin panel is where you install plugins, activate themes, and add content. The more of these features that you have on your site, the slower your pages will load.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to delete any old pages, posts, and images that are no longer needed. If you have access to your database, you can even go in and remove any archived materials.

On top of this, it’s best to remove plugins that aren’t essential for your website to function. Again, with database access, you can get in there and delete any tables that sometimes get left behind when you uninstall plugins via the WordPress dashboard.

When it comes to themes, you’ll want to opt for a simple layout with a minimalist design. Themes that come with lots of built-in widgets or rely on third-party plugins will likely add bloat to your loading times. Essentially, the lighter your back end, the quicker it will load.

Conclusion

Product drops and sales are a great way to increase revenue, but these events can result in traffic spikes that affect a site’s availability and performance. To prevent website crashes, you’ll have to make sure that the sites you design can handle large numbers of server requests at once.

The easiest way to support fluctuating traffic volumes is to upgrade to a scalable web hosting service like Cloudways Autonomous. This way, you can adjust your server resources automatically, based on demand. Plus, you’ll get access to a CDN, caching, and an SSL certificate. Get started today!

The FTC has ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million for falsely claiming its AI-powered tool could make websites fully compliant with accessibility standards. This action is part of the FTC’s crackdown on deceptive AI marketing practices.