How to do website Design

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Seven basic principles that make a web design look good

What makes a web design look good? Maintain your design in balance. Divide your design with the help of rasters. Choose a maximum of two or three basic colours for your design. Make sure the images fit together well. Enhance the typeface of your website. Highlight items by attaching blank areas around them.

Let's connect all the items. Everybody and his grandpa (and dog) seems to have a website nowadays. While the web gets more congested every single passing week, tens of web sites are added while you are reading this one. "Luckily " for us designer, not everyone seems to comprehend what constitutes or destroys a web design.

Admittedly, web design is to a large degree a generative proces and can therefore be described as more of an arts than a sciences. Following a few easy instructions, everyone should be able to design a look that is appealing to the eye and come a little bit nearer to glory. To say nothing of the fact that Flash has no value, but Flash alone doesn't make a design good; some evil Flash sites are out there.

And you don't have to be a big illustrator to create great looks. Instead, consider web design as a combination of different items. It is not a question of a particular individual item that matters most, but the total number of items makes a design look good. Maintain your design in balance. The balance is about making sure your design doesn't tilt to one side or the other.

Take a look at the dogs in the title artwork of Khoi Vinh's subtraction website below. I' ve taken this example from The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. Failure to pay attention to how you arrange things will quickly upset the design. There are many ways you can influence the appearance of a design, including colour, sizing, and adding or removing items.

Though the head graphics are symmetrically symmetric even (can you see how it is done?), the remainder of the design has bottom symmetric gaps at the bottom. An asymmetric equilibrium may be more difficult to achieve, but it tends to make a design more fun. You' ll find that any design you think is good is based on a well designed sense of equilibrium.

Each design presented here will score with each of the seven principals we are discussing. Divide your design using rasters. Lattices are intrinsically linked to equilibrium. Raster are a set of horizontally and vertically positioned bars that help you "divide" a design. Thirds and the golden ratio explain why, for example, side bars usually make up about one third of the page width and why the principal contents area is about the same as the width of the design split by 1.62 (corresponds to 1.62 in mathematics).

This louvre is particularly suitable for minimalistic design. The design itself is not optically impressing, but the clear, rigorous structure of the components is gentle on the eyes. For example, the right side bar is about twice as large as the right side bar, which makes perfect sense and is a reason to think when you' re making your own design.

Choose a maximum of two or three basic colours for your design. How about changing the basis colour on The First Twenty website (above) to limette gree? This is because it does not form part of the same colour range (and of course limette is not the simplest colour to work with).

There is a specific purpose to sites like ColorLovers. Can' you just choose your Rambo-style colours, your weapons are on fire? While some colours go well together, others don't. There are many philosophies about colours and their combination, as well as convention about colour and contrast patterns, but much comes back to good judgement and feeling.

Include as many website themes as possible as they can be found on one of the many display case sites (e.g. Best Web Gallery) to get a sense of how colours interacted with each other. Choose a maximum of two or three basic colours for your design and then use tones (which are brighter, blended with white) and hues (which are brighter, blended with black) of these basic colours to extend the range as needed.

Choosing beautiful colours is just as important as choosing the right colours (i.e. the right colours for the job). Webdesign for a cosy little eatery would go well with "earthy" tones: red, brown, etc. Each colour emits a certain sound and it's up to you to get the right sound across.

The website of Bence Kucsan has its own colouring. It is mainly in monochrome (tints and hues of a unique color) and in achromatic (black and white) with a different colour (red) to distinguish it: Blacks and whites convey elegance and professionalism, while reds add the flavour that highlights certain features and makes the design not boring; of course, more than just reds make this design interesting.

Talking about colour, WebDesigner Wall by Nick La is just happiness: 4. Try to make the graphic fit together well. Okay, great design doesn't need extravagant artwork. However, bad graphic design will definitely damage a design. Diagrams complement the pictorial messages. Web sites like WebDesigner Wall have stunning artwork, while others are subtle.

