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Now that your idea is finally organized and have your business model off the ground, you can get started in the design process. There are a couple of web design secrets which I’m going to show you that will help you achieve the best design and color scheme before you even bring the your ideals to your computer. Here are a few exercises:
Finding Colors
Color is the most amazing gift that we have as human beings. It allows us to feel the words we are reading and the actions we see. It’s important to use colors that are legible, relevant, and appropriate for the project you are about to start. There are people who take entire classes totally devoted to the subject, but I am going to teach you the basics of color theory as it relates to web design.
The colors we see in life are based on a color harmony. I could sit here and draw out a color wheel like you probably learned in grade school, but I’d rather teach you how to find these colors based off of your feelings. Lets say that you’re about to build a website for a landscaping company who sculpts gardens, lawns, and creates beautiful outdoor art for their clients. The best way to find colors for your client is to take a look at their work or portfolio. It’s a wonderful way of examining their business and getting inspired by their work at the same time. As your holding that beautiful 8 x 10 picture of their masterpiece in your hand close your eyes and start to derive colors from the picture you just saw, what did you see? I saw green, brown, bright pinks and purples, and that is what I’m going to base my designs upon.
You would be surprised on how relevant your first instincts are in this business. They’re essential to the success of any art you create, because you have to imagine the objects in your head first before you can process the information. Let’s try another experiment with color, and this one is much more on the creative side, rather than the business side.
Imagine, for a moment, you’re favorite flower in the world. I’m imagining a white orchid with small pink spots scattered across in a rugged pattern. Now take that beautiful flower and focus on everything around it, the rest of the garden, the dirt, the grass, the trees, but still focus on that beautiful flower. Start naming the beautiful colors you see (but don’t write them down yet). Now, imagine that there is a woman sitting on a bench in that garden and she’s crying. Start to analyze why she’s crying, perhaps her significant other broke up with her, perhaps she’s lost a loved one, perhaps she’s stressed at work and needs a reprieve in the garden. Now, write down the new colors you see. I guarantee that you’re no longer seeing colors of pinks and greens, but are instead introducing bolder and darker colors to compliment that flower. That, my friend, is what complimentary colors are. It’s taking aspects of an object and making them fit for your situation. I can design an entire website devoted to the situation. Perhaps is “Girl on Bench Recovery Center” or maybe “Getting Therapy from the Outdoors, Inc.”, regardless what you want to call this website, you’ll dealing with thoughts, people, objects, situations, and most of all–feelings. If you choose the wrong color to correspond to this; you can change the entire meaning of the situation. So, you are the artist and scientist and you get to choose which colors go together. Take it as a responsibility to the future of this website that the colors you choose are the best and that they always make a difference whatever service or product you are promoting and trying to sell.
Do yourself and your client a favor, develop multiple color schemes to go by. With the skills I teach you in this book, you’ll be able to easily change entire color schemes out, even after the website is completed and published to the web. There is no such thing as a bad idea, only not so good ones.
Design Secret:
Palette Generator - Palette generator is a free service, where you can upload a favorite photo and create a color palette based off of the colors that are included in that photo. If you are struggling with getting the idea in your head put to good use, this is a great tool to help you accomplish your color goals. http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/colors.php
Finding a Layout
Finding a good layout is the second step to building a powerful and usable online presence. Notice while you’re surfing the web looking at websites that at the very core of most web designs is a cookie cutter approach to its layout. You can do absolutely anything with one row for a company’s logo, another row (with individual columns) for the website’s navigation menu, and a third row with two columns to drop website content and pictures in. However, unless you’d like all of your websites to look exactly the same, it’s a good idea to draw your website’s lay out on paper before you get started. Here are a couple of ideas for website layout to get you started.
What do you notice about these layouts? If you’re thinking that they’re all a bunch of squares, you’ve aced the exam of website layouts. These layouts represent 90% of all websites on the internet today. Of course there are infinite 12 possibilities when it comes to putting your content together, and these are only a few examples, but the concept of putting your information onto a grid is a format that the human brain can easily understand. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which we will talk about later in this course, is derived from the concept of using squares for layout design—and that very concept has existed in art for thousands of years. Draw your website out on paper, begin to experiment on how you would like your website to be laid out and what colors you would like to use on your design. Come up with several ideas and concepts and choose the one that works best for you. Associate a color palette, which you chose in the last section, with layout you just created. Imagine these colors with your layout and put together an actual website in your imagination. Think in your mind all of the details you see, but don’t think too hard because the content brainstorming is about to begin.
Article written by Andrew J. McClary, © 2008, All Rights Reserved.
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