Let me first start by saying, I am not a designer by trade, but I do enjoy reading about it and trying to understand it better. In general I know what looks good. Getting my own work to look good is the tougher part. I have 3 rules I follow to get the job done and it’s something I learned from a designer friend of mine.

It’s referred to the 3 C’s of design: Consistency, Conservation (Clutter-busting) and Contrast

The one I use the most every day is “consistency”. You can face design pretty darn well by just making sure your layout is consistent.

This basically means that make sure you use 1 base font on the design and making sure that the spaces above, below and on the sides of elements and text are always the same. (I find that multiples of that number also works well when you need larger spaces)

Because this is an interest field of mine I was very excited when the opportunity came along to recode the existing Lexus South Africa website.

The site’s been around for a while and under the hands of a few different agencies before it landed on my desk. As a result, there was a ton of inconsistencies all over the place like text that didn’t line up with headlines, different fonts in the same sub navigation, different spacing sizes on different internal pages and then there was the old images that was re-saved so many times that they started to look crusty.

Looking back, I didn’t change anything too noticeable. I just made sure all the spaces are consistent, replaced all the crusty layout images with new and fresh ones and made sure that the font was consistent throughout the site.

I know this might be very up in the air, so I decided to provide you with some examples below: