Exploring Typography In Web design — a concept restaurant landing page design process.

Typography is an integral part of any kind of visual design, the modern job industry has people known as content writers who specialize in using writing to convince readers to take certain actions. Then there’s Information Architects in the design industry who use typography and whatnot to give users an awesome experience.

In this write-up, I’m going to walk you through the process of my low-fi restaurant landing page concept design, the struggles, excitement, and so on.

I might have forgotten to mention that the design was a task given to me at WeJapa product design Internship which I’m presently undergoing. The task was to design a restaurant landing page, using just typography to tell a story good enough to convince online visitors to patronize it.

The difficulty….

Trust me when I say it’s no easy thing to design a website without illustration, icon, or images. I have only seen the majority of these done with posters, magazines or any of that book cover sort of thing. But hey, there’s a high chance that is associated with my shortcoming as a newbie designer.

I found myself looking to balance the layout, using large and small texts to avoid too much negative space(it’s funny, I never believed in too much negative until now). It was a serious challenge to me because I tried a lot of times to avoid a scanty-looking page, hence the multiple discarded sketches that I made during the process.

The layout

I looked up the likes of Awwwards, Uplab, Pinterest, and the likes to gather inspiration on how to tell the story the best way, this resulted in creating a “Pinterest board”. This was helpful, and I must confess I underestimated the usefulness of the board before now. The Pinterest board allowed me to collate several screenshots of my inspiration and explorations in one single place. Sounds awesome right?, I know.

Typography and Color choice (design system)

I used Fontjoy.com to generate a good and clear font pairing for the design, it is a nice tool and it does the job quite well. It was a tough choice between serif and script for the headings but I opted for the former for clarity purpose.

The primary colors I used are yellow, orange, and blue. This was gotten from my exploring of other restaurant landing pages. And I quite agree with the choice. Going by color psychology, yellow and orange convey warmth, enthusiasm and excitement. The latter eases decision making, which is the whole point of the landing page. Blue, on the other hand, is regarded as a “safe color”, and is used to create an order which is the reason I used it the least, intending to create balance.

The takeaway

Designing without images taught me the importance of typography, eliminating distractions and also the need to create balance in layouts. The excess use of images most times causes cluster and ends up confusing the audience instead of guiding them. Newbies are mostly advised by industry experts to improve their typography skills using preferably social media posters. You can use quotes from your favourite book authors or lyrics from music artiste. From there, you can graduate to wherever possible.