We’re calling upon all creative minds to submit your ideas via our Community Portal between now and the 14th of April, at which point voting will be enabled for Members of Mautic to select their preferred designs over two weeks.

Submit your design proposal

The winning designs will be available in the Mautic Swag Shop for the next 12 months for people to purchase a range of different products. There may also be some limited print runs locally which will be sold in person at our conferences and meetups.

First, let’s be clear on the guidelines for submitting your designs:

Contest Rules ?

1. Membership: Participation in the design contest – both as a creative contributor or voter – is open only to Mautic members. If you’re not a member yet, learn more about becoming a member.
2. Accreditation: Individual creators will be duly recognised. For company accreditation, the company must also be a Mautic member.
3. Design Specifications: Your awe-inspiring designs should align with the specifications of Spreadshirt (both colour and mono styles) and poster printing requirements here. Make use of the available templates and keep North American and European formats in mind when creating your posters – both must be submitted.
4. Submission: Upload your designs to a publicly shared Google Drive folder and include these links in your proposal body.
5. Originality: Authenticity rocks! Only original personally crafted designs are eligible. AI-generated designs will lead to disqualification.
6. Licensing: All design submissions will be licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 regardless of winning status.

We’d love your designs to capture the magic of Mautic’s vibrant, international community and our decade-long journey. This is your chance to bring to life Mautic in a way never seen before. We can’t wait to see your designs!

Submit your design proposal

Submit your design by 14th April 2024, at which point there will be a two-week voting period for members of Mautic to choose their preferred designs. Good luck and happy designing! ??

This community-driven initiative is focusing on not only streamlining and codifying our design operations, but elevating Mautic’s UX/UI to align with the latest industry standards.

This fresh team is to be spearheaded by Anderson Jose Eccel, a Brazil-based industry expert who operates the forward-thinking agency Idmotion. The UX/UI Tiger Team’s mission is to provide advice, consultation, and expertise to the Mautic project when introducing new features or planning changes.

This group of experts won’t just be a reactive force; they’ll also actively pursue strategies and formulate plans to improve Mautic’s UX/UI, helping us to keep our finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary trends and standards.

Our Mautic users can look forward to improved onboarding with clean, straightforward interfaces, and an overall enhanced user experience.

Let’s hear from the Tiger Team lead himself:

Mautic is not just an automation platform; it’s a means of bringing success not only to the businesses where it’s applied but also to the intermediaries: marketers worldwide who use Mautic and make it their own pathway to success.

Regarding this new team’s formation, the Product Team Lead, Mattias Michaux shared:

Mautic has stood out as a versatile and powerful solution for marketers, enabling them to create personalized campaigns, automate marketing processes, and gain valuable insights into their strategy’s performance. However, the key to Mautic’s ongoing success lies in the user experience and the interface we provide to these professionals.

Our commitment is clear: to enhance the Mautic user experience, making it more intuitive, efficient, and user-friendly. We understand that marketers worldwide rely on Mautic to drive their campaigns, achieve outstanding results, and meet their goals. Therefore, it’s essential that our platform is accessible and effective for everyone, regardless of their level of expertise.

At the core of all this, we recognize that our success as a development team is intrinsically tied to the success of our users. When marketers worldwide achieve their goals through Mautic, we consider it a victory. And that’s what drives us to keep enhancing the Mautic experience, so our users can achieve and surpass their goals with ease.

We are excited about Mautic’s future and committed to ensuring that it remains a valuable and essential tool for marketers everywhere.

Adding to that sentiment, Mautic Project Lead, Ruth Cheesley shared:

I’m really excited to see this Tiger Team getting off the ground – the user experience in Mautic is not that dissimilar from the heady days of Mautic 1.x and we’re long overdue for an overhaul. 

Anderson has stepped up to take on leading the team (no small task!), and we’ve already got several motivated and inspired people who are keen to ensure that Mautic is brought up to spec and indeed keeps ahead of the curve, so watch out for some proposals coming soon to modernize the user interface and start to address accessibility issues that have long been neglected.

The formation of the UX/UI Tiger Team is a testament to Mautic’s willingness to innovate and strive for excellence, reflecting our ongoing commitment to our vibrant community’s needs and the broader open source software ecosystem.

To learn more about the team, please follow the Assembly on the Community Portal and join us on Slack in #tt-ux_ui.

Landing Pages are a primary Marketing online tool. Most of the time they are the first visual element that a visitor experiences of your brand. While landing pages are usually designed to be informative, they must also focus on the action expected – completing a form, signing up to a mailing list or purchasing a product, for example.

The biggest challenge faced by the designer is to create a landing page that looks good, but also converts well.

The Mautic marketing automation platform provides the perfect technology platform to convert an anonymous visitor into a potential lead, but the designer is the person who has the power to make that happen.

• Design for the technology platform

Landing pages may be short and to the point, or they may be long-form, engaging the visitor and providing various sources of information to help the visitor come to a decision.

Whether short or long form, navigation plays a critical role in focusing the user on completing the action for which the page is intended. If your visitors will only be spending a few seconds on the page, the design elements must help them to find their way to the relevant information and action points.

As a designer, we try to convey a story through the elements we place on the page, using structure to guide the flow between different chapters in the story, and explaining points which may not be obvious to the reader.

• Design

At Virya Group our focus is on keeping things simple. Our main goal is to create theme which are clean, functional and with minimal distraction.

All our theme designs adhere to research-driven best practices related to landing pages. By dispensing with the fluff and keeping only the essential requirements, we focus on directing visitors’ attention to the appropriate page elements.

