Archive for March, 2010
Web Design Process
The Web Design Process includes:
- Know what your doing
- Know what the site needs to do in the end
- Figure out what the visitors to the site want
- Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
- Sketch some successful scenarios
- Organize a site map
- Sketch out some of the essential features
- Map out the visitors’ attention
- Arrange the visual elements to work together
Overall these are the basic steps that web designers take when designing sites and most processes are about the same and fairly consistent.
My current design process is very similar to the ones in the articles I definately plan out stuff before I start and I tend sketch down ideas when I get them otherwise I sometimes lose the idea before I can put it into action or I can’t get it quite the way I want it or originally pictured it being.
Style and Design
Some issues that are faced in the design of web pages are keeping a consistent look and layout for the site, using color contrast correctly, correct use of white space, and simplicity.
Using a consistent look and layout for a website is very important because if you don’t some people might believe they have navigated away from your site onto another one.
Without color contrast used correctly a website might not be very easy to navigate or even just read or look at the content.
White space and simplicity are very important as well. They’re important because without them a website could become overly cluttered looking and hard to navigate through easily.
Graphics on the Web
Optimizing graphics is very important when it comes to file size, it cuts down on the overall page size, but also saves bandwidth by having smaller files, which makes the page load much faster.
Graphics are used on websites in many ways but they are mainly used to make a site more memorable and to make it stand out to people.
Graphics can become major content on websites. Graphics sometimes can convey just as much information as text alone. Many times graphics convey the information in a more easy to understand form than just using text alone.
Graphics appear differently from computer to computer no doubt, but the biggest issue is how the colors appear and whether the graphics will fit within the monitor screen. Color is probably one of the biggest issue I have faced even when I’ve used colors that are web-safe. Between my laptop and desktop computer there are some major differences that I’ve noticed. You’ve really got to be careful there because some colors that look normal on one screen look neon or just plain awful on the other.
Design Styles
The different classifications of web design styles that are most commonly used include illustrated designs, black and white, just black, new old paper, extremely colorful or bright colors, sketch artist designs, old paper based sketches, very minimal, and design using wood.
The styles that I like the most are the designs that incorporate the wood element, the brightly colored designs, and the designs with black used as the main color.
I like the using the element of wood in designs because it looks great to begin with not only, but also it takes a little more effort and practice to make it look right.
Brightly colored designs are very neat looking because they definitely catch the attention of the eye.
When it comes to using black or another dark color for background would have to be one of my favorites because it is very user friendly because of the high contrast it makes everything stand out more. I like using a black background with bright colored elements so that text and other elements used in the design itself.
Editing
Photoshop makes it extremely easy to edit photos from a photoshoot because all you need is someone who knows how to use the tools offered correctly and then your photos can be made completely perfect, sometimes too perfect.
I think using photoshop to edit photos for magazines is acceptable but only to a point, I think you should be able to edit out small glitches things such as light reflections that take away from the quality of the photo. I don’t that you should be able to take it as far as editing the image so much that it doesn’t even look like the original.
When you edit a photo to the point that it no longer looks like the original, then people who are familiar with the powerful tools of photoshop don’t always realize the damage done to a photo. When you edit a photo that much it makes it very misleading and it makes the photo look so perfect that it doesn’t even look realistic, but yet some believe that those pictures are.
I think that if you are using photoshop to edit the photo to improve the color or quality, your within the boundaries of editing but once you start editing so much that the image becomes too perfect, then you have went to far.
