Graphic Design

I make a lot of websites, most of them I think look OK, they could all be better. I've no training in web design, didn't do art past junior school (and *sucked* at it), but you learn a few things from trial and error, and the usual experiences of life. One of the things I've learned is that it's best to avoid using complimentary colors, say blue and yellow, except for very loud logos and advertisements. I've also learnt not to use serifs on very small text, and that the Google logo is a masterful bit of advertising because by having so many colors it fights with almost any conceivable page you might put it on, thus drawing attention to itself. So I pay attention, but I still dont know very much about graphic design. High time I did some reading on the subject. Google up one set of results for 'graphic design principles':

First result: Huh. Links turn yellow. Yellow on blue. Less than wonderful looking font. Oddly disconnected centered title. Reminds me of geocities in the 1990s. Ugly pixelly graphics. At best, this is likely to be a bunch of reading that teaches me to make sites that look like this. Moving along....

Second result: And it's about.com, a library of articles around all manner of subjects. Looks OK too. Bookmarked for later.

Third result: Blue on orange this time, but it's only one link. Looks better than the first result, but no real information here. Oh well.

Fourth result: It's a company, selling web design services. The eye is drawn to a pull quote in the middle of the page... 'Rob Frankel, the number one guru for branding says, ''Doing it yourself works for suicide.'' '. Yeah. Tasteful. Worse, I think its meant to be a joke. These people sure know how to design a page that embodies the expert, professional nature of their service. And they use Microsoft FrontPage, so they must be pros. Next.

Fifth result: Wow that's bad! Red on blue this time. And I quote: '1. Skim over the basic elements of the 'CRAP Principles' in Williams and then reread my ''Summarizing the CRAP Principles'' below.' If I made that up, people wouldn't believe me. This is the fifth result on Google? Though I didn't read further, its clear they've used all their crap principles on this one. Red bevelled buttons, text all bold and underlined, more red buttons that don't match the others. Enough of this now.

If these are the experts, I don't need to know. I'm beginning to suspect the upper echelons of the design community are like the upper echelons of the art community, a bunch of windy overblown monkeys spouting on about paradigms and such in a way that means nothing to anyone except themselves. Thinking... if you were an expert that was going to teach the world graphic design from a website, wouldn't you make it a good looking website, so people might belive that you understood how its done? At the very least? There are millions of beautifully made sites on the web, template shops (like this and this) are a good place to find a lot of them together and compare. I'm going to go study those instead.

meh.

Created 2006-07-27 22:16:28 by 255 and filed under introspection

Comments

Kristy writes...

I think its like anything, once you turn it into theory, it stops working. If I was to design a web page, I would ask 2 things: 1)Does the average person think it looks good? and 2)Does the average person think its easy to use?

Job done.

posted: 2006-07-28 13:16:55