Web Design Tips and Tricks

A Crash Course on Graphic Philosophy 101

Get Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. A Crash Course on Graphic Philosophy 101 topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Novice and professional graphic designers, we are aware that you know the basic principles of graphic philosophy. But then, as workers of art – though digital and graphic art already borders in commercial arts, there’s no harm in continuously improving our craft through constant study and practice, is there? Really great graphic designers I know have come to their status because of painstaking application and study of their past works.

We’ll review the theoretical concepts of graphics and graphic forms as a foundation on how we have to go about our graphic designs. To begin with, a graphic form is the shape that embodies a certain idea. We can take a tree and use it as an example. How many ways can we depict a tree? We can depict by a photo of a tree, or the silhouette of a tree, or even its outline. By having these forms that represent a tree, we are therefore conveying the idea of a tree.

A word of caution, though, the effectiveness of which the idea is communicated depends upon many levels of context.

The abstraction of an idea into a flat space, to make it a graphic form, is an integral part of Graphic Design. Usually, the goal is to communicate the idea as clearly as possible. So why not depict the apple as close to reality as possible with a photo? This clearly depicts an apple and leaves no room for misinterpretation. So why not use photos of everything?

The idea is usually not as simple as just an apple. The graphic form is merely a component of an entire design. In a design of a poster for example, the existence of multiple forms and large amounts of text can compete with one another for the reader’s attention. To increase readability, graphic forms are usually simplified into basic shapes, and flattened into a limited amount of color. They are made to work with type more harmoniously and further refined to convey the layers of information with clarity.

The concept of contrast also defines the graphic form of an idea. In a field of 10 squares and 1 triangle, the form that will be noticed is the triangle. A design placed on a wall, on a billboard, or on the internet, are usually lost in a field of other designs. In order to help define your idea over the others, forms that contrast those around it are effective. Basic factors such as typeface, color, scale, and form are elements that can easily help get a design noticed.

The representation of an idea goes beyond its place on the page or its place on a wall. There is the larger context to consider the audience. The ability of the audience to interpret your design is based on the ability of the audience to understand the forms in which an idea is embodied. Preferences of form, and the ability to understand form, can change by age group, location, and through time. We all understand the representation of dollars by a symbol: $. Though symbols universally communicate, they are become ordinary by usage. As the audience becomes visually educated and aware of these forms, the visual language of graphic design expands. However, the evolution of forms must also take place in order to keep interest.

In the overall scheme of things, fresh ideas and interesting graphic forms have always been able to attract attention. New ways of representation strike curiosity. But the goal is to communicate and the form is part and parcel of visual communication.

Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no?

Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?

I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site.

This strategy never makes me a passionate user.

What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content.

So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal.

Welcome Googler, let us help you out

Here we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that manuscript post isn't quite ready yet.)

1. Check referer string
2. If search engine, grab query text
3. Do a full text search on your content to find other articles on your site that are related to their search query
4. Pass the resulting list to the reader in a user friendly way
5. Maybe keep that list persistent for the session, unless they close it

What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site.

Placement etc.

We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too).

We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)?

As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing.

More Articles: