In the heart of Waltham, Massachusetts, Tina Deng leads Wildleaf Inc., a premier Biophilic Design Studio, dedicated to seamlessly integrating nature into interior spaces. Through innovative use of 0 maintenance preserved moss, Wildleaf crafts graceful and textured plant spaces, bringing the tranquility of nature indoors.
“Our mission is simple: To improve life by bringing the beauty and tranquility of nature indoors,” says Tina Deng, founder of Wildleaf. “We believe that green luxury can be both accessible and transformative, and we strive to create interiors that inspire, nurture, and enhance well-being.”
Wildleaf’s journey hasn’t been without challenges. “To be known by more interior designers,” Tina highlights as their biggest obstacle. However, with each hurdle overcome, the team at Wildleaf finds pride in their collaborative spirit. “Each time our team works together to overcome some difficulties!” Tina exclaims, highlighting their resilience and dedication to their craft.
Emphasizing their expertise and design prowess, Wildleaf recommends a unique setup that aligns with their vision. “It is unique and emphasizes your expertise,” Tina notes, underlining the importance of standing out in a competitive market.
Choosing the .design domain was a strategic decision for Wildleaf. “First of all, wildleaf.com was taken,” Tina explains. “Secondly, we are a team consisting of all designers, using a .design domain emphasizes the design background of us, and makes it very clear to clients which professional industry we belong to.”
As the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, Wildleaf’s mission became even more poignant. The need to reconnect with nature, especially within indoor spaces, became apparent. Founded in Boston, Wildleaf has emerged as a beacon of biophilic design, harmoniously blending nature and artistry. Brands like Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo, American Express, Alibaba, Hilton, and Nintendo have all entrusted Wildleaf with their spaces, testament to their expertise and dedication.
Wildleaf Inc. stands as a testament to the transformative power of biophilic design. Through meticulous craftsmanship and a commitment to sustainability, they create spaces that enchant the senses and positively impact well-being.
As the end of the year approaches, many entrepreneurs might feel the need to assess all aspects of their business, including the state of their website. But a web design audit involves much more than a spruce-up. A year-end review of your business website should be a thorough analysis of the look, feel and overall functionality of the site. It takes into account visual design, UX, and most important, whether your website still aligns with the identity and mission of your brand.
There are many ways to measure the state of your site, from whether it is current with the best SEO terms or technically up-to-date on the backend. Just as you would give an employee a year-end performance review, consider conducting an annual review for your website. Here’s a step-by-step guide for auditing the digital headquarters of your business.
Outline your website review goals
In many cases, your business website is likely the most centralized storytelling platform for your company. It can house your company identity, brand voice, founding story, and every single product or service offering in one place for the entire world to see. There can be many areas that need redesign, be it the graphics or the messaging.
When auditing your site, have a clear objective of what you want to achieve. Be clear on how much time, money and resources you can dedicate to this project. Are you looking to just update some online text or do you envision yourself hiring a web designer to completely revamp the site? Budget appropriately for any professionals or consultants you might need to hire, be it a web designer, e-commerce consultant or a copy editor.
Conduct a visual audit
Allocate an hour of time to simply sit down and review your website’s overall appearance. Go on a browsing-spree of your own site! Think about your web design and how its interface speaks volumes about your business. Browse your own site thoroughly to evaluate visuals, including colors, layout, graphics and other imagery. Do all the elements still accurately reflect your brand?
A company can evolve overtime, and it’s important to make sure your website still connects to your target audience, echoes to your company culture and conveys your unique value proposition. For example, are you isolating a large part of your audience by being too gender-centric? Does the lead homepage feature your bestselling product? Does the About Us page need a little more soul?
Conduct a UX audit
Looks are one thing, functionality is another. Is your website intuitive and easy to navigate? Test your website to ensure your web design is contributing to the best online user experience. Check for loading speed as well as whether the website works across different browsers and on mobile. Test the user flow, interactions, and responsiveness from different devices including desktops, tablets and cell phones.
Conduct a content audit
It’s time to play editor. Review each sentence and description on your website, from the tagline to the fine print. While a proofreader or copyeditor can help your website’s written text shine or pack a punch, it’s your job as the business owner to make sure all the content aligns with your organization’s mission and voice.
Equally important, ensure your website is up to date with all the keywords relevant to your product or service. Ensuring your SEO strategy is up to date will help your website gain more visibility and reach your target customer.
Follow the data
Is your website giving you the data and stats you need to assess online sales performance?For beginners, Google Analytics is a free and easy tool to help you gauge your website traffic, where it comes from, and which pages are performing best. Are there pages with certain designs that are resonating well with your audience? Is there a webpage that is getting zero love? If so, it might be time for a redesign.
Review latest design trends
Check out your competitors, the latest ventures, as well as brands you admire. Are there design trends that should be on your monitor? While you should be authentic and never play copycat, it’s great to be in-tune with what is trending, and draw inspiration from what can help propel your brand identity.
Experience your website from the customer’s POV
Allocate a separate time to review your site from your customer’s perspective. Consider doing a test-purchase of a bestselling item from your website. From typing in the URL to landing on the homepage, and getting to the checkout page—was the e-commerce experience seamless and intuitive? Or, were there many glitches that made your website difficult to navigate? Does the look of the website seem consistent and engaging throughout the entire buying journey?
Get feedback
At the end of the day, it’s difficult to completely remove your bias as the business owner during a website review. Consider starting a conversation with your top customers or trusted associates to also give you feedback on your web designs and user experience.
A web design audit empowers business owners to have a thorough understanding of how a website performs and contributes to business growth. It identifies technical issues as well as whether certain areas are off-brand. Launching a managing a website in itself can be a tedious task, so having to revisit the though of redesigning can seem overwhelming. The key is to conduct a website at least annually so that your company site is always in top condition and positioning you for success.
As you browse blogs and brand sites, you might notice familiar features and patterns as you navigate across the web. That’s because – like fashion, beauty and decor – even web design follows the ebbs and flows of popular trends. And right now, as our Internet browsers improve their capabilities and our computers begin to emulate the functionality of our smartphones, the look and feel of the Internet is in a constant state of change. Here, we’ve rounded up a few of the trends you’re likely to see more and more of in 2023.
One-page websites
Maybe our attention spans are shorter, or maybe there’s just more competition and a need to get to the point faster – spreading out who you are and what you do over several pages has been on its way out for a while. Many brands have made it incredibly easy to understand their mission statement, business practice and how-to-buy, all without more than a scroll down the page. Great examples include intimates brand Harper Wilde, Cook Collective, and Sakari Sake.
Fewer hero images, more typography
For a quite a while, a lot of the web has been dominated by hero images that conquer web pages, a minimalist-friendly way of visually capturing the user, setting a tone and showcasing a brand through photos. But we may have become oversaturated with the style, making the effect a little less striking than before.
Instead, some sites are leaning on the creative use of beautiful typography to become its own eye-catching introduction to a brand’s identity and online experience. Fonts are their own artistic medium, able to capture time and place, as well as leverage psychology and brain mechanics to guide your reading experience. Fonts can even be altered or custom-made to best fit your brand. Often channeling print magazine design, the font-forward web design approach can be minimalist or maximalist, it can use design and creative copywriting to capture users, and it can even incorporate motion graphics and user interaction into the web experience.
Like with some of the font examples above, motion graphics can add a touch of delight or usability to a website. We’ve already seen the rise of parallax scrolling to create motion on web pages across the Internet. And as computer and web browser capabilities improve, and motion design tools become more available to the average user, adding interactive touches can boost your site experience, rather than weigh it down.
Great use of motion design on the web is actually a category at the annual Webby Awards – take a look at their collection of winners and nominees to inspire your own site’s possibilities.
App-like experiences
Web designers are charged with the task of creating not just one beautiful website, but also a version that works well on mobile. This is a problem often solved by responsive design – websites detect your device and screen dimensions and adapt accordingly – but as more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, the mobile version is beginning to take priority, potentially bringing the mobile experience to your desktop, rather than the other way around.