In most cases, this will be a call to action such as a button, special offer, lead capture form or video.

It is also important to cater for any eventuality. Each theme we design comes with a library of elements to choose from. This includes design guidance on everything from the weight of fonts to the styling of a table and the dimensions of images on a photo slider.

We try to ensure that we design everything with a focus on the experience of the visitor to the landing page and the flexibility that our end-users might require when customising the ‘off-the-shelf’ or bespoke themes that we provide.

• The Form

No matter what the goal of your campaign is, a great landing page needs to push your visitor to take a specific action and in many cases, this will be through a lead capture form.

The most important element of the landing page; the lead capture form presents a trigger. By this point (thanks to your awesome design work!) visitors are highly motivated to do something (complete the form) and the task now is to make sure that it is super easy, clear, and a nice experience to complete that action.

Sometimes we might add an extra convincer reminding them what they are getting when completing the form, but we always make sure the process is smooth, easy to understand and seamless.

It’s easy to forget the importance of the button on the form – but this is a vital ‘call to action’ – and an opportunity to remind the visitor what they will receive on completing the form.

From the designers perspective a good colour contrast with the background and a careful choice of wording are the two ingredients that will communicate clearly your goal and ensure the conversion takes place. Don’t just leave it at ‘submit’!

• The Language

Here we shift our attention from pixels to people. In Mautic landing pages we want to focus on using a certain language, which builds trust between the brand, product or service and the visitors.

As a designer, we need to think like the potential customers, determining what they need to see and what we want to communicate so that they fully engage with the value proposition on this landing page. We try to keep the language simple, describing why the product or service meets their needs or solves their pain-point, with no use of complex language.

Headers, sub-headers and text are structured to highlight for the reader any important messages.

Well designed Mautic landing pages allow you to communicate your value proposition clearly, without burying the visitor under piles of irrelevant information.

• Mobile First

Mautic landing pages should be designed with mobile in mind – if they are going to be used to target a mobile audience. As this segment is growing rapidly, it is an important factor when preparing visuals for a landing page.

Mobile visitors need to have the same kind of guidance throughout the page, be able to access the same resources, and have the same compulsion to complete the action as their desktop counterparts.

Designing for mobile devices is not simply about moving blocks around to fit a smaller screen, but must focus on a deep awareness of the behaviour differences on mobile as opposed to desktop devices.

• Test

With the growing importance of fast-loading web pages and a need to do everything possible to ensure a conversion when a visitor lands on your page, the overall page size is an important consideration.

Multiple studies have shown that landing pages which take a long time to load result in less conversions.

Optimisation in this regard involves a lot of testing, but also close communication between the designer and the developer to ensure that visuals are delivered in the most efficient way – for example using a single SVG image and applying CSS to select the relevant image, or making sure that the images are rendered and provided in the resolution that is required, rather than in maximum resolution.

Testing does not stop with page speed, however. Full testing should also include running A/B tests to determine the best button placement, applying design knowledge to identify the best colour choice, icons and photos, making sure that the typography is appropriate for the purpose of the page, and of course once the page is developed, ensuring legibility, navigation flows and of course interaction on any device or browser.

When the needs of the visitor are combined with the designer’s qualitative understanding of them, and a thorough understanding of the market, the results can be spectacular.

Are there other elements to landing page design that you include in your process? Please comment below! Thank you again to Betty Chatzisavvidou for allowing us to share this valuable content. For a look at the original post, click here.

As training for the Rio Olympics  gets underway, we see the immense work that is done by these athletes in preparation for the games. In a similar manner, each of us works hard to compete in today’s business world. We plan, organize, implement and deploy new ideas. Although our environment may not be an open stadium, it is certainly an open marketplace. And unlike the real Olympics where only a single person is rewarded with a medal, everyone wins when you contribute to an open source project like Mautic.

Who can participate?

According to Olympic records, Cecilia Colledge was the youngest female competitor in the Olympics. She was only 11YO.  The oldest to ever compete? Arthur von Pongracz of Austria, who was 72. We’d like to approach the Mautic Summer Games in a same manner. We believe everyone has worth and value. That you can contribute and participate to this community in some way shape or form. So we’re excited to open up the competition to developers/creators/designers of all ages.

What are the events?

In preparation for the Mautic Summer Games we wanted to give you a rundown of all the different events that we will be offering. Regardless of your skill level or expertise, everyone should be able to participate.

UPDATED: Scoring for events

When do the Mautic Summer Games start/end?

Our Summer Games will run the entire month of August. So as you’re watching the Rio Olympics take some time to contribute to an international phenomenon that is disrupting an entire industry. When you participate in these summer games, you also add value to others.

What’s in it for me?

Our undying gratitude! ? Aside from the knowledge that you receive by helping people move horizons, there will be prizes! Be on the lookout for more detail on mautic.org as we design our scoring system and determine the prizes. Also keep in mind there will be prizes for country participation! Do you have colleagues that are willing and able to participate? Invite them to join in on the games!

By holding this fun-filled event, we hope to show the world that an inspired community, gathered around a common ideal, can change the way we communicate. And that given the proper tools and inspiration, we can create an open space where creative ideas can be  shared and horizons can be moved.

UPDATE: Summer Games Prizes

We’ve created our very own Mautic Summer Games swag bags! Proudly display your contribution to Mautic as you collect points to contribute to one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world. There will be a different set of swag for gold, silver and bronze, so do your best!

UPDATE: Rules of the Games

We’d like to request that all content produced or developed be done during the timing of the games (the month of August). Please no recycling of content that has already been created. We encourage everyone who is participating do use creativity and innovation when applying their talents to each of these events.