On his website Max Voltar, Tim van Damme uses only a few diagrams, which he realises with great caution. An unobtrusive wallpaper and a refined wreath are two of the prints. Not too eye-catching, but they all contribute to the look and feel of the site, and nowhere is one out of place.

Max Voltar has had a different design than the one shown above for some while now. For this reason, and because the use of images is so good, I preferred them to the latest one. They may not be great illustrators or photographers, but that doesn't mean they can't place great artwork on your website.

Make sure the artwork matches well and that it embodies the styling you're looking for. Enhance the look and feel of your website. Writing is a difficult topic to discuss because it contains so many different kinds of element. Whilst it can be seen as a design discipline, one can live one's whole life to master all its facets.

Of course, dynamical rendered has its strengths, but web design professionals have little influence on the results. Here are a few fairly simple ways to significantly enhance the typeface of your website, three of which we will discuss here. That means, of course, that the design won't look the same for everyone, so once again we loose it.

While Arial is available on almost every computer (at least Windows and Mac machines) and is therefore a favorite web option, most designer choose Helvetica over Arial. Gives the design an additional piece of flair and does not hurt anyone who does not have it. The majority of a designer uses a quote wallpaper and then aligns it as Matthew Buchanan did:

It' s not possible to have full oversight over how your web design will look to everyone. Highlight items by attaching blank areas around them. Whitewashed room, or negativ room, has to do with what's not there. Just like measuring and guiding, the whitespace gives the text some leeway and room for harmony.

Emphasize items by placing blank areas around them. Fragrance advertisements - or any other ad for a luxurious item - are known for their use of whitespace...lots of them; and a serial font as an encore. Above screenshots are from my own website Shift (px).

Design is strongly based on type and whitespace. The void probably occupies about 50% of the page. Whitespace is one of the simplest (because you don't really add anything, do you?) and most efficient ways to make a visual appealing and legible design. Spaces add much quality to a design.

Unexperienced designer are tried to put something into every little nook. When it comes to design, it's about conveying a certain kind of conveyance. Therefore, design features should reinforce this embassy and not introduce hiss. This is another good example of a lot of whitespace: Meyers Astheria shows that not much is needed for an attractive design.

" However, it's neither straightforward nor light -hearted to create such a look (even if you don't necessarily have to be good with graphs or illustrations). Let's connect all the items. Here, the term connectivity is used to refer to a web design that has both uniformity and consistence. Both of these characteristics show the professionalism of a design (and thus of its designer).

The design should be coherent with the use of colours, the choice of typefaces, the symbols, etc. These are all important factors; a design can look great and still endure mismatches. If a design is discontinuous, its uniformity may be compromised for the end-consumer. Unitity relates to how the different components in a design interoperate and match.

Do colour and graphic, for example, agree? Consistency, on the other side, can be found between the pages of a design. The link has to do with how all items come together: equilibrium, raster, colors, graphs, types and whitespace. The design will fall apart without this adhesive. One could have a handsome guy and a brilliantly and painstakingly selected colour range, but if the artwork is horrible or just doesn't fit, or if everything is cramped without thinking, the design will miscarry.

It is the most difficult part of the design. However, it is what it is and it makes a design look good in the end. In the past we used to praise Nick La's WebDesigner Wall for his beautiful graphic, but it is also a good example of connectivity. If you look carefully at the graphic and the overall look, everything has a hand-drawn watercolour look: the pictures of the items, the watercoloured wallpapers, the hand-drawn scribbles and symbols, the survey design, and so on.

This design is characterised by a love of detail. For beginners, a guideline to the nets. A good web design is not restricted to the seven basic principals described here. That' s why web design is so hard. It' simple to get your design down, especially today where so many CMS, blogs utilities and topics are readily available.

However, mastery of all aspects of web design requires patience and, let's be frank, skill. Being able to create beautiful design is only one aspect, but an important one.