Building a design gut instinct

One more task as part of my Ironhack's UX/UI bootcamp prework: finding four designs that I like (or dislike) and explaining the reasons why!

Then, after studying a little bit of Classic Elements and Principles of Visual Design, I reviewed my notes and added some new comments based on what I learned.

Bellow I presented each of the analysis:

Design 01: Headspace

• Love the colours
• Love the characters
• It’s clean and very intuitive
• Icons are very cute
• Little information per page
• Like background textures
• Love the pause/play moving button that appears in every session

Thinking about the concepts learned: I like the shapes (mostly circles and rounded elements) and the colours used in this UI. Also, the space (both white and orange backgrounds make it interesting) and the pattern, due to the characters and icons.

Design 02: Waze carpool

• Love the characters and animation
• Love the scrolling effects
• Like how the screen is divided in two parts: one white for text, another for the illustration
• Like the colours, typography and feels clean and easy
• The information is well explain and you can easily learn everything you need about the product without clicking anything.
• You read, you understand and you download the app at the end.

Thinking about the concepts learned: I like the balance and the alignment presented by the half-divided screen. I like the shapes and forms (illustrations with a light black border and backgrounds with some gradients and no borders). I also like the space at the text zones.

Design 03: Outreach

• Like the photo with text over it that is only a table texture, so you can easily read it.
• Like the icons and the way they are structured
• Love the mask for the photos and the effect when rolling over
• Love the light gray element used as a background separating sessions
• It’s very clean and feels like a very professional company

Thinking about the concepts learned: I like the contrast of the colours (purple and white), the alignment and balance of the team pictures and client logos, the pattern of the icons and the space of the sessions.

Design 04: Uglytub

• Don’t like that the page doesn’t fit the browser (white columns at the sides)
• Don’t like the header, the typography is weird, there’s no logo and there’s no menu options on the top
• Don’t like how elements are so close one to another, it’s like you can’t breath
• Don’t like the amount of text… come on, who's gonna read all of this?
• It’s a lot of information and I don’t know where to go.
• The images are terrible and don’t match one with the other.

Thinking about the concepts learned: this web has a terrible design because there’s no harmony between any of the elements (typography, colours, pictures…). Mixing illustration, with no background pictures, with collage, with some square-shaped pictures makes the page completely unconnected.

The contrast is not good (in the fourth image, the green text in a white background is very hard to read) as well as the blue one.

Also, there’s no balance nor pattern at all. The amount of text doesn’t give the web enough space. The elements proximity is not correct, so there’s a lack of distinctions which make users confused.