All About Design Concept and Why It’s So Important

To craft a proper app design, it’s vital to think everything out. Designers can’t make a complete design with a snap of fingers, so they begin with a design concept. It would be wise to discuss all steps related to the concept stage and show that this process is more important than you may think.

• Why Branding Design Depends on Graphic Design so Much

Why is Concept Developing Stage Important?

As a brand new car creation begins with the sketches, the app design begins with a concept. This stage helps the product owner to understand how the app will look like in the future. During this stage, designers can make various changes relying on the product owner’s feedback, and they can’t take any steps further until the customer accepts the design concept.

It’s often around three to five screens with two or three variations of each screen made by designers. This set of screens makes the development stage clear for the client and shows how the future app will look like.

There are two scenarios of concept development that rely on two possible circumstances:

• Presence of Brand Style Guidelines. 

In this case, designers make the app design concept based on the client’s guidelines. All design aspects (icons, fonts, color scheme) adjusting to fit these guidelines.

• Absence of Strict Guidelines.

If this happens, designers make a concept that relies on the information gathered during the research stage (competitors research, user preferences, and so on).

Design Concept Workflow

The concept development stage is divided into four steps. Let’s dive into them and discuss each one of them.

Step 1. Making a Mood Board

To set the right mood for the future app and get proper inspiration, designers make a Mood board. This board is a set of various pictures, interface variants, color schemes, and so on. This crucial step may look like boards with highlights on Pinterest or a set of pictures gathered in one file.

Step 2. Choosing the Righ Colors

The next important step of a concept creation is to pick the right color scheme. Colors play a significant role in building a specific attitude and emotions towards apps and brands.

But there is a little pitfall that should always be in the mind of designers —  safe colors. Sometimes various monitors can display the same color in different ways because monitors can’t display color as intended. In this case, the monitor displays the color that looks very close to the primary color, but it still differs and may seem odd.

Choosing the right colors is a responsible process due to the psychological side as well. Colors are linked with various emotional triggers, so it’s very important to determine what emotions the app must evoke. For example, purple is linked with sincerity and sophistication, while blue color is associated with trust and loyalty. Moreover, the right picked colors will increase brand recognizability.

In terms of competition, the thoughtful color scheme is a great boost that helps brands or apps to stand out from the competitors.

When the selection of the main colors is finished, designers start choosing suitable shades of main colors.

Step 3. Selecting the Right Fonts

When the color scheme is set, it’s time to make textual content look good. Like in the case with colors, all fonts have their own moods and should be picked wisely based on the apps’ scope.

Designers use different tools to check out various fonts, but one of the most popular is Google Fonts. This tool clearly shows fonts and their dependency in context. Speaking of context, localization puts its own restrictions on choosing fonts. Some fonts that look good in English may look worse in French, for example.

Fonts are an essential part of app design. Correctly picked font increases the attractiveness of the app and overall satisfaction from using it.

Step 4. Assebling All Aspects Together

It’s a final frontier before sending a concept on review to the product owner. Within this step, designers create a few concepts that differ from each other with various design aspects (icons, layout, and so on).

As you can see on the picture above, there are two concepts with different buttons and photo layouts. The style of buttons and their color scheme is slightly different as well. The purpose of such a variety is to provide several options to choose the look of an app. If there is a need, these concepts can be mixed to get another app design, but this scenario depends on the clients’ needs.

Summing Up

To sum everything up, it would be good to say that there are a few clearly traceable standards through the concept development process.

• Simplicity is a Key

The main purpose of the concept is to bring to life and visualize “on the paper” all the app goals and features that were determined on previous stages.

• It Has to be Concise

It’s vital to reveal the main idea that is hiding behind the concept and to achieve this, designers can create from three to five main screens concepts for clear presentation to the product owner. It helps the client to understand the looks of the future app.

• Implementability Before All

No one needs a concept that can’t be brought to life so everything that is portrayed on the concept must be implementable. Moreover, the design concept must reckon with strict deadlines, project budget, and various tech requirements that were defined earlier.