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List of all Articles in Design
Here you can browse through a list of all the article titles in this category, or maybe search for an article that you have seen before and want to read again.
If you can't find what you're looking for here then why not try our related categories section.
Advantages for Using FrontPage (Part 2)
Another benefit to using FrontPage is being able to create virtual directories with ease. As you know, when you specify a home directory, all of the subdirectories beneath the home directory automatically become subdirectories of the Web site as...
Bad Web Design: ActiveX
ActiveX uses an interesting method for enforcing security ... it doesn't. Well, that's not exactly true. What happens is when a web page requests an ActiveX control the browser determines if that control is already loaded onto your...
Basic Web Design Principles
Home Page Home page should clearly indicate what the site is about. Provide top level navigation on the first page, your logo, and tell to the visitor what he can found on your web site. Your home page should be informative, and should call...
DesignSmarts: Three Terrific Tips for Site Design!
Terrific Design Tip # 1 Place the most important offer, feature or product of your site closer to the top of the page. Give it prominence so visitors will not miss it. Having a big logo taking all the valuable space at the top of your web pages...
Does The Color of Your Site Matter?
You are driving your car through a rural area, enjoying the countryside. At some point you come to an intersection in the road. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a green stop sign. Do you stop or drive right through the intersection? Chances...
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Design Principles and Elements
Design Principles and Elements
A truly shocking number of web designers are unfamiliar with the
basic principles and elements of design. Having never been
through any formal design education, many just go with what they
think 'looks good', with very mixed results. If you're going to
design a website, you'll do much better if you have some idea of
what you're doing when it comes to graphic design. Here, then,
is a crash course in the principles and elements most useful to
web designers.
Of all the style and beauty in the world, it seems not enough
has met the web. We can all do our parts to add to the stylistic
content of this new-age phenomenon, and in an attempt to assist
you in reaching that goal, I give you a set of guidelines to
help you along your way.
Balance.
It is important for things to be balanced. That doesn't
necessarily mean symmetry, making one side exactly the same as
the other, but it does mean that you can't make one side
'strong' and not balance that on the other side. For example, if
you use a dark colour, you should balance it with a larger area
of a lighter colour. What balance allows you to do is to lead
the viewer's eye to certain parts of the page without making the
page look ridiculous.
Emphasis.
If you want to make part of the page stand out from all the
rest, you can give it emphasis using a variety of techniques.
Grouping everything together and then moving one thing a
significant distance away from them will make it a focal point,
as will making it a different shape from the others, or a
different colour.
Line.
The directions of your lines will give a mood to your design: as
a rule, horizontal lines are calmer, vertical lines are
moderately active, and jagged or diagonal lines are very active.
If you were designing an austere financial news site, then,
you'd use horizontal lines, while a fun site for kids would be
full of lines going in all sorts of directions.
Shape.
One thing that lots of people don't realise is that there are
two kinds of shapes - positive and negative - and every design
has both kinds of shapes. The positive ones are the ones you,
the designer, actively placed on the page, while the negative
shapes are the spaces created around the positive ones. Many web
designers simply ignore this, leaving their negative shapes as a
mess - this leads to the 'boxy' look that many amateur pages
have.
Colour.
Colour is a big subject. As soon as you add more than one colour
to a page, you make the other colours look different. Some
colours are complementary, and some just look terrible together.
On the web, though, you should usually avoid using too many
colours on one page - even if they are complementary, it will
look garish.
For the web, hue is more important: the best way to create a
colour scheme is to use black, white, and various shades of one
colour. You have to consider the brightness and intensity of
your colours, to make sure you're not overdoing things. One of
the easiest mistakes to make is to use the built-in CSS colour
words (background-color: red, for example) instead of creating
colour codes - the colour words should generally be avoided,
because they're just too intense.
Space.
You can create all sorts of illusions with the amount of space
you put between your objects, and where you put it: design is
often as much knowing where to put something as it is knowing
what to put there. If you make things overlap, or example, the
covered things appear to be at the 'back' while the uncovered
ones are at the 'front'.
Lots More.
This is the briefest of brief overviews, because graphic design
is a surprisingly large subject, and one that's changing all the
time. If you want to get properly up to speed, it's worth buying
a book, or even taking an evening course at your local college -
you won't regret it.
About the author:
Original Source: Articles-Galore.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
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