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Say it with Colour
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Art, Design Inspiration, Web Design | No Comments
Colour plays a very important role in graphic design for all mediums. Whether you are designing for TV, print or for the web, your choice of colour can serve to enhance your overall message and can communicate on a more subtle level with your audience. Conversely, bad colour choices can actually contradict what you are trying to achieve and lessen the impact of your design.
As an example of how colour can work against you, think about the primary colours, red, yellow and blue. These colours are bright and vibrant, and when most people see them, they automatically think of children. The primary colours have often been used for toys, commercials aimