Impress your target audience appropriately, efficiently and cost effectively
That's what marketers want to achieve. With a clear mission and competitively priced unique product, you'll need a creative agency to develop various marketing collateral, advertising campaign and organize events to build brand awareness, boost sales and increase customer loyalty, efficiently and cost effectively. If that's what you are looking for, you have come to the right place.
Find out moreDESIGN, COPY WRITING, PHOTOGRAPHY, MOBILE APP & WEB DEVELOPMENT
OUR THOUGHTS
With more bandwidth, 5G, and popularity of mobile devices, websites can be more creative. Here's the trend for 2024. More Attractive Images To capture the attention of your target audience, the first attention is important. That's why what's on the main slider remains important. However, most people would only spend a fraction of a second it and started to scroll down or go to other pages. So, don't expect that your customers would spend more than 3 seconds to read all the messages on the main slider. Instead, keep the audience engaged with more attractive photos and relevant information throughout your website would be key. More Movement With more bandwidth and wider coverage of 5G network, engaging objects such as video background, animation, fancy hover effects, moving text, and parallax scrolls are just some of the web design elements that will make your website more attractive and fun. Mobile First Simply adapting a website to fit different resolution may not be enough. Instead of having mega menu which cannot be adapted for mobile display, some websites started to keep the top navigation simple so that the customers can browse the website the same way they use any other devices. Readability and usability on mobile phones are key considerations when designing new websites. Dark Background We all used to read black text on white background because it is easy on the eyes for printed materials. When it comes to backlit LED screen like the computer, tablet and smart phones, dark mode has become popular. Some suggest that dark mode may reduce eye strain and cut down on blue light exposure. As a designer, we like to think out of the box and try new design elements. And we want to look cool. Vibrant Color & Cyber Look What goes hand-in-hand with dark background is vibrant color. Yellow, orange, magenta and florescent gradient. From logo to graphic design to photography, more dramatic and futuristic look would become a major trend for a while. Use of Typography Big, bold and fancy text is another key visual element in web design. Well, this is more for English which is the dominant international language spoken by over 60% of the world. Of course not all fonts can be displayed on all mobile devices, there are enough variation such as Italics, font size, san serif and non-san serif fonts. Mobile First If you have not yet upgraded your website into a fully responsive website, you would have to hurry up so that you don't loose your target customers to your competitors who offer a much better web browsing experience. Most people browse websites and search for information using their mobile phones these days. Having a design that fits well on mobile devices would be important. What does it mean? It means that your images would not be too large or too small on mobile devices, text is readable, button works, mobile menu won't require scroll down. Yes, you don't want to have too many sub-navigation. Summary All in all, while there is always a design trend, marketers and businesses should still adapt what complements their brand while stay on top of the technology. Talk to us if you are interested in exploring ways to improve your website.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing our life left, right and center at unprecedented speed. When it comes to graphic design and images, many platforms are popping up to provide text to image feature. Just like ChatGPT, you can just type in your request in text, the app or platform will generate an image in seconds. How Text to Image Works In addition to providing all sorts of templates, filters, stickers, style and effects, generative AI Text to Image is an interesting feature that saves you a lot of time coming up with a draft of an imaginative picture or graphic. I have used three different platforms to generate the same image requirement to see the results. Here's what I've got. DeepAI doesn't require that you open an account before you try it. This is what I generated on the homepage. You may select different style and enhance the image after. However, I don't see much difference in enhancement. At the end of the day, it's a free quick trial. There was no watermark and the image was 2048 px x 2048 px, 72dpi file. Picsart requires that you create an account to try. There is only 1 image that that it generates. You may add text, effects, stickers and even create an animation from the image. if you want to download or remove the big watermark in the middle, you will have to subscribe a plan. You will need to sign in to Adobe to use Firefly (Beta). This image by far is the best of the three Generative AI platforms that I've tried. I don't know the image source of the other platforms, but Adobe has its own library and commercial images which are of higher quality for this Beta. Generative Fill Generative Fill is another Firefly feature that allows users to add and subtract elements in the photo. From the image generated from text, I have added a crown, jewelry and changed the eye color of the dragon cat. The Generative Fill is also a "text to image" function but I can put it in specific area on the photo. All I had to do is to identify the area using the brush, type the requirement in English, then it will generate 4 optiosns for me to choose. All images generated can be downloaded. File size of this image is 1048 x 1024px. There is an Adobe Firefly logo and a message saying that this image not for commercial use at the bottom left corner. This leads to an important question: Intellectual property. It is still unclear who woul be the owner of the final generated image because it may have incorporated some copyrighted images. Is Generative AI replacing designers? Not yet. Text to Image feature is great for visualizing a creative concept. For example, if I were to create a far-fetched character like the dragon cat with wings, I can see some possible options in seconds, saving a lot of time sketching and coloring. However, if I wanted a realistic image, there isn't any good options yet. It comes down to the database that the software/app has. Thoughts Back in the good old days, the creative director would come up with a concept, sketch the idea, or hire an illustrators to visualize the concept, then present to the client. With the generative AI tools, we can simply put the concept in words then see what it looks like. It is potentially an efficient and cost effective tool to conceptualize an initial idea.
Over the last decade, we have built many websites and eShop using WordPress, one of the most popular content management system that was used by 40% of all websites on the Internet, for some good reasons. Open-source As a web developer and designer, we like to use PHP and MySQL which is a cost-effective solution for creating websites because they are both open-source software. Popularity and Continued Development Since 2003, WordPress has continued to develop, transforming from a simply blogging platform to one of the most popular content management system. Due to its popularity and open-source programming language, tens of thousands of plug-ins (free and premium) are available to enhance the features and functionalities of the websites. Lower Cost WordPress has been a cost-effective solution to many small-medium sized companies and startups to start a presence on the Internet in the past twenty years. The available templates and plugins have saved a lot of our development time which translate into faster delivery and lower costs for our clients. Challenges However, major customization is needed to to create a unique and professional corporate or eCommerce site. As we work on different themes and plug-ins created by different developers, we had to overcome a lot of challenges because every theme or plugin was developed differently. They may or may not work. Some plug-ins may even have conflicts. All these unknown factors may slow down the development process and incur higher costs.
