Hello guys, I’m back with my weekly lessons blog where I share some of my learnings and mistakes with you related to UI/UX design. For those who don’t know I’m a UI designer who works as a freelancer and I do so many mistakes and learn from them, as well as learn from other designers so it would be beneficial to learn some random lessons from me.

So without any further detail, let’s jump into our weekly lessons..

1. Navigation is a Critical Part of Web Design.

While designing a website for a client I found out the navigation between various tabs, and pages inside the website are very critical for both user and website owner. as it allows users to travel to the exact location on the website where they wanted to go, sometimes navigation with the menu is a much faster way than searching. Making navigation clean and clear is important as if it did wrong can seriously impact your user experience.

Types of Website Navigation

there are several types of navigation styles which you can implement inside your web design, choosing a better type is very important and to choose it you have to test it with your audience or if you know your audience well choose it yourself and just look for the feedback, so let’s look at some of my most used navigation types for web design..

#1 Header Navigation

one of the most commonly used navigation types that help designers place key tabs, and pages on the top of the website that users can select easily as they always appear on the top of the website.

#2 Footer Navigation

Another mostly used navigation type is footer navigation which appears at the bottom of the website with a list of links that help the user to easily navigate to the page he/she wanted to go to. For Example, users can choose the about us page from the footer to read about the company or choose a social media page to follow or see their social profile.

Stuff I Found Helpful on Web Navigation

Recently I found these resources that help me design better navigation for websites as they share some knowledge on making your design better for web navigation. watch/read them to gain more knowledge on navigation.

#1 Video On Tips for Designing Better Navigation

#2 Article Guide for Website Navigation

Navigation should be clean and clear, short, and designed specifically for your audience, so now you know how to design better navigation. let’s look at how to design with better icons.

2. Be Careful With Icons

In my previous article, I shared a tip where I discuss that icons are really helpful for your design to make the text more understandable. but i found one response by Chung where he discuss that using icons can help people but use them carefully.. so I looked on the web and researched how to use icons more carefully and I found some tips to do it. let’s discuss them.

But First, I wanted to thank Chung for sharing a counterpoint to my tips, I’m not a perfect designer, I love when people share their opinions and I request all of you to share your response if you wanted to tell us. thanks.

Tips for Using Icons Carefully

#1 Use Icons With Clear Meaning

It is the lessons I learned from that response, using an icon that represents more than one thing can sometimes confuse the user if not used along with text, so it is much better to use icons with clear meaning and design your icon specifically for it.

#2 Make Them Simple

Making icons simple is the key to better design as the complex icon can be interpreted with different meanings to make them simple.

#3 Make Them Recognizable

Designing an icon that is simple is good but if the user doesn’t recognize it then it can affect the user experience badly. making the icon related to the thing in real life can help, for example, using a TV icon for Entertainment can help as most people use the TV for watching entertaining shows.

3. Building a Brand Helps Designers Grow.

Building a brand as a designer is very important, it gives the designer an edge to become more successful and gain popularity, as most freelance designers work independently making a social presence gives them more reach to new clients. But how to build a Brand?

Use Social Media To Build Your Brand

Many designers use social media like Dribbble, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Medium, etc to gain an audience and make their brand on the internet.

Instagram turns out to be helpful as it generates clients for me sometimes. Therefore I recommend every designer to be on social media.

One Personal Lesson To Share With You

Above learning are about UI/UX design, but I wanted to share some personal lessons with you, a lesson that I learn recently from somewhere that turn out to be very helpful in my life. The below one is turn out to be a motivational lesson for me as it makes me understand more about why knowledge is necessary.

The Knowledge that We Learn is What Makes Us Unique.

While I was reading Almanak Of Naval Ravikant, I found a lesson where the Naval is saying that the knowledge that we learn and discover on our own is what makes us unique. These are things we learn by exploring and failing at multiple items, and they can’t be taught in school and colleges.

The specific experience that Joe Rogan has about podcasting, anchoring, and martial arts — can’t be copied. And this particular knowledge makes JRE a widely appreciated podcast.

The internet has allowed us to use all our interests and make a unique niche for ourselves. This is why we get to be ourselves and create a brand that is an extension of us.

It also allows us not to worry about the competitors because our only competition is ourselves.

Nobody can become you no matter how hard they try.

Thanks for reading, If you like the lessons I shared please clap and share your response as it motivates me to write and share more.