Home page design inspiration

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kerimucci
Propeller Head
Posts: 59
Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2017 3:38 am

Home page design inspiration

Post by kerimucci »

I am using the top navigation skin for my company's help center home page and I am struggling to find a good graphic to include in the background. I am curious to know how other Flare users chose to design their home page, and if they used graphics, if they chose graphics that relate to their company's product or relate more generally to documentation or software. I feel it is hard to find appealing and un-cheesy graphics for the latter option!

I want to present a modern-looking help system that includes more than just our logo, text, and links, and ideally use one large graphic that is relevant to our users (cybersecurity analysts). I've searched Unsplash for graphics relating to computers, offices, knowledge, data, etc.

I would be grateful to hear how other people have gone about this. Thanks in advance.
NorthEast
Master Propellus Maximus
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Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:33 am

Re: Home page design inspiration

Post by NorthEast »

I'd suggest looking at the imagery used in your company's website and other marketing material, and follow that lead.
For example, in my company the website and marketing uses photos taken on customer sites, so I use those on the documentation website too.
bunnycat
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Re: Home page design inspiration

Post by bunnycat »

For our TopNav hero image, I leaned heavily on our branding team's stock image assets and then selected a pool of candidate images that might work.
And yes, a good number of those photographs related to our industry or our product lines. Some were kind of generic if I just needed something to represent "computer technology".

One has to beware of photographs that are too visually busy, as you as the Flare designer are probably going to place text over top of the hero image.
I selected ones that were visually calm in the center of the image - because I would be overlaying a lot of text and or help dropdowns over top.
Also images that are too dark or too light in color may not track well with your font use/color or your Flare proxies (search bar, etc).

I made a lot of test Flare projects while I was developing our TopNav look and feel. Also a lot of fiddling with the margins and padding of the hero image to make it fit the space nicely.

I leaned very heavily on the styles of our corporate pages (browser inspect element is my best friend!), our support site and our product interfaces for inspiration for font and color and layout inspiration.

Hope this helps!

-CAT
Jbleasdale
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Re: Home page design inspiration

Post by Jbleasdale »

I've found that working closely with the marketing department on this kind of thing much more beneficial than trying to 'guess' what people want.

Ours has a massive stock library of images to use for things like this, as well as a marketing manager who loves designing things - so I enjoy working with her and tweaking the Flare CSS to suit our brand guidelines.
Joe Bleasdale

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smajors
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Location: Midwest United States

Re: Home page design inspiration

Post by smajors »

We also work with our Marketing/Communications department who have stock photos and other company approved photos that relate to our business. We work closely with them and the Web team so that our Online Help site and the separate company website have a similar look/feel, then users don't notice as much that they're going to completely different websites. As a tech writer, I'm personally not a graphic designer or web designer so I don't try to be. :)
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Training & Development Team/Marketing Department
kerimucci
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Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2017 3:38 am

Re: Home page design inspiration

Post by kerimucci »

Thank you all for your feedback.

As we are a startup, we do not have many image assets at the moment. Just the ones on our website, which do not suit the help system I want to build. I will work with Marketing on this, as it makes a lot of sense to have everything branded similarly.
ajturnersurrey
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Joined: Fri Nov 05, 2010 3:30 am

Re: Home page design inspiration

Post by ajturnersurrey »

In a similar small company set up, if I am looking for things to offer up to sales/marketing people as suggestions I make lots of use of images from pixabay.com and thenounproject.com
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