Designing Style Guidelines For Brands And Websites

A website is never done. Everyone has worked on a project that changed so much after it launched that they no longer wanted it in their portfolio. One way to help those who take over your projects is to produce a style guide.

Edward Tufte once said: “Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.” Although there’s no stopping some clients from making their website awful, by creating a style guide, you’re effectively establishing rules for those who take over from you.

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Ask a Madman: My Client Wants Me to Copy a Design

Whether it happens in a corporate conference room or in a startup client’s office (read: Starbucks), at some point in your career, someone is going to ignore your sketches and ideas and say, “Here’s a site I like. I want one designed just like this!” A bruised ego is bad enough, but knowing where to draw the line between inspiration and theft is even tougher.

There are times we need to just give in to clients—it is a service industry, after all. As an old teacher once said to me: “If you’re a designer, you will have to follow instructions and inane wishes of clients. If you want to be an artist, then paint pictures.”

It sticks in my mind because at the time he was strangling me while other students tried to pry his hands from my throat. My arguments about creativity and self-respect were naïve… and aggravating, judging by the teacher’s attempt to murder me. I’m still reminded by peers that the wishes of the client are of utmost importance in our line of work.

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Freelancers and Freelance Website Design

Freelance website design is the act of hiring a freelancer to design your website. Many webmasters all over the internet are doing just that. Hiring a freelancer is often cheaper and even sometimes faster and more reliable than hiring an establish design company. A freelancer is in business for himself or herself, they have a whole lot more to lose by losing you as a client, more so than an established company.

When you need freelance website design one disadvantage to hiring a freelancer over a company is that you may need to find several different freelancers to finish the website. While a freelance web designer will be able to take care of the design and graphic aspect of your website, they may not have the skills to take care of the technical aspects of a website. Furthermore, you might be able to find a graphic designer to take care of logos, headers, and buttons, but the overall design of the website might not be in their skill set.

Both of these situations will require a separate freelancer. Now it is not as bad as it sounds. You might find freelance website design in one very skilled and experience person or you might find a graphic designer who has a deal with another freelancer on the technical side of things. Either way you can get the job done.

Freelance website design is probably the most popular choice for business owners all over the world. However, you want to make sure the designer is experienced and has proof of their experience in references and samples. You never want to hire a freelancer that cannot provide you with verifiable samples of their work.

Now when it comes to budget, a freelancer will be cheaper, but you should be willing and able to pay for quality. Keep in mind you get what you pay for. If you expect to pay $50 for freelance website design, you should also expect to get your $50 worth and nothing more. This could result in a poor design that you simply are not pleased with. I once read somewhere a freelancer said, “If a client says they want cheap, fast, and quality, I tell him to choose two. I can provide cheap and fast, but I cannot combine it with quality.”

Keep in mind freelance website design takes time and talent, you should be willing to provide a good price for both.

Article Source: http://www.kokkada.com
To find a freelance website design specialist visit: www.unlimitedfreelancers.com today.

Elements of Graphic Design for Your Website

We’ve all seen them. Poorly designed web sites that make you cringe as soon as they load. But how do you keep your website from becoming, well, ugh. You could hire a professional web designer, and that’s expensive, or maybe you already hired a professional, or someone who claims to be professional, and you don’t like what they’re doing with your site. It all comes down to the K.I.S.S. principle; keep it simple stupid. And you’re probably asking well what does this really mean for web design.

Here are some basic graphic design/web design principles that you can use on your site:

1. Background, be careful what color you use for the background of your site. Yes I know that you’re trying to get noticed, but really they’ve already decided to look at your page so why does it have to be orange? Seriously though, consider how long you want people to be on your site, half an hour, one hour, more? Whatever the time chose your background color and then sit in front of your computer and stare at it, for awhile. Is the color easy to look at? Difficult? Does it make your eyes water? Does it make you calm? If you can look at the color for about fifteen minutes without a problem you’re okay.

2. Text, related to the above be careful what text color you use. Follow the rules above for determining a text color. It should be easy to read, and look at.

3. Font, no more that three fonts on the entire website. I mean that! A big mistake that I see a lot of times is the use of more than three different fonts, it get’s hard to read no matter how neat you think it looks.

4. Font size, no more that three font sizes either. Now I don’t mean three font sizes for each of the three fonts you’ve chosen. I mean no more than three fonts with a total of three sizes throughout the entire site, and if you can get by with less even better. It will simplify your site.

5. Scrolling, this is a big one literally. I’ve been on too many sites where I had to scroll down so far that my computer beeped at me. This is really important on your main page. Keep it very sparse, generally any information that someone has to scroll more than one full page down for will not be read.

