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Design tips

Some tips to improve the look of your Run campaign website

Here are some tips from the Run design team for getting your campaign website into tip top shape:

  • Have a someone with a good design eye set up your Run site: If you have access to a graphic designer, either paid, or as a volunteer, they can often make your site look a lot better that you can on your own. While anyone can set up a Run site, there are a range of outcomes depending on who takes on the task.

  • Ensure text legibility. Although our system ensures your text is legible out of the box on top of standard background colors, when text sits over photos OR if you use our advanced customization features to override defaults, certain text or menus may become difficult to read. This most often shows up on your header component.
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  • Ensure navigation menus don't overrun the page. Our header system allows for quite a few header links, and will even wrap your social icons and featured buttons onto a new line if your navigation bar gets too long. However, if you have too many navigation links, your links can still overrun the page. Check inner pages and translated pages for this issue. It can be solved by shortening page titles, making your navigation link size smaller on your header block, or nesting pages within dropdowns.
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  • Fully crop your logos: Make sure to use Run's cropper to remove any extra space around your logo images. Leaving extra space will make logos smaller than they should be and will throw off the alignment with surrounding elements.
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  • Don't use a logo with a rectangular white background! Make sure to get your hands on, or create, a logo with a transparent background. We have a button on the image editor that when clicked, uses AI to remove the logo's background.
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  • Use high quality photos. Of course, not every campaign has time or budget for a professional photo shoot, but along with your logo, it's the most important thing you contribute to the look of your Run site, and will go a long way towards making your site look professional. If you don't have professional shots, try using our AI upscaler in the image tools and see if that improves your photos.
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  • Color correct your photos. Either in a photo editing tool, or using the tools Run has provided, make sure your photos are bright and have a relatively high level of contrast.
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  • Crop your photos such that your candidate's face is relatively prominent, horizontally centered, and around or above the vertical midpoint of the photo.
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  • Be very careful about using graphics for your site images: Cropping a piece of your campaign flyer, using a logo or icon - really anything other than a photo, will often look very unprofessional when used on your website. If you're not a trained graphic designer, we recommend sticking with photos.
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  • Style your About / Bio page. Don't just put a giant a block of body copy as your bio. Instead, use a variety of text sizes and styles, and try building up a more engaging design by using a variety of different blocks to create visual drama.
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  • Arrange your snapshots well. In your text editor you have the option to add inline photos. Make sure those photos are wrapped with text, and not just hanging at the end. Make sure to leave space between photos as well.
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  • Turn off unused text boxes. If you don't want text in a certain spot, rather than simply deleting all the text in a box, turn off the element using the sidebar options (where available). This way there won't be a big empty space that throws off the balance of your page.
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  • Don't use line breaks on your header layouts. Generally speaking, it looks better to have a single contiguous headline, rather than putting line or paragraph gaps inside it.

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