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Do You Want Fries With That Logo?

From low-budgets to rush jobs to piss-poor project management, every designer has one time or another faced the inevitable, "I need a logo (brochure, website, etc.) done ASAP" scenario. Depending on the designers' work situation, some can simply choose to decline these projects. But for many full-time designers, this “rushing creative” is a very real and necessary part of their job requirement.

So when asked to “just slap a design together” or “crank it out,” how do we as designers maintain our standards and integrity when a logo must be created in three hours? Or a website in a day? And for that matter, can we? In this article, Stephanie Orma, a graphic design herself, hangs her head out the drive-through window and shares her personal experience, tips, and advice on how to handle the “hurry-up and be creative” demands of the graphic design industry.

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10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS

Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?

I have written about content management systems before. I have highlighted the their hidden costs, explained the differentiators behind the feature list and even provided advice for CMS users. However, I have never actually asked what features you should look for in a content management system. And that is what I will address here.

When I left home for university my mother taught me a valuable lesson. If you want to save money, never go grocery shopping when you are hungry, and always write a list. If you don’t, you'll be tempted to buy things you don't need.

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Online Advertising And Its Impact On Web Design

In recent years, advertising has become a major revenue source for many websites. Not too long ago, online ads were often met with disapproval from visitors, and advertisers were unsure about their value or effectiveness. Today, most visitors have come to expect ads on commercial websites, and advertisers have recognized the potential of various online ad opportunities. Ads have long been a part of print publications, such as magazines and newspapers, and now they essentially have the same role in online periodicals and publications.

Although advertising is a concern for website owners and those pushing products or services, it is also has an impact on Web designers, because they have to be able to design and develop websites that can produce ad revenue and still meet the needs of visitors. Clients with websites that depend on ad revenue need a design that provides the necessary screen space and a proper layout for selling ads, and advertisers need placement that will get them the exposure they seek.

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How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business

Many e-commerce sites these days tend to be loaded down with too much information on their landing pages. The reasoning for cluttered e-commerce sites is simple: the more information you can cram on the page, the more the user will buy. Unfortunately, web buyers are a finicky bunch.

Jacob Nielson reports that web users are becoming much more impatient while shopping and browsing online. Instead of spending their time going to a site’s homepage and finding the content by categories or other product recommendations, most shopping is done by quick Google searches. If the user can’t find what she’s looking for right away, she’s gone.

It’s crucial to have simple web designs to allow the user to quickly find the information they need, especially if you are selling a product. If the page is cluttered with useless text, widgets or unrelated products, the site becomes meaningless.

However, it’s become a common practice to do just the opposite. e-commerce sites have taken this “scatter shot” approach of trying to slap the potential buyer with as many options as possible. Instead of making the landing page solely about one product, sites usually clutter the page with unnecessary information, ads and related products.

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Screencasting: How To Start, Tools and Guidelines

Some companies have made a living creating a sort of “virtual classroom,” allowing members to learn at their own pace when they have the time using video tutorials. The advantages of the classroom setting stem from a one on one experience and the ability of the instructor to show the ideas and theories rather than simply explain them.

Screencasting, or sharing your virtual desktop via video presentation, has exploded in popularity with the advent of podcasting, and gives you the ability to bring the classroom feel to a media presentation that can be delivered over the Internet. The medium of screencasting is readily available to everyone and with a few tools of the trade you can be ready to produce your own.

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Who Do You Design For: Clients or Users?

If you close your eyes and think back to the first design fundamentals class you ever took hopefully you remember the instructor saying,"When beginning a design ask yourself who is your audience? If you don't know who you are designing for then how can you design anything at all?"

Fast forward to the present. Now you are a freelance designer, you have met with the client, discussed what they want and agreed to do the job. Suddenly the client sends you a sketch of a horrible monstrosity of a design so unholy your eyes begin to burn. The client attached instructions that do not resemble the previous discussions and break every rule you can imagine.

Now ask yourself, "Who are you designing for?" By definition, your job is to communicate a message via images and text. But, as a businessperson your goal must be to meet the requests of the client. If you go against the client’s explicit requests and produce a user-centric design, oddly enough you’ll have an unhappy client. Now the flip side of the coin. If you cooperate, lay down your sword, turn off the grids and produce what the client has demanded, the design will fail and in turn you will fail. The bad design will always come back like Rocky and smash you right in the face.

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Top 10 Killer Photoshop Combo Moves

Is time kickin' your ass? Well, learn to defend yourself! Master these killer Photoshop keyboard combos and you'll find yourself with more time for the important things (e.g. Facebook trivia questions). These combos assume you're using Photoshop CS3 on Windows platform with default keyboard shortcuts.

10. Cloak of Invisibility
Remove everything from the screen except for your file.

• F, F, F | Cycle through Screen Modes
• Tab | Remove Tools and Palettes
• Ctrl+H | Hide Extras (Grid, Guides, Slices, etc.)
• Ctrl+R | Hide Rulers

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How To Stop Being A Lazy Designer

From working with wide range of projects, I have learned one thing: designers are lazy (sometimes myself included). Most often it comes from our desire to get a quick signoff and move on with the next project. While several posts could have been written on this, I offer here a few suggestions guaranteed to make things at least a little bit easier in the end:

• Name your layers and folders.
  What the heck do "Layer 234" and "Block Right Copy 23" mean? Have you ever tried to work with someone else's files and find that one layer within several hundreds of them?
• Make sure you cover most case scenarios.
  Nothing can be worse for integration developers to guess how something needs to look or interact. Design for the worst case scenario first and only then look at the best case scenario — you are always good at that!

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A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs

We are quite curious; particularly when it comes to design and web-development we want to know just everything. Therefore, following our web form design survey, we have decided to take a closer look at blog designs, analyze them and find out which design solutions are common and which solutions are not used at all.

Since we wanted to make the survey as objective as possible, we used Technorati Top Blogs and analyzed 50 most popular blogs which appear there. It doesn't really matter if the Technorati list is correct or not — we wanted to find out what design solutions big players (aka most popular blogs) prefer. Popular blogs are often considered to be examples of effective and functional design (which is not necessarily the case).

We have identified 30 design problems and considered solutions for each of the problems separately. We have posed 30 questions which we would like to answer with our blog survey. Below we present findings of our survey of popular blog designs — the results of an analysis of 50 popular blogs according to Technorati's Top 100.

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Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs

Effective web design doesn't have to be pretty and colorful — it has to be clear and intuitive; in fact, we have analyzed the principles of effective design in our previous posts. However, how can you achieve a clear and intuitive design solution? Well, there are a number of options — for instance, you can use grids, you can prefer the simplest solutions or you can focus on usability. However, in each of these cases you need to make sure your visitors have some natural sense of order, harmony, balance and comfort. And this is exactly where the so-called Divine proportion becomes important.

This article explains what is the Divine proportion and what is the Rule of Thirds and describes how you can apply both of them effectively to your designs. Of course, there are many possibilities. Hopefully, this post will help you to find your way to more effective and beautiful web designs or at least provide some good starting points you can build upon or develop further.

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