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An iteration is one version of your project, and there will likely be several versions between the start and the final product. When creating a design, your first idea is almost never your best idea.
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Generally speaking, it's a good idea to think in terms of iterations or passes.
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An iteration is one version of your project, and
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there will likely be several versions between the start and the final product.
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When creating a design, your first idea is almost never your best idea.
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There are always things that can be improved or
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changed, to better suit the goals of the project.
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For example, the arrangement of page elements we created on a mobile device,
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probably isn't the best way to communicate with the audience, on a desktop computer.
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Or perhaps after stakeholders see the first version of the site,
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they might ask for changes.
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After the product launches, you might get feedback from customers,
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or information that comes from analytics data.
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In almost every case, your first try isn't going to be your best work.
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So you should embrace all the feedback you can, and
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use it to make the project better.
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We've done a first pass on the mobile version of the site.
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But there might be some ways we can make it better.
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We've created this free floating design, but
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we should wrap it in a mobile phone container.
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Let's drop in an iPhone container.
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So I'll go to containers, and you can drag in either iPhone or smartphone.
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I'll just pick iPhone here, and let's drag that onto the canvass.
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And these containers will be scaled appropriately.
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And if we zoom out even further, we can see that this
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website doesn't quite fit into this container.
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And you'll also notice that it's going behind the container.
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So to fix that we can just click on the container, and
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then right-click or secondary click, and choose send to back.
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And then the other thing we should do, is actually lock this layer.
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So let's move this over to the upper left, right click on it, and choose lock iPhone.
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And that will lock the layer in place until we right-click on it again, and
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choose unlock.
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And that way we won't select it accidentally.
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So now let's try to put this website inside of this iPhone.
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And you can see it doesn't quite fit.
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So we need to make some adjustments, so
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that this site is proportional to this particular device.
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So let's zoom back in, and let's start working on these adjustments.
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So first, I'm going to make
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this image a bit more narrow.
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I'll move Coming this Summer in a bit.
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We can make this Pre-Order button a little bit smaller.
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And we'll decrease the font size a bit, maybe to 16.
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And I think that looks pretty good.
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Up here, we need to reduce the size of this tagline.
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So let's maybe try 18 point font.
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That works!
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And we'll bring in this logo and the hamburger menu.
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And that's looking good.
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Now, we just need to adjust some of this copy.
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And it's okay if this ends up scrolling further down
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the page once the final copy is in place.
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It's not a big deal, we just want to align everything right now.
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And then we'll put the social buttons back in place,
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and center them on the page.
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Okay, great.
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Now, we can zoom out and take a look what this looks like.
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I'm generally pretty happy with this.
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I'm gonna move these elements down, just a little more.
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To give each one of these things some room to breathe, and give it some space.
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And I think that looks pretty good.
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This feels a bit cleaner than the free-floating page we had previously.
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Elements are properly scaled to fit the context of the phone,
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and they're aligned with one another, along an imaginary grid.
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However, it's still a smart idea to design without
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putting a box around your work at the start.
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Keeping the space open will allow you to think freely, and
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come up with the best way of presenting the information,
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rather than trying to cram it into an arbitrary area.
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Now, let's keep this design on the side, and
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we're going to select all of these elements.
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And we'll copy them by hitting Ctrl+C on Windows, or
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Command C on Mac, and then click in any blank area.
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And we'll paste them by hitting Ctrl+V on Windows, or Command V on Mac.
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And that will duplicate the items, and
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we can just drag these over to the right here.
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This is what's going to become our desktop layout.
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So first, let's make this headline a lot bigger so
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that it stretches across a wider area.
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I'm gonna zoom out just a bit, To give us some room to work.
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So we'll bring this font size back up, maybe say, something like 40,
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or we can probably go even higher here, to something like 60.
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I think that looks good.
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Move these items out of the way here.
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Now let's make the area for our images bigger to match.
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So I don't think they need to stretch all the way across the horizontal width of
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the page, like on a phone layout but, we'll make them still pretty large here.
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And maybe take up a bit chunk of the left side.
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Next, let's put this pre-order button to the right side here.
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We want the images to capture their attention, but we don't want to shove
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the button all the way out of the way, because that's the call-to-action.
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So we want that up high on the page, kinda front and center.
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So let's make this button a little larger.
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I think that's good.
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And we'll make the font sizes larger here, maybe say, 20 or even 24 on that.
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And let's do something similar for
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the coming this summer, say 20, maybe even like 28.
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That's pretty good, and we'll center that along the button.
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So let's zoom in a little bit, get a better look at this.
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This looks like it's coming together nicely.
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Move this up a bit.
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We still want to include the marketing copy down here to educate the customer,
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but stretching it all the way across the full width of the page,
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will make long lines difficult to read.
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So let's just stretch it across the width of the product images.
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So we'll say that's kinda the space for this copy.
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And of course, in our final design, we would adjust things like font sizes,
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and so forth, to make it fill the space a little bit more neatly.
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And this does leave the right side a little bit bare.
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But this type of thing can be changed later when you
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further iterate on the design.
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And this could be resolved with higher fidelity design details, like a square box
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around the preorder area, to separate the page into two columns.
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Or the page could be tweaked with different fonts, sizes, line heights, and
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so forth.
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This wireframe is just meant to get all the elements into one place.
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Now, let's stretch out the logo a little bit.
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Because on the desktop version of the site,
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we'll probably have the full logo lockup with the image and
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then the company name, rather than just a small icon.
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And we can do the same with the navigation.
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So let's delete this small menu here.
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And I'm gonna go to text, and I'll grab this menu bar here.
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And typically, this is meant for an actual desktop application,
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but we can use it for this website too.
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And we can separate each element with a comma, so
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we'll say Home, Products, Support and the About page.
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So we'll stretch these out.
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And let's bump up that font size as well.
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Maybe something like 16.
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And we'll align that with the right side of the page and the middle of this logo.
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And we're almost done, let's just move these social icons around a bit,
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maybe change them to be extra large icons.
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That's good.
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And let's try to find the center there.
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I think that's pretty good.
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And finally, let's put all of these elements inside of a browser window,
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so that we can clean things up a bit further.
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So I'm gonna go to containers, and instead of an iPhone,
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I'm going to drag a browser window into place here.
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And we'll right-click on that, say Sent to Back, and
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we'll zoom out a bit further here.
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And we can just kind of wrap all these page elements, just like this.
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And of course a browser window can be resized, however the user might like.
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So we'll just wrap these elements just like this, and zoom back in.
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And I think this looks pretty good.
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I'm gonna lock this browser into place.
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Maybe move some of these elements down here,
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to give them a little bit more vertical space,
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give that tagline some room to stand out on its own.
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And now that we have two different screen sizes side by side, we can compare the two
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to make sure that we're delivering a good experience on both.
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And the desktop size we designed,
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will likely fit smaller screens and possibly tablets.
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If you wanted to take things further, you could create an even larger layout, and
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have one more size up for particularly large screens, but we'll stop there.
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We just iterated a bit on the design we already created.
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But if you want to do more exploration, you should take some of the same
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elements and come up with a completely different design.
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Perhaps there are other approaches that do a better job
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of communicating to the audience, that you could iterate on even further.
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I hope you enjoyed this overview of designing websites.
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Like I said at the beginning, there's no standardized approach, and
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this is just one way of tackling the problem.
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You should feel free to be flexible, and
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experiment with different techniques to find the one that works for you.
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