Shopify: What is Digital Design?

"In ecommerce, digital design shapes whether customers trust your store in seconds. The layout, color palette, and flow of your online store or mobile app do more than look pretty—they influence whether visitors become buyers.

"When Weston Table founder Dianne O’Connor transformed her lifestyle blog into a home-goods retailer, she designed the site to reflect that new identity. Inspired by print magazines, she used line-drawn illustrations, richly styled product photography, and collage-like moodboards. The result feels more like an online publication than a store—a design choice that mirrors the brand’s focus on authenticity and artisanal quality. 
"When executed properly, digital design turns browsing into belonging. Learn the fundamentals of digital design, explore its various types, and discover how thoughtful visual communication can boost ecommerce sales.

What is digital design?

"Digital design is the process of creating visual content for computer screens and mobile devices. It shapes the look, feel, and functionality of websites, apps, emails, social media channels, and other digital formats. 

"One recent study in the journal Sustainability found that consumers think ecommerce sites with superior visual, navigational, and information design are more usable and satisfying. Visual design alone accounted for 93% of user satisfaction and helped drive brand loyalty. 

"Digital designers combine technical skills with artistic principles such as color theory, balance, and white space to build new websites. They often partner with web developers to bring ideas to life, using design elements like fonts, shapes, and images, along with digital-specific features such as buttons, menus, carousels, and animations.

"In ecommerce, digital design is an essential aspect of communicating your brand’s story while ensuring a seamless, enjoyable user experience. Because every digital interaction can be tracked, teams can analyze how specific digital elements and choices affect engagement and sales in real time.

Example: How Weston Table designs—and redesigns—its digital storefront

"The Weston Table design process takes cues from magazine publishing, updating the site regularly, the way a magazine editor plans recurring issues, as Dianne recounts on the Shopify Masters podcast. Early on, she actually sketched on paper, outlining what each screen should show and how it should function. She then worked with her in-house team to translate her sketches into a digital product, including ensuring that her vision was technically feasible and search engine optimized.

"To keep the look on brand, Diane’s team refreshes the experience every three months. It isn’t a light face-lift; modules, colors, and moods change to tell new seasonal storylines.

"The benefit of designing for screens, she notes, is agility. She contrasts it with the process of designing a brick-and-mortar retail space. “The advantage we have working online in ecommerce is that we can change the carpet, we can change the wall color, we can change absolutely anything we want to,” she says. “In a physical brick-and-mortar space, you’re sort of stuck with the foundation and the walls, and you can’t move things around. We can move our walls around any way we want to, and they can morph into something super spectacular in minutes. It’s a digital-first mindset where brand, content, and UX evolve together.

Email design

"The goal of effective email design is to keep the look consistent with your brand’s visual identity while also strategizing for maximum engagement. This can be done with visual cues that guide the reader through the email or make the content easier to parse. 
"Dianne attributes Weston Table’s strong engagement—“one of the lowest unsubscribe rates in the industry,” in her words—to emails that echo the site’s editorial feel. Her team matches the look and feel of the website to its other marketing efforts. “Our emails are a reflection of this sort of inspirational lifestyle, beauty, and editorial content,” she says. This is digital design as a system: typography, imagery, and pacing carry over from site to inbox, making every interaction feel like part of the same publication."

Excerpted from Shopify: What is Digital Design? Types of Digital Design