Working with Visual Weight in Your Designs. In design, visual weight is the notion that design elements have varied weights; that is, some objects, even on a two-dimensional medium, can appear to be heavier than others. Visual weight is a powerful concept that allows us to create visual hierarchy, symmetry, balance, and harmony in designs. When applied strategically, the concept of visual weight can help us guide the viewer’s attention to the places we want in a design. This article covers the concept of visual weight and the factors that affect it. What Is Visual Weight? Visual weight revolves around the idea that distinct elements in a design have varying heaviness relative to each other.
The main visual weight factors we will discuss are: ColorContrastLightness/darknessSizeDensityComplexity Visual weight is heavily tied to symmetry. To draw attention to certain objects (or to deemphasize others) we’ll want to purposely throw off the balance and create a visual hierarchy so that the focus shifts in the areas we intend. Color Size. 9 Information Design Tips to Make You a Better Web Designer. The 3 Components of Good Web Design. Good design isn't just about good looks, and nowhere is this truer than in web design. In fact it makes sense to think of web design as being made up of three major non-technical components: aesthetic design, information design and interface design.
If you want to be a great web designer it's essential that you have a firm grasp of all three. Aesthetic Design Aesthetic design is all about getting the look right. If you are good at this it means you will be able to design sites that not only look good but are appropriately designed. Different designs convey different messages to an end user, so it's essential that a design matches the site's message. The other day I was walking through a supermarket and saw a juice brand that had the visual design of a laundry detergent. Out of the three components of web design, aesthetic design is surely the one that people most identify as being design. Information Design Collis' Awesome Diagram Interface Design What about ... What's your take?
8 Ideas, Techniques & Tricks for your Web Design Toolkit. As important as information and interface design are, it's the satisfied feeling of designing something that just plain looks awesome that keeps us going during those times when the creative well is dry, when you've stared at a blank canvas for hours, when you've saved a hundred attempt.psd's, and when you're fed up of design. It's because you know that when you have that finished, polished, veritable work of art up on your screen, and you've switched Photoshop into full screen mode and you're looking at it from different angles around the room, and you're basking in the glory of your perfectly positioned pixels, you just know that this is the greatest profession in the world!
1 - Don't be Satisfied with 1 Iteration When designing a website for a client you often have to provide a couple of different design concepts. When you feel like you've gotten it right the first time, it's pretty annoying to have to dredge up another version which you're pretty sure won't make it out of Photoshop. 6 Interface Design Principles and Tips Every Web Designer Should Know. Good interface design is like the air we breathe - it's there when you need it and you use it without thinking. If you've ever used a bad interface design, struggled to get around a site, clicked away because you couldn't figure out what was going on, not been able to complete a task you had in mind, or just been plain confused, you'll know the perils of going wrong in this area.
Websites are not pretty pictures, they are there to be used and consumed, so it's pretty important that as web designers we spend a good portion of time thinking about usability. In this article we'll consider some of the big usability issues and my tips for being a better interface designer. 1 - Analysing Audiences When laying out Psdtuts+ we take into consideration the different ways people will be using the site In any website there are at least three distinct parties involved - the client or owner of the site, the users of the site and the designer or builder of the site. Audience Classes And that's it!
Opacity, RGBA and compromise. The header of my own blog (still in development; please don’t judge me!) Features a single image which spans two columns, with a semi-opaque panel featuring text over the top of it. I wanted the image to be clearly visible in the left column, and faintly visible in the central column.
I could have done this by designing it that way in a graphics package, but as I intend to swap the image around in future, I wanted to come up with a client-side solution. I could have just used a semi-opaque background image, which would have worked immediately with all major browsers bar IE6. But I didn’t want to use an extra image and I wanted to play around with CSS 3, so this is what I came up with: Firstly, I put the image as a background property on the <body> element.
The problem with opacity is that it is inherited by all child elements, so if I had put text inside div.header, the text would also have become semi-opaque. Equal Height Columns using CSS - Ed Eliot. Creating equal height columns with tables is easy. Of course we shouldn't use tables for layout. With CSS it's a little harder. If, for example, you create a three column layout by floating 3 DIVs within an overall container the result will probably look something like the following: View Example All's well and good except those pesky columns aren't the same height.
"Faux Columns" The most commonly described method, "Faux Columns", works by applying a background image to an overall container. View Example JavaScript Solutions Other solutions use JavaScript to adjust the height of the columns. Another Way The third and final way which this post investigates uses pure CSS and doesn't require any background images, at least initially. Taking the original example shown, we add a large bottom padding value to force the background of the shorter columns beyond the height of the longest column of content.
View Example View Example But what if we want to add borders to the columns? View Example Notes: Facebook no longer providing status update feeds?