attractive websites
Inspirational Designers, and how to get recognized as a Web Designer
Want to get recognized in the graphic and web design world? Here are some tips on how to get yourself out in the design spotlight and promote your work. We’ll also be looking at some of today’s most inspiring designers, and what makes them famous.
- Focus on your strengths. Are you better at illustration? Designing web layouts? Creating graphics? Try to pick your strongest skill and use it to your advantage. This will help you stand out and better display yourself. Of course you never want to spend too much time on one thing and leave no time for anything else, but if you can use your strengths to your advantage you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.
- Eliminate your weaknesses. Surround yourself with people who are good at what you’re not. Have them help you get better in those areas. Ask for resources you can use to get better at those things that have always frustrated you. The worst thing you can do is avoid something simply because it’s challenging.
- Challenge yourself constantly. Always go a step further to learn a more advanced technique. One new technique may open up thousands of possibilities in your work. If you always take the easy way out, you won’t learn as much, and you’ll never try anything new.
- Broaden your skills. Even if you’re exceptionally good at one thing, if you don’t try to learn new things you’re going to run into a lot of walls down the line. Broadening your design skills can be an easy and fun process if you use the right resources and put your mind to it. Also, being stuck with an obsolete skill will get you nowhere. Web and graphic design is constantly changing, and if you can’t keep up, you’re going to be left in the dust.
Color Branding and Corporate Identity
Color is a very important factor in design can be quite significant in defining the identity or branding of a company. Companies use colors to brand their products so that we are reminded of the product simply by recognizing a combination of colors. Not only these large companies but many designers and small companies use colors to identify themselves to stand out. Here are some examples of websites where the color contributes to the company’s identity:
Apple
Apple has always been known for their use of silver, both in their products and their advertising. The Apple website clearly displays this by the use of a silver gradient navigation, and light grays and white for the rest of the site. With their common use of silver computer casing, Apple has indeed branded themselves with the color silver. Apple also uses bright colors for some of their product lines, including the iMac and iPod shuffle/nano.
(For an interesting article documenting the change in Apple’s design between 1977 and 2008 click here) › Continue reading
2009 Website Trends
Web and Graphic Designers such as ourselves are very creative and always looking for new and exciting ways to dazzle our viewers. This in turn creates many new trends as more and more designers pick up these techniques. We are going to show you some of the biggest of these trends for 2009 and explain the advantages to using these techniques in your own work.
To begin, typography and font trends are becoming more and more prevalent.
Embossing letterpress in order to give titles a “pressed” look has rarely been used until now. This technique adds a refined style to titles, and gives it a solid look that really looks nice.
Embossed Lettering
Embossed Lettering
How to design a attractive website
While designing a web site it is crucial that the site is attractive, fast-loading, user friendly, focuses on your content and has a high stickiness factor to it (that shows how long the visitor stays on your site). Instead of making very complex designs with less content or bare designs with cluttered content, we recommend that you find the right balance between both.
Give importance to Layout and Navigation
A clean layout and neat navigation that uses a lot of white space enhances your site’s look. Try to keep the focus on your content. That is why we recommend using dreamweaver templates for your site – all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies – this way even if your site is a little distracting due to necessary effects, your design is noted once (hopefully with a appreciative eye 
and then the visitor focused on the content automatically.
If you have too many links then you should use drop-down menus or flyouts for your main topics. If you have Fireworks or Dreamweaver then adobe drop-down menus are one of their most popular in-built “Behaviors”. Otherwise you can use the copy-paste code for drop-down menus in the article SmartWebby Drop-down Menus.
› Continue reading
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