What the website design goes by? Actually, it starts from your browsing experience around the web. Once you like the awesome site, you can challenge to creative person. From user interface to design principles, you can count on the talented designers.
When creating the look of a new website theme, we were focusing on visual and intuitive communication with visitors. We needed someone with wonderful ideas. Someone who could balance her professional opinions with the demands of our clients.
And that's, in fact, what we're going to tell you about.
As you might know, our company provides thousands store owners with Argento theme. It started the trend towards successful multi-purpose themes and keeps being very popular in the Magento community.
So what are we supposed to do with that?
You will agree with us, the template design is incredibly important to store’s success. We have the pleasure to show you another great feature of Argento. New fashion Magento theme design!
For now Argento comes with 5 designs: Mall, Pure, Pure 2, Flat and Argento. However being constantly up-to-date is important for us. We wanted a new stunning design for our Magento premium template.
Argento history or why we come up with Luxury.
Argento theme was launched in 2013 by Templates-Master company. The template with incredible flexibility and functionality was great as a starting point for a lot of custom projects worldwide. There are multiple reasons why Argento has been used on many successful sites. Argento design was one of the first responsive designs for Magento. Very nice designs and excellent quality are Argento’s specialty.
First, let us first say that we love all Argento designs.
All of them ensure that your customer experience will be as good as possible. All designs are appealing and easy to understand. All themes are full-featured, that makes Argento really multipurpose Magento template.
It still was new design challenge, though.
Following the latest tricks in website design
When creating Luxury design, we aimed to help Argento make its mark as the best premium Magento template. It must have been a state-of-the-art theme.
Talking about the latest design trends, we still see Flat design is here to stay. So, new Argento will use the flat web design with gradients to build its own charm online.
Keeping up to date with the latest web design tips, the new Argento design comes with card design homepage layout, overlapping text and images and custom typography. Among other cool things you will see bold lettering, de-cluttered interfaces, intuitive forms and icons, fully responsive layout, big and beautiful images.
Who is Cristiana Bardeanu and why we have chosen her as a partner.
Cooperating with a freelance designer for the first time was a daunting experience. We needed someone to create beautiful work. Cristiana Bardeanu met our expectations. Know that we appreciate all she has done. We thank for the time in answering our questions.
Follow up questions and answers. We hope you enjoy it.
Please tell us about yourself.
“I'm Cristiana Bardeanu and for the past 13 years or so I've been busy solving all sorts of design problems for businesses small and large located all over the world - from USA, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, South Africa, Romania (where I'm originally from) and, of course, the Netherlands, where I'm currently based in the lovely watery town of Amsterdam. I'm a full stack designer, meaning my skills range from wireframing, defining user flows to front-end development, interaction design and animation.”
What were your expectations during the process. What inspires you?
“I've done work for Magento platform before, but this was my first fully fledged theme. So when I took on the project I was a bit unsure what to expect from the process and what the final requirements were for a theme with such a large potential audience. Luckily, the Argento team was very helpful in that regard, and I was pleasantly surprised by the clear communication from the dev team and how their suggestions improved the final theme.
For inspiration I poured over dozens of high-end fashion websites, Pinterest boards with minimalistic, modern, clean geometric designs.”
What new trends did you try?
“One of the biggest recent design trends is to shift the focus from the interface back to the content by decluttering the interface and reducing it to the bare minimum and to achieve what I like to call a functional simplicity. That's what I did throughout the theme, from the navigation to the product page, the focus is always on the content. One other trend is to use big, bold type that adds tons of personality and also makes the design easy to scan. The use of large image blocks make the theme sophisticated and allows end users to instantly personalize the theme with minimal effort.”
Being a web designer, do you focus on functionality first? How do you feel "friendship" between the visual design and site functionality.
“I believe design is all about communication, and good communication is not just about how something looks, but also what it says and how it works. I always start my projects with wireframes that define the content, user flows and functionality of the website and only once that is sorted out, I move on to the visual design. Thanks to my development background, I also make sure that everything I design can also be successfully translated in fast-loading, flexible code.”
What sites excited you in 2017?
“There are so many interesting websites and apps coming up all the time, so I'm always looking for inspiration. Some of my biggest "hunting grounds" are Dribbble, Pinterest and Awwwards. From individual works that had the most influence on me this year, are:
- Rodesk - use of images, big type, colors.
- ZERO - use of whitespace, tight typography and nice animations.
- Stripe - really bold use of color and graphics.
- Danish Shipping - playful use of motion and imagery.”
What the Luxury is
The design was thought up over to the smallest details to engage your visitors. There are 4 key moments that determine new template success:
- Responsive design that will show your store in a more tablet and mobile friendly way.
- Eye-catching presentation of your products upon neutral color scheme with light pastel highlights.
- Overall design incredibly easy to navigate around.
- Effectively used space make all products and services easily stand out.
Let’s dig deeper and see what we’re sure you’ll appreciate:
Homepage
The design is communication. Luxury design starts talking via homepage. Card UIs allows you show a lot of content on a screen at once. Using streamlined page interfaces you will help users scan quickly what’s particularly appealing to them.
Argento theme keeps bringing a superior browsing experience for the customers. New design comes with the following benefits for the homepage:
- adding fixed or sticky header to your site with custom setting
- reaching across the language barriers via using language switcher in header and store view switcher in footer
- showing new arrivals block with products listing
- adding additional text block about store below Free shipping banner for example just to let you place SEO text or information about your products there
- improved with 9 custom modules: Easy Catalog Images, Product labels, Ajax Search and Autocomplete, Ajax Pro, Easy Banners, Navigation Pro, Highlight, Image Slider, Brands Pages.
Category page
Grid based structure of the Luxury category page will help you efficiently organise and display your store content.
Among other deals of category page you can also see:
- improved overall design of side boxes, layered navigation block and pagination block
- hover effect for buttons
- new icons for cart, wish list and compare elements
- improved with 3 custom modules: Product labels, Testimonials, Rich Snippets.
Product page
New products page is completely different from our current Argento designs. It still addresses your customer's wants. In the same time it fulfils your requirements as a seller.
Luxury design will help you make the product page understandable and highlight the product advantages via the following features:
- 2 tabs groups - accordion menu and tabs with responsive design
- improved with 7 custom modules: Product tabs, Product labels, Sold together products, Facebook Like Button, Lightbox Pro, Rich Snippets.
Magento 2 version is coming
Interested in Magento 2 Fashion Luxury design for your store? We are working tirelessly to provide you with fresh and modern design of your Magento 2 website. Hope you'll meet all enhancements and trendy features offered in Argento Luxury theme quite soon.
What else we should consider when designing
Before moving on to the next step in Luxury design strategy it’s still tempting to try something new. Thus we ask you to review our new Magento theme. What do you think about current design? What else should be implemented in Argento? What styles you can suggest us to use?
Expecting for future partnership with our designer
We enjoy working with Cristiana Bardeanu, so we don't hesitate to recommend you this talented designer with perfect knowledge and skills.
She's very responsive to our needs. We see she is passionate about design and has proven knowledge that you can see in wonderful work. We found her very careful to details and very creative. Having years of experience in theme design, Cristiana has a lot of ideas to build pages for customer engagement. Visit her web design studio 84colors and see for yourself.
We are happy we met a person who loves to visualize what we are thinking about. We believe Argento Luxury design is long-lasting template for fashion website. Keep getting enjoyable experience via our Magento solutions. We're going to develop further to encourage you keep in touch with our company.