This is only a start of course but it’s a start and it is on these issues that I see so many problems. Always remember that simplicity is best.

Copyright 2004 Kelly Paal

Author
Kelly Paal is a Freelance Nature and Landscape Photographer, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Recently she started her own business Kelly Paal Photography (www.kellypaalphotography.com). She has an educational background in photography, business, and commercial art. She enjoys applying graphic design and photography principles to her web design.

understanding Vector and Raster Graphics

Choosing the right design, the right designer and the right graphics is essential. Selecting the right business, the right platform and the right time is crucial. If you have an artistic hand but don’t know how to write, or you have beautiful voice and you don’t know how to sing, you may have a gift, but a paralyzed one.

You have a website and don’t know what its composition is; you have graphics and don’t know how they are designed; just the lack of this information you may lose your business.

Simple, yet complex, are the pages of your website containing graphics all together in every space. And those very graphics can hamper you, if not properly designed for an impressive deliverance to the customer.

If your site loads slowly in a browser, if your logos are not eye pleasing, if the fonts are not stylish, if the color combination and outline architecture is not smooth, you might be irritating your own costumer rather appealing to them.

Graphic design elements that are in your websites primarily are of two types; Vector and Raster.

Vector graphics is a geometric modeling of images, widely being used in Computer Graphics today. Vector graphics applies geometrical standards i.e., lines, curves, and polygons to represent images, while Raster graphics or a bit-mapped image, which is based on pixels in a grid, and contains information about the colors to be displaced in “bits”. Due to this raster graphics have fixed resolution, thus cannot be resized without losing image quality.

In addition, bitmap images have much large file sizes; however, vector graphics are prepared by many individual objects, and each of them are defined by geometrical data with individual properties allocated to it such as color, fill, and outline. Thus, vector graphics have free resolution and can bring high quality output at any scale.

Vector images are more flexible than bitmaps, and for that reason they can be resized and stretched. Additionally, images stored as vectors enhance appearances on monitors and printers with higher resolution, while bit-mapped images always appear the same, in spite of of a device's resolution. Another advantage of vector graphics is it requires less memory than bit-mapped images do.

The word vector graphics is typically used in the context of two-dimensional computer graphics. Today almost all computer video displays transform vector representations of an image to a raster format.

Vector graphics editors usually allow a user to spin, shift, mirror, stretch, tilt, a combination of primitives into a more sophisticated objects. Vector graphics are better for designing outlines, typography, logos, technical illustrations, diagram and flowchart, while bitmap editors are more suitable for retouching photos, photo processing, and artistic illustrations.

It is ideally good for simple or complex drawings that need to be photo-realism. i.e., for PostScript and PDF page description languages use a vector graphics model.

Vector graphic are perfect format for the Web as these are lightweight graphics to the websites due to its file size and problem free regarding physical height and width of the image.

These days, websites are filled with sophisticated icons, images, navigation bars, photographs, bottoms, logos, etc and for cutting the file size, vector graphics are efficient, smaller, compact, and scale perfect or independent resolution compare to the raster graphics.

Regarding programs which allows us to create and operate vector graphics, are called drawing programs, while programs that operate bit-mapped images are called paint programs.

Almost all graphics application these days, including CADD systems and animation software, use vector graphics; furthermore, printers like PostScript printers use vector graphics and fonts represent as vectors are called postscript fonts. While, dot-matrix printers, laser printers, and monitors, are raster devices, this means that all objects, even vector objects, must be translated into bit maps before being output which means, even vector graphic images must be interpreted to the raster graphic before the end product can be displayed on paper.

Interesting, yet most important note regarding these two graphics are, its similarity with the human organ behaviors; like bitmap images, the human eyes catches objects in a mosaic raster format by photon recipient nerves though physical world.

Another hand brain function perceives the objects as vector graphics in its visual world. As a result, the brain can easily recalls drawings like cartoon, logos, signs, images, symbols, banners, with outlines. Though the pixel image with mosaic format will be faded out, but the impression of outlines of the pictures will remain in the memory of a human being for long. Eyes cannot manipulate the objects seen in the outer world, it perceives as it is, while the mind can manipulate through its imagination in its mental zone.

If you have chosen the right graphics and the right graphic designer for your business, enrich your business with graphics that are web friendly, swift loading, attractive, impressive and much more than outlines that remain in the mind of your visitor for a very long time.
Your website design should be eye pleasing, mind snatching, impressive and overall appealing to the customers. Design simple, but yet make it striking!

By: Bharat Bista

top 10 Tips to a Great Web Page

Make Your Site Valuable to Your Readers

There aren't any magic pills to create a great Web page that everyone will visit again and again, but if you follow these ten tips your site will be more popular and easier for people to read.

1) Know your audience, and keep them in mind when you write.
If your Web pages are frequented by people with slower modems then designing a page that looks best over a T1 is not a successful strategy.

2) Keep your pages short.
If you minimize the scrolling, chances are, your readers will get your message. A good screen size is 640 pixels wide by 480 tall.

3) Use tables of contents.
According to Jakob Nielsen only 10% of users will scroll beyond the first screen of text. If that first screen has a table of contents viewers will click on the links to the explanatory text.

4) Keep images small.
Large images annoy people. If it takes too long to download, many people will never see it, as they will have browsed somewhere.

5) Use Web colors.
The browser-safe color palette will ensure that most people will see your page and images in the colors you intended.

6) Avoid lots of text.
People don't read the Web, they skim it.

7) Check your spelling.
Use a spell checker, either in your editor or on-line.

8) Keep links current.
Check your links often to make sure they are still valid. Using a link checker speeds up pages with many links.

9) Annotate your links.
If a page is good enough to link to, then it's good enough to explain why you like it.

10) Put contact information on your pages.
The Web is interactive and dynamic, and you should welcome comments on your pages. Also, if there is a broken link or other problem, your readers can let you know, easily.

By: Jennifer Kyrnin / http://webdesign.about.com

why to use PNG Images in your Web Design

The PNG image file format is not new to the web. It originally developed in the mid-90s as a solution to the shortcomings of the traditional GIF image file format. However, because early browser applications offered only spotty support for the PNG's advanced features, web designers, developers were limited in its use.

One large hurdle in particular faced by PNG's was Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). Far and away the most popular browser, IE offered particularly poor support for the file format . However, with the release of IE 7 as well as several JavaScript hacks, this has all changed, and PNGs are more popular than ever.

But who cares!? And besides being one letter short of my favorite 1972 video game, what makes a PNG so great? Below, are three reasons why PNGs are the best image format since the Polaroid.

They’re See-Through! (Alpha Transparency):
As compared to the GIF, PNG offers a far less basic form of transparency. With GIFs, a particular color (or colors) is able to be saved as transparent, leaving colors either entirely opaque or transparent. There is no in-between.

PNGs have a distinct advantage in this area. The PNG file format supports "semi-transparent pixels," meaning a PNG can be saved with a soft drop shadow and floated over any background. It can be used as a watermark on a textured or gradiented background. It can even be smoothly faded from fully opaque to transparent, revealing the web page contents beneath.

Summerour.net features a logo which demonstrates this function. The homepage layout called for a logo with a soft drop shadow over a textured background of architectural sketches that regularly change. Using a GIF or JPG would be highly impractical, because every time the image changed, the logo’s background would need to be edited. A PNG, however, is floated over the image with a faded drop shadow, making the task quick, simple and dynamic. PNGs make the look and feel of your page flexible.

They Look Great! (Lossless Compression ):
Every time a JPEG is saved and compressed, it loses some of the original file's information and the image quality degrades. The GIF file format offers lossless compression (so the file can be saved and resaved without losing image quality ), but it only supports a limited 256 color palette, making it useless for full-color photography and other such complex images.

PNG offers the best of both worlds. It displays full color photographic images, like the JPEG, but it also supports a managed color palette, like the GIF format. While the PNG will typically have a larger file size than the JPEG for photographic images, it does have a distinct advantage: its compression is lossless, meaning images never degrade in quality or suffer from "compression artifacting" which affects many JPEG images.

The results are crisper, brighter images that will “pop” on your pages unlike ever before.

They’re Self Optimizing! (Gamma Correction ):
Adjusting the brightness and contrast of images to look correct on a wide variety of monitors and operating systems is a common problem facing web designers. This problem is primarily related to different monitor Gamma settings.

Gamma is a method monitors use to distribute their luminance evenly across the display. Unfortunately, different operating systems (in particular the Mac and Windows ) use different Gamma settings. So an image that is color-corrected for the Macintosh operating system may look too dark on the Windows operating system and vice-versa.

The PNG file format offers a solution for this problem. The image can be saved with built-in Gamma correction, enabling it to anticipate the operating system's Gamma settings and automatically adjust its brightness and contrast. By using a PNG, designers can simply color-correct the image for their personal operating systems and let the PNG do the rest.

About the Author:
This article was co-authored by Mike Bradbury and Mike Harvey. Both are employees of Objectware, Inc, an Atlanta web development and Atlanta web design company with an active branch in Washington DC. Mike Harvey is a graphic designer, with expert knowledge of web design and usability.

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