Web of colours
Web designing has emerged as a new and very lucrative job opportunity for all artistic minds. If you have a creative way of thinking and you know exactly what to do to attract the crowds with your designs and colours, this might just be the perfect job for you.
A web design has to be catchy to the eye, easy to read and understand and not repulsive to the target audience! It is said that a visitor to a site, forms his or her opinion of the site within nine seconds.
What can be more attractive to the eye than colours? They are not only attractive they may also be helpful in navigation and easy handling of a user of the site. However, what is deceptive about the happy thought of attractive colours is that colours used for web designing do not come in the language we know and describe them in. Thus the red colour cannot simply be put in words, but as #FF0000 , or purple cannot be just that, but instead has to be used as #800080. Thus designing on the web is not that easy after all. For a person to be proficient at his work and execute it with a certain amount of professionalism, he has to educate himself to a certain extent. However, there are other options available to a web designer, he may use the colour type which is specified as a RGB triplet in the hexadecimal format, sometimes these colours can also be used in their common English names, or sometimes a colour box tool is also provided with certain softwares.
However, one thing should be kept in mind, that use of very bright colours, or a very colourful background or colourful text will only make the site look much cluttered. In order to avoid this from happening one must use white space carefully. White space exudes a feeling of spaciousness and neatness. Keeping it simple often does the trick.
Pertaining to this rule, the use of bulky colourful images must also be used sparingly while designing a site. Often heavy colours take a long time to just load. The testing of an audience’s patience is not the aim here. Thus, other kinds of attractive design ideas must be made use of. Tables can be creatively used while designing or attractive icons can also be made use of. The colours must enhance the site and its subject matter. It must not confuse the audience.
The first thing which a designer must do with a project in hand is agree on a colour scheme for the website with his client. The company logo and the colours of the site must be compatible with each other. The logo etc. can be preceded on when the colour scheme is thus decided upon. Usually, five colours are selected to make the job easier. Three colours are used for scheming, one is used for contrasting and another for highlighting. The important part is nailing one particular set of colours which would match your design idea as well as go together with all the five colours. Colours express the mood of the site and its personality, thus the colour scheme itself can be an inspiration for the entire theme of the website, and designers must be on the look out for such inspiration. You might find the perfect fit on a film poster or a baby’s clothes.
Inspired designs
Heads need not be beaten or hair need not be split over an inspiration block for a design. Even regarding the simple design of a webpage, designers might reach a block in their minds and might not be able to proceed further with a client. Web designing is not always an easy task and is not as simple as it seems. There are however, some simple ideas which every designer must keep in mind. These can come handy for any kind of designer, especially those who have deadlines to meet and clients to keep happy.
The best method to overcome a creative jam is creating a trusted system. Jotting down ideas, to do’s and other tiny notes has always done a world of good for every creative person on the planet. Sometimes it may not seem necessary to jot down less important things, but actually it does help. A less important note can always help to trigger off an important memory or something related to it. Journals and random notes on something that you carry with yourself everyday are very important. It can be stored in a notebook, on your mobile phone or even on your laptop. It comes in very handy to remind you of a forgotten mood.
One of the most important things to record is ideas. Great ideas are often fleeting. They are there in your mind one moment and gone the next. No matter how hard you convince yourself to remember it you generally do not, and it comes back to you on a rainy day, a long time after you have suffered enough of your mental block. Creative impulses therefore must never be lost track of.
Eliminating distractions and focusing on the task in hand is another crucial method of concentrating. It might be easier said than done, but it must be concentrated upon. Most creative people claim that they live in chaos and they are most inspired when they are in the middle of some doggone catastrophe, however, focusing will always help you move in the right direction. It has seldom failed great creative minds.
A great new concept which has come up is making a review list. This must consist of items of inspiration and other reference items. A regular look over of one of these inspirations list might just solve a mental block. It might just prove to you what has been holding you back or what particular type of inspiration you have been stuck on. This might help you move on from a trend which might not be working out with you.
Another important thing to remember is that designing is not the only artistic talent which exists in the world, thus it is advisable to develop other creative habits. These can include a regular habit of taking photographs or writing creatively. This can always help in triggering off your own creative inspirations.
But most importantly creativity exists maintaining discipline and also through learning and practice. Working hard and practice can help the designer to be more inspired.
No Nos of web designing
The art of a good web design is that no one should notice the hard work put into creating it. However, amateurs have an uncanny knack of revealing just that, that they are amateurs, while on the other hand, a seasoned web designer can virtually go unnoticed.
To start off, one of the usual mistakes that an over enthusiastic new designer is bound to make is, to go directly for an eye catching and great looking background. But the greatest advice anybody can give a designer for an attractive background, is to make it plain white. That’s right; a plain white background allows the user to feel more relaxed and at-home. It is also less confusing for him and gives him an interest to explore the site more thoroughly. The maximum that can be done to make the page more interesting is to substitute white with black. Of course, there can be other colour schemes which may be required regarding a particular theme concerning the website, therefore the colour choices must be made accordingly. For a children’s site or a fun gaming site, bright colours can always be used, but on the other hand, for didactic or business related sites, subdued and natural colours must be resorted to. Colours almost always create the first setting impression for the audience. It is said that a user makes his first impression about the site, within nine seconds of visiting it. Therefore capturing the target audience’s needs and interests in a matter of seconds using the appearance of the site, must be first and foremost in the priority list of the designer, not the display of his artistic skills.
Busy graphics in general must be avoided. Bright graphics or even very complicated graphics tend to confuse the user and drift his attention away from the main purpose of his visit.
In the beginning days of web designing, designers stuck to the good old linear look for their page. This meant straight lines of images, text body, headings etc. These made the pages extremely long. Users often begin to get tired of scrolling down a page for too long. Actually it wasn’t the fault of the designers, but that they had no other choice. It is very recently hat html’s new version allows designers to use the side by side table format of representation. The table format must thus be used by a designer to the full extent. Long web pages can just evoke a snooze fest. Tables or a number of columns in the same page lead to easier reading, and give much more information in one go. This pleases the users much more than long scrolls down.
Another sure sign of an amateur’s webpage is if the page is one big clutter; banners for this, icons for that, bubbles and blurbs which take up too much space in the webpage. It must be kept in mind that the more graphics are used and the more extra features a designer uses for what he thinks will make the webpage more attractive, only adds to the loading time of the page for the user. This may not go down well with the audience, and they just might go away to an easier site to load. Of course, links are very important, to other business associates or little search engines or other related sites. But these must be placed properly throughout the page and not just strewed randomly at the bottom of the page.
An amateur’s task is to make himself look bored with the profession, not as excited as a bubbly teenager with a gadget.