graphicsexpression.com

By Adekola Oyategbe

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Proper Navigation
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Image Reduction
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Text In An Appropriate Length
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Web Standard Compliance
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Scripting Language Usage
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

CSS Usage
Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

By Adekola Oyategbe

Planning is an important aspect of designing and developing a site. There are rules and guidelines to follow in order to create an impactful website. Many graphic designers refuse to follow some of these standard and processes, thereby they lose clients, there integrity and reputation in the industry.

In fact, this failure has led to low page ranking and less traffic expected. Here are five of these standard rules:

Rule 1 – Deal with your Background

Your background speaks so much about your site. Make it lively and clear, let it be appealing and more importantly it should load fast.

Rule 2 – Make It Browser Compatible

Your site must be able to load on all major browsers. It will be useless for your site to load correctly on Firefox and not load rightly on Internet Explorer. This can be done by using CSS correctly and follow W3C standards.

Rule 3 – Remember “Content Is King”

You content must be cleared and corresponded to the theme of your website. When writing your content keep the perceptions of your readers in mind and the theme of your site.

Rule 4 – Make Your Site User-friendly

The usability of your site matter most. Avoid excessive use of graphics, make navigation easy and avoid broken links. This criteria determines the economic growth of your website.

Following these standards will increase your ranking, boost your site economic viability and your traffic will be increased.

By Adekola Oyategbe

The elements of graphics design are very simple and easy to understand. Comparing the initial period of art in the elementary class to this digital graphics design time where your colouring pen is now your mouse and your canvass is now on your screen. Even your imagination is trained under auspicious rules of software like Photoshop or CorelDraw.

Here are the 7 basic elements of graphics design which a good graphic designer combines to make a complete convincing graphics design.

Shapes
Shapes make core elements of art because they are the most basic building blocks for human arts. Have you ever wonder why shape tools are in most graphics design software? It is because most designer starts out with shapes. So if you want to start creating your designs, decide on shape.

Lines
Lines are different from shapes since lines don’t close up. They are the dividers and organizers of space in a graphic. They move the eye into the different sections of an image and create major forms that span one point to another. Lines can be connecting lines, perspective lines, borders, dividers etc. In digital graphics software today line tools have become even more advanced with features making lines vary in thickness, color and style. They can be simple, broken, dotted, curved and patterned. Use lines in a design to direct the eye and establish a certain kind of perspective.

Colours
Colour is a given graphic design element. With the eyes of humans capturing several million hues of colour it is not hard to imagine why colour is such an important tool in graphic design. Colours convey feelings and emotions in people. They can be hot, cold, complimentary are contrasting. Even the absence of colour says something about a graphic design. Graphics editing software offer several palette combinations with you being able to actually create your own custom colours with the creative adjustments of the combinations of some other ones. Use colours to solidify the feeling and purpose of your graphic design.

Shadows/Lighting
Shadow and lighting effects have become more easier to add to art these days with the use of design software. These effects make shapes and lines stand out from a picture making them look more three dimensional. So if you want you circle to look like a sphere, or your triangle into a pyramid then you should add these elements to your graphic to make them come out.

Textures
To add extra realism to your shapes, textures are used as another important design element. Textures basically make a shape look like it is made of some sort of material. The surface of shapes in their raw form in a drawing will always be smooth. Add a brick wall texture or concrete tiled texture to a rectangle shape for example and you give it a new and more realistic look. This is different from just colouring the rectangle in simple red brick as it includes the subtle shadows, lighting and reflections that most real objects display.

Typography
A relatively new design element is typography. In the past, artists where limited to their own hands when adding text to their works of art. Now, it is easy enough to add text, with a myriad amount of styles to your artwork. Use text in your design to add actual readable messages to your design. Also, you can use letters and words themselves as actual shapes that you can use for artful effects.

Pictures
Lastly we have pictures. Integrating some real elements captured from cameras is another relatively new development in terms of art. Pictures captured from reality can be taken, distorted or enhanced to improve the look and feel of your graphic design. Sometimes pictures are edited to add a surreal effect to them as they get integrated into a graphic design.

By Adekola Oyategbe

According to Dictionary.com, Graphics Design is the art or profession of visual communication that combines images, words, and ideas to convey information to an audience especially to produce a specific effect.

Graphic Design is generally everywhere around us. You start a day with it and also end the day with it. It is in many common way; see it in a poster, logo, website, brochure, book design, advertisements, billboard, product package, magazine, newspaper etc.

The major responsibility of a Graphic Designer is to use graphic softwares to convey information using basic elements.

Common graphics softwares used by a graphic designers are Photoshop, Coreldraw, InDesign, Fireworks, Dreamwaver, etc. The ability to know how to use the softwares very well will enhance the productivity of a visual effect of the designer.

There are many sites that will help you through with tutorial that will equip you whether paid or free. Also some of the site owner of these softwares provide a discussion board that you can visit to help you out when you are having difficulties.

Some of the basic element that a graphic designer need to understand the usage and their arrangement are Photos, Illustrations, Types, Shapes, Colour, Texture.

By knowing how to use a specific designer software and applying the usage of the basic elements, your work will beginning to speak which will increase your client base thereby increasing your income.