As mobile experiences increasingly become the default, we may begin to see the principles of app design applied to web design, altering the desktop user experience.
These fundamental changes don’t stop at compliance. The last few years have shown us that brands are not immune or exempt from waves of social change, whether that’s by making diversity and inclusion statements, offering employee benefits, or making public shows of support. On a website, this can play out through the faces users see, word choice like inclusive language, and even the design elements themselves – examples include throwing out gender-coded color palettes, offering increased gender options for user profiles, and focusing inventory categorization by product, rather than gender.
The Internet changes every day, and we’re in a period of endless possibility for brands to create exciting experiences that engage users and keep them coming back. There’s no time like now to step out of conventional design and into a new online identity.
It is easy to think of design as something purely aesthetic. We are, after all, initially attracted to the way something looks. However, good design is more than just a visual offering. It considers function, it evokes emotions, and ultimately elevates an experience.
Trends in design are largely driven by the public’s general mood at any given time, but are also influenced by world events and new technologies as well as our political, economic, and social climates. As a result, trends can change overnight.
Keeping up with trends is not always easy, but doing so is important to ensure customers are getting the experience they both need and desire. Whether you are designing furniture, clothing–or creating a whole new brand or business website–here are a few trends worth considering in 2023. Let one or more of the below inspire your vision:
Interactive Design
Innovative technologies are driving the trend for more interactive design, which will continue to gain momentum. As an example, last October, attendees at the Coperni fashion show watched in awe as model Bella Hadid had a dress spray painted onto her body using a new fabric technology. Prospective home buyers are now able to tour homes remotely using virtual reality headsets. Elsewhere, touch screens, augmented reality, and 3D technologies are providing designers with new avenues to create interactive experiences and products that engage and delight users.
Inclusivity & Personalization
No, those two things are not at odds with each other. Consumers are looking for increased access and broader representation in their products in 2023. How that is accomplished will depend on the sort of product or service you design. It could mean adding more inclusive sizes to a clothing line or having more diverse casting in marketing materials. People want to be able to see themselves using a product.
Personalization can help people feel a product was intended for them. It can be as simple as monogramming clothing to using data and AI technology to curate a shopping or user experience that caters to the unique preferences of each user. Both will likely result in more diverse products that cater to the individual.
Transparency
Consumers are increasingly discerning about the products they use and brands they support. They are actively seeking to support those whose values align with their own. Transparency is about more than the use of sheer fabric in clothing (though that is trending in 2023 as well). Consumers are looking for brands that are authentic, honest, and transparent in their messaging.
Sustainability
With increasing attention on environmental issues, sustainability continues to be a driving trend in 2023. Consumers and businesses alike are seeking out more eco-friendly and sustainable materials and modes of production. Innovative ways to reuse or repurpose materials are generally well received.
Minimalism
Minimal, streamlined design has been popular for a while and will continue through 2023 as people continue to simplify their lives. Minimal design is simple and uncluttered and focuses primarily on the essential elements with minimal but impactful color elements.
Minimalism can exist in the digital realm as well, from web design down to one’s small business URL. If you’re leading an artistic venture, consider a .design domain to not only simplify and convey your mission, but to also stand out from the crowd.
Deep, Saturated Color
And while we are talking about color, the neutrals that have dominated design in recent years are making way for eye-catching pops of bold color in 2023. Pantone described their color of the year, Viva Magenta, as an “animated” and “electrifying” red that “promotes a joyous and optimistic celebration.” There were lots of poppy reds on the Spring 2023 runways, but the strongest color to come out of that season was a vibrant cobalt blue. At home, the colors hues are leaning warmer (so long pale gray!) and deeply saturated to invoke comfort and anchor a space.
Continually Use Design to Reinvent Yourself
The design landscape is continually evolving, and new trends and technologies are emerging all the time. By keeping up to date with the latest trends, you can stay ahead of the curve and add experiential value to your customers and audience that will keep them returning for more.
