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Learning about Graphic and Web design Courses in West Bromwich
The art of creating and manipulating images digitally is only a simplified definition of the elaborate field that is graphic design. Graphic design is the basic course needed to learn before proceeding to web design and user-experience design. Apart from learning about the important software of digital illustration, you must be well acquainted with many other factors. These factors will be discussed in detail and taught to you in our online graphic design courses. Until then, here is an overview of what a graphic designer should be acquainted with, before he can progress in this field.
1. Optimize Web Graphics for Better Page Load Times
Learn how to optimize your web graphics by selecting the correct format and making sure it’s as small as possible. Although people are moving towards broadband connections, there are still quite a few who use dial-up internet connections. Additionally, with the emergence of mobile device technologies that do not necessarily have broadband-like speeds, slow page loading times due to image file sizes can turn users off.
Here is the general rule of thumb for selecting the correct file format: images with solid colours are best saved as PNGs and GIFs, while images with continuous colours (such as photos) are best saved as JPGs.
There are a lot of tools available to help you further optimize your images and lower their file sizes, check out this list of tools to optimize your images.
By limiting the number of images you use to the bare minimum, being smart about using images, and reducing file sizes as best you can, you will significantly reduce the response times of your web page and improve the performance of your web page.
2. Keep it Clean and Simple
A good web design is not only one that looks visually attractive, but also one that is user-friendly. Clean and simple web design tends to end up being a high-usability web design that is not confusing to interact with.
By getting so many site features and components on a list, you run the risk of distracting website visitors from the function of the website. Make sure that each page item has a objective and ask yourself the following questions:
Does the design really need it?
What does this element do, and how is it going to help the user?
If I delete this item all of a sudden, do any of the citizens want it back?
How does this item connect to the target, the post, and the intent of the site?
Additionally, although it may be super awesome to come up with a new design concept or interface design pattern for your website, make sure the design is still accessible and intuitive to your users. Customers are accustomed to standard interaction styles, site elements, and web interfaces – even if the template is genuinely innovative, make sure it’s not too cryptic even confusing. Be imaginative, but keep it easy, too.
3. Navigation is the Most Important Thing You Will Design
The most important feature of the site is web browsing — without it, users are stuck on whatever page they happen to land on. With that obvious fact out of the way, we ‘re going to talk about some important points to consider when constructing a navigation scheme.
Second, it is really important to invest adequate time and a lot of thought into the navigation system of the web. This is common sense, but it’s still surprising how many web designs take browsing for granted.
Placement, style, technology (does it use JavaScript or just CSS?), usability, and web accessibility are just some of the things you need to consider when creating a navigation design.
Your browser design should work without a CSS because of text-based browsers. Poke the fun of text browsers all you want, but they’re still prevalent in many mobile devices. But more specifically, surfing that works for impaired CSS users is possible (99.99 percent of the time) via screen readers.
Navigation would be available and functional without the requirement for client-side software such as JavaScript or Flash, which consumers might not have allowed or configured for a number of purposes, such as protection or company policy.
It is important that you have a strong navigation system in place that is situated in a highly noticeable spot. Good navigation can be detected as soon as the web page loads without having to scroll down the web page. This is where keeping it clean and simple plays a key role: a complex and unconventional design can lead to confusion among users.
Users must never ask, except for a split second, “Where is the navigation on the site? For sites arranged in a hierarchical, multi-level way , make sure that it is simple to switch through parent and child web pages.
In addition, it should be easy to access top-level pages (such as the front page of the site) from any web page.
The key aim of your web navigation is to enable users to reach the information they want with as little acts and as little effort on their behalf as possible.
4. Use Fonts Wisely and Methodically
Although there are thousands of fonts out there, you can actually only use a handful of fonts (at least until CSS3 is fully supported by major browsers). Make it a point to stick to secure web fonts. If you don’t like browser-safe fonts, find a increasingly improved site interface that leverages SIFR or Cufon.
Keep the use of fonts consistent. Make sure that the headings are clearly distinct from the text of the article. Using white room, tweak line-height, font-size, and letter-spacing property to render it easy to read and easily search.
Perhaps one of the things that web designers often get wrong is font size. Since we want to accommodate as much text as we can on a web page, we often set font sizes to an inconvenient tiny scale. If possible, try to keep font sizes above 12px, especially for paragraph text. Although certain individuals have little trouble reading tiny text sizes, care of elderly users and those with poor vision and certain forms of visual loss.
5. Understand Colour Accessibility
After learning about fonts, we do need to stress the value of choosing the correct colours.
You need to consider background and foreground colour contrast for readability and low-view users. For e.g., black text on a white background has a strong contrast, whereas orange text on a red background makes your eyes strain.
Often, using colours that are available to those of different colour-blindness conditions (see the Vischeck method that can help you search for other colour-blindness types).
Some colour combinations only work well when the colour is used as a background colour instead of a background colour. Take , for example, dark blue text on a pink background and pink text on a blue background, the same colours with varying degrees of readability and readability. It is important not only to have a good colour combination, but also to apply it to the right elements on the page.
6. You Need to Know How to Write Code Yourself
With various WYSIWYG publishers flooding the market, the design of a site has become as simple as 1-2-3. However, most of these editors needlessly insert code junk, making your HTML structure poorly designed, more difficult to maintain and update, and causing your file sizes to bloat.
By writing your own code, you come out with a clean, crisp, tertiary code that’s a pleasure to read and maintain; a code that you can be proud to call your own.
Knowing how to use a WYSIWYG or a visual preview IDE is no excuse for learning HTML and CSS. You need to know what’s going on in order to construct efficient, functional and highly optimized web designs.
