There are some things you can’t explain in a few words, or with website copy. You need a booklet or a brochure. Now, there are all kinds of brochures. Practically every business is giving them away these days. If you want your audience to take you seriously, both your content and your booklet presentation have to be top-notch.
In addition to explaining what makes your business different, you can also use booklets as short catalogues presenting your products. It’s especially handy in B2B sectors! You could spend hours describing your products, and yet, one thing is true: A picture is worth a thousand words. So before you turn on the printing press, make sure you use some of the best booklet mockup PSD templates for Photoshop.
If you’re a designer, it’ll be easy to convince your clients that your design is the best medium for explaining their ideas. If you’re a business owner, you’ll easily create engaging and realistic booklets to promote your own products.
The best part? These booklet mockup templates come as PSD files. It’s easy to customize them and add your own content in Photoshop! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; just plug and play!
From brochures and catalogues to passport and square booklets, we’re giving you plenty of options for taking your project to the next level.
Create a gorgeous letter brochure, booklet, or template with this stunning booklet mockup template. Once you download the 9 PSD files, you can simply customize this booklet mockup template in Photoshop by adding your own content with smart objects. You can even adjust the shadows, shades, background, colors, and more!
Present your design in the best light with this A5 top view portrait booklet. This flat lay booklet mockup allows you to customize practically everything: from colors and shades, to background of your own choosing. Perfect for announcing presentations and reports, this booklet helps your design and your subject shine!
If you want to show the synergy between your booklet design and your booklet content, choose these 3 beautiful square booklet mockup templates for Photoshop. Easy to customize, these mockups offer high-quality, photo-realistic results for your next brochure, booklet, or catalogue. Both B2B and B2C audiences will love this booklet!
Your content is great, but what will your booklet look like in prominent places? That’s exactly what these 2 booklet mockup templates help you understand! Offered in two different positions, you’ll be able to upload content and designs for both front pages, and both first pages.
Gorgeous and glossy, there’s no better square brochure mockup template than this one! With 8 photo-realistic ways of presenting your content, this booklet is the perfect choice for your next booklet or catalogue. With Photoshop smart objects, you can even customize the background, and it retains its photorealism.
If you want to elevate your event or loyalty program, leverage this passport booklet mockup template for Photoshop! Offerinig powerful presentation that allows you to mimic passport aesthetics, this mockup comes with plenty of customization options (foil print, editable smart objects). Add a dash of luxury and charm your clients!
There’s nothing like landscape booklet mockup templates to emphasize the quality of your designs and products. These beautiful mockups highlight your content and your visuals. You’ll also get multiple layout options to make them your own, and editing becomes a piece of cake with PSDT files.
Simple and easily editable, this open horizontal magazine mockup template for Photoshop is perfect for a brochure, a magazine, or a showcase of what your catalogue will look like. You can customize content, as well as the color and the background. It’s simple, effective, and we love it!
An elegant booklet mockup that offers plenty of options to add even more photorealism to your designs, this square brochure mockup is perfect for both B2B and B2C audiences. With 9 angles, light exposure and shadow density options, and photo filters, you’ll get the booklet of your dreams!
Create the perfect booklet with these 4 square brochure mockup templates for Photoshop! Clean and minimalist, these booklets offer plenty of customization options to adapt them to your brand: different poses, realistic effects and shadows, as well as changeable backgrounds. Perfect for advertising, this mockup set will charm your clients!
Simple and fully editable, this sketchbook mockup template works as well for brochures and catalogues. You can easily add your own designs and get beautiful photo-realistic results. This minimalist booklet mockup template for Photoshop also works great if you want your content, not your visuals, to shine in the limelight!
Simple and minimalist, this open booklet mockup template is perfect for highlighting your designs without extra fuss. Easily upload your designs or content, change the color, or modify the background to suit your brand. You’ll get plenty of options for an effective presentation that will wow your clients!
If you want to create an elegant design, look no further than these square brochure mockup templates. They work perfectly for catalogues, too! You’ll get 6 beautiful PSD files, as well as 6 background textures, all of which are easy to customize and adapt to suit your branding.
Start a design revolution with this elegant and versatile passport booklet mockup template for Photoshop! Featuring 4 mockups, foil print, and customization options for background and colors, this passport mockup is perfect for your next event or exclusive loyalty program. Don’t settle; show your design’s brilliance!
This magazine mockup template allows your clients to judge the book(let) by its cover – and its content! Featuring 2 glossy layout options (open and closed), horizontal orientation, and easy customization, this magazine mockup is the perfect choice for elegant and stylish brands and publications. It’s design time!
No fuss – just the beauty of your designs. This minimal square magazine mockup template is perfect for showcasing your visuals and your content. It’s easy to customize; from content, to colors and backgrounds. It works as a magazine, but your booklets and catalogues will look gorgeous too!
These A4 and A5 brochure and booklet mockup templates for Photoshop add a dose of interactivity and dynamism to your designs. You can create gorgeous results with 10 versatile PSD files, and edit whatever you’d like; from shadows, to the background. Tease the beauty that is to come!
Flat lays are great, but sometimes you need a little more. This square trifold brochure mockup template for Photoshop is the perfect choice for your next project! Emphasize the effect of your designs on your audience with 7 photo-realistic mockups. These booklet templates are perfect for modern and engaging brands!
Envision what your customers will feel once they get your booklet with this versatile booklet mockup template depicting two hands holding your materials. Simple, yet effective, this booklet template will show you what your brand looks like through the eyes of your customers! It’s time to amaze them!
Stylish and relaxing, this squared booklet mockup template is perfect for brands that fit the same bill! Depicting your booklet and a few lifestyle objects like a croissant, and a plant, this booklet brings an extra dose of realism to your designs. Play with colors, and make it your own!
No matter the size or the purpose of your booklet, these templates will give you plenty to pick from! Forget about the old way of doing things: designing, and then heading straight to printing. Test your designs and your content first with these photo-realistic booklet templates.
Once your design is ready, simply boot up Photoshop, and add your content. The mockups will show you what the end product will look like. From there, it’s easy to make sure every detail is perfect to convince and convert your clients.
More Mockup Templates: Banners, Books, Bottles, Box Packaging, Branding, Dresses, Flyers, Frames, Hoodies, iPads, iPhones, Laptops, Logos, MacBooks, Magazines, Mobile Apps, Mobile Devices, Mugs, Packaging, Sweatshirts, T-Shirts, Tote Bags.
The post 20 Booklet Mockup PSD Templates for Photoshop appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
When I started writing about website architecture, the idea of a skyscraper construction project came to mind.
I thought of a huge skyscraper with restaurants, retail stores, offices, gyms, and residential spaces — a large self-contained, compact community all by itself.
Source: Bernt Rostad
No one would ever start the construction process of a skyscraper like that until everything is properly planned and drawn out.
Source: Steve Newfield
I’m not a building architect or construction contractor, but I can still see the innumerable requirements you need to draw out before proceeding to construction. Room planning details, sourcing of good construction materials, managing the different teams involved in the building’s construction, zoning permits, funding allocation, natural disaster planning in case of earthquakes, the list goes on.
Everybody considers design as an important component of things; whether it’s the design of a skyscraper or the tires of your car.
Design is about not only bringing convenience, innovation, and comfort into people’s lives, but also in many cases such as skyscrapers and your car tires, people’s lives and safety becomes dependent on it.
I’m not an architect.
I’m an IT person. I’m a concept designer to be more exact.
For years, I’ve been designing strategies and conducting research for very large, ambitious website projects.
Concept design is the foundation of a robust website architecture. Like in the construction of a skyscraper, you need to have a sound blueprint for building large-scale websites.
In this article, I’ll share our company’s process for architecting large websites.
Let’s first figure out whose role it is to do this thing called website architecture.
To me, this job is carried out by a website architect.
I deliberately avoid mentioning UI/UX designers and the IA guys here because website architecture goes beyond — or rather encompasses — the user interface, user experience, and information architecture of the site.
The website architect needs to have a solid understanding of usability, in-depth knowledge of web development tools, online marketing technologies, and everything else involved in the construction and maintenance of a website.
Just like an architect of a skyscraper or a residential home, she must be well-versed with the tools, materials, and processes of construction in order to plan the product efficiently and effectively.
This person, our website architect, should possess strong logical thinking, has an analytical mind, is smart with commercial aspects of websites, and be attentive to details.
Of course, for a guaranteed quality product, the architect can/should consult other specialists: designers, developers, etc.
As you see, the ideal web architect in my mind should be a broad specialist, because, as you’ll soon see below, there’s no getting away from that.
I’ll give you just a general overview of my company’s website architecture process.
The process is divided into these 11 stages:
As you can see, all these stages are related to each other, and we’ve organized them in a sequential manner.
Let’s discuss each stage.
Gathering the needed data from the client and your team can usually take 2 days. Though you should be as thorough as possible, also keep in mind that there’s always room for elaboration and additional data-gathering in the other stages of the website architecture process, so don’t get too off-track if some pieces of information haven’t been transmitted to you.
What is the client’s goals and expected outcomes of this project, and how does she envision the end result of the project?
You should be clear about the evaluation criteria of these goals and expected outcomes to make sure you’re both on the same page.
You have to be as specific as possible; goals and outcomes should be quantifiable and measurable.
Ask the client to tell you everything he has on his mind. Listen to what he says patiently and thoughtfully. Take notes. Focus on what they’re saying and resist the urge to chime in. Your ideas and remarks can wait.
If the client is passionate about his ideas for the project, he can spend hours talking about it, which is completely normal.
When the client is really into the project, he’s a great help and pleasure to work with.
At the end of your brainstorming session, you should ask the client to sum everything up — if he succeeds in boiling his idea down to one sentence, then the idea is clear. If not, you will need better clarity and focus.
Who is the client’s target audience? Who’s going to use this site, and how might they benefit from the site?
The client should have a clear idea of who the end-user is so that we can produce a website for them. Otherwise, it’s like playing darts with your eyes closed: You know where the target is, but it’s going to be nearly impossible to hit it.
You can also start discussing what the client already knows about their target demographic: gender, age, location, etc.
Who are the website’s direct and indirect competitors? The client and the website architect should be aware of the existing competitive environment.
There are always competitors. Even if the website’s idea is completely unique, there are at least indirect competitors.
Meet with the people who make decisions. Discuss the deadlines, the budget limit, resource availabilities, and so forth.
Organizational matters, matter.
Some of your other questions will need to wait to be answered later on in the website architecture process. What you get out of the project briefing stage will be basic data and just to get a general feel of what your client already knows about his project.
It’s crucial to understand the client’s needs and expectations at this early stage, and to choose the right direction for the project right at the starting line. The price you pay for not giving enough time to this simple but critical first stage exponentially grows as the web architecture process and website production progresses.
A project brief template. Source: docstoc.com
The deliverable of the briefing stage is a written document with detailed information given to you by the client and the decision-makers. This document should be approved and verified by the client. It can be in the form of a design brief.
A website needs goals. The client’s goals might be these: to monetize the site, to increase the offline market share through online marketing, to better engage customers online, and so forth.
The goals define the direction of the entire website production process.
Besides determining the website’s goals, you also need to define success criteria according to the client.
A good way to establish goals is by using the SMART criteria. That is, each goal should be:
For example:
As a result, you will have a document containing 2 lists:
This document needs sign-off by the client/decision-makers.
This stage involves researching the target audience. We need to identify what types of users will go to the site, and also define the needs of each group.
We need to create a common persona for each group. The user interface design depends greatly on the results of this stage. To get started with this, we first need to define what our audiences’ common characteristics are.
Define socio-demographic characteristics: We should figure out the sex, age, education level, and occupation of our target audience. Targeting teenagers (15-18) is going to differ from a site meant for people over 60.
Define psychological characteristics: We should determine the lifestyle, personality, temperament, motivation, value system, philosophies, etc. of our target audience. This information is even more important than socio-demographic characteristics in terms of user interface design. If, for example, our users are early adopters, the user interface and pre-launch strategy will be different than other websites.
Define wants/needs characteristics: We should figure out why our user would want to sign up to our website, what problems they’re looking to solve with our site, etc. We define their pain points and aim to solve it with our website.
This information is vital, though it’s hard to find. If you’re working on a website redesign project, the client may already have this information if they have user feedback tools in place.
Sometimes the competitor can have it (but good luck getting them to share it with you). In this case, you need to perform user research studies and conduct surveys.
Geographic location characteristics: Country, city, region, continent — these are all helpful information. Being online does not completely eliminate the location factor.
Sometimes geotargeting is the first thing to think of when creating a national site, government website, or any location-dependent website.
Moreover, website content and website copywriting is heavily determined by the audience’s location.
You will need this when you’re in the information architecture (IA) stage.
When the target audience portrait is well-defined, we can then create personas.
Example of a persona. Source: uxmag.com
The main goal of the web architect here is to determine all the possible groups of users, starting from the largest (core) group, and ending with the smallest one.
Then we create a persona for each group.
Each of the personas you develop should have a:
To get a better image of your target audience you can interview potential users. This is about marketing research at this point.
After finishing this stage, you should now have two things:
To ensure the success of the project, you need to know your competitors and have good ideas on how to get ahead of them. You should discover their strong points and weak points.
There are several methodologies involved in conducting competitor analysis research, including market participant polling, and Internet and print media research.
If you’re creating a local website, don’t limit yourself only to your country. Look through international websites that are doing similar things. Most likely, there are similar or analogous projects up and running somewhere in the world. Some of these projects can be rather inspiring.
For example, we’ve been working on a social networking site for pet lovers for a client in Russia. We didn’t find direct competitors in the local market. However, there are several foreign sites and indirect local competitors. They are:
| Competitor | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| www.dogster.com | international, popular, quality |
| www.dogster.ru | Russian project, quite popular, satisfying quality |
| www.catster.com | international, popular, quality |
Your website’s competitors can be direct competitors or indirect competitors.
There are different approaches towards competitor identification and analysis. I like SWOT analysis the best.
SWOT — which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — helps indicate the strong points and weak points of your competitors, and more importantly, aids you in figuring out project opportunities.
SWOT matrix. Source: wikipedia.org
While analyzing competitors, you can discover useful site features and ideas worth adapting onto your own website — general, universal site features like commenting systems, web forms, etc. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel in these cases.
All good ideas you end up with during the competitor analysis stage will be needed for the mind mapping stage (which we’ll discuss later on).
You should now have:
Proceeding from the personas we’ve developed, we can start working on goal-problem-solution.
Every person has short-term and long-term goals.
There can also be sub-goals. For example, a person might desire to improve his career, but first he needs to find a job. The sub-goal is finding a job to reach the goal of improving his career.
For our website project, we identify a person’s goals, problems, and we look towards providing solutions for them.
All goals should be designed well. Fuzzy goals won’t help, as it’s impossible to solve all problems within one site. Focus on primary goals and keep the list of goals short.
Some clients think if users listen to music online, their site should also provide such a service, even if their website isn’t looking to solve this problem. The more features we add, the more diluted our core objectives become.
When we have a list of concrete goals, we can determine concrete problems.
For example, a user goal on our website might be to find a contractor that can build his construction project. That goal is more complex than it seems: How do we locate the right contractor for the user’s specific construction project? Is it important that the contractor is located close to where the construction project is? How do we allow them to quickly evaluate many candidates? Due to questions like these, you’ll generate ideas easily.
When we’re done identifying goals and problems, it’s time to design and develop solutions for them through website architecture design.
This process brings great fulfillment to the website architect because she’s looking to solve pain points that her users have.
As the result, we’ll have a goal-problem-solution matrix designed for each persona we’ve developed for our website.
Scenario mapping is the stage dedicated to revealing possible user flows.
User experience mapping. Source: adaptivepath.com
Once again, we need to think like an end user and create probable scenarios of his actions on our website.
Every goal of every persona has his/her own set of scenario maps.
These scenarios help reveal weak points in our existing ideas and knowledge. Scenarios also help the website architect develop good user flows later on.
We should have scenarios mapped out for critical site goals that we’ve established in the previous stage.
Here’s an example of a scenario:
User goal:
Choose a dog
Scenario:
When we wrote out this scenario, we ended up adding these site features:
As you can see, scenarios help us find opportunities for improvement.
When we have a bunch of ideas, it becomes helpful when we start visualizing and interconnecting them.
The mind mapping stage is dedicated to creating a solid system of logically connected ideas and also helps us cut out unnecessary things. It’s a popular design conceptualization tool.
To create mind maps, we should use Xmind.
Find your list of ideas and divide them into logical categories. For example, let’s say we’re working on a real estate website. The real estate website’s sections might be:
Map all of your ideas into one of these categories.
If an idea fits in more than one category, choose the best fit for it.
Brainstorming will help sift out the useless and unneeded features, web pages, etc.
Each website section should be planned logically. Don’t forget about section-dependent features (such as the user being able to rate each property, in our example). Mark this connection with an arrow to remember the dependence (in our example, it would go to the Property Catalog).
You can design your own symbols to indicate different functional sections. If the web architect, for example, is undecided in terms of which section a certain site feature belongs to, she can mark it with a question mark. These symbols are really important if the project is large.
As a result, we have a bird’s-eye view of the interconnections of site features and sections.
Now that we have a detailed mind map of our website, we can start working on the website’s information structure, which will be the foundation of the website’s prototype.
The website’s IA can be created with the help of flowcharting software like Visio.
You should end up with an information architecture (IA) design after this stage.
You will need prototyping software for this stage. I recommend Axure, though there are a number of other similar programs.
The home page prototype doesn’t necessary have to be prototyped first. For example, in the case of an online shop or a blog, the product page or blog post page should come first, because these are critical pages, and will typically be the landing pages of most users on the site.
The website architect is going to lean on the mind map and information architecture diagrams to develop this prototype.
When creating each web page prototype, you should focus on how the user can achieve his/her goals. Before prototyping, you should refresh your knowledge of your target audience using the previous stages in the site architecture process.
The primary navigation menu is the first to create. We need to figure out the number of menu items and the number of drop-down menus.
Then we design the header section that typically contains these items:
Now we start designing contextual areas, which will differ depending on the web page you’re prototyping. We will make content blocks, some of which are constant for every page, some of which won’t.
The footer typically stays the same on each web page. Usually, the footer duplicates the main menu. It also contains auxiliary information such as the website’s privacy policy, links to social networks, contact information, copyright information, and so forth.
The first web page prototype should be shown to decision-makers, and the reason for the layout should be explained to them. The client might revise and suggest some adjustments. That’s OK, because having this done on a low-fidelity prototype is much easier than if we had a higher-fidelity prototype.
After the first page is approved, we can move to the next prototypes. All the ideas represented in our mind map should be found in these prototypes. It’s crucial not to forget about the smallest detail, as it can turn to hell in the long run if you do.
Our scenarios will help test the mockups to ensure the logical order of every action.
This is the most time-consuming component of this stage and requires a lot of patience and attentiveness. In the case of large websites, there could be over 100 unique interface prototypes.
The deliverables after this stage are low-fidelity prototypes/wireframes of all web page types.
Examples:
There are 90 some such prototypes for the example project above. As you can see, each prototype was broken down in detail. This way, no questions and uncertainty arose during the design of the functional prototypes and finished web designs.
This is one of the best ways to quickly validate the effectiveness of the website architecture and make changes before things progress further.
Axure generates HTML from prototypes, which make them interactive and ready to test on users.
Usability testing at this stage will help you notice gaps and flaws in the architecture.
For testing purposes, we invite some representatives of the target audience and observe how they manage to reach certain pages and results within the site.
Then, the users can be interviewed regarding the site in general.
After usability testing, we make final corrections.
As the result, we will have validated and improved the user-friendliness of our web page prototypes and we get a better picture of how users would be interacting with the site.
The final stage of the website architecture process is to create the project specification document. This should contain a detailed description of each stage of the site architecture process.
The project specification is the result of all the stages you’ve gone through. It typically will contain a detailed description of each prototype, user flows, and so forth.
The specs should be full and unequivocal. Be detailed and thorough, but also keep it as succinct and as concise as possible.
The project specification should contain all the information regarding software and web technologies required for the website.
Design requirements should be clear.
Once the project specification is approved, website development starts.
The post The Secret to Building Large Websites: Website Architecture appeared first on WebFX Blog.
Branding is a vital and integral part of any business. In fact, even before trying out your products and services, branding is what helps people recognize and identify your business. No matter how big or small your business or venture is, your marketing strategy will not be successful unless you pay proper attention to branding.
“Branding” the term itself does not just mean the logo, it also includes various components like posters, banners, advertisements, envelopes, business cards, and so on and so on.
We have put together some beautifully designed examples of brand presentation (or corporate identity) — you’ve got logos, business cards, stationery items, and many more other items. Be inspired!
You might also like our collection of brand identity templates.
The post 25 Beautifully Designed Examples of Brand Presentation appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
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The post Weekly News for Designers № 595 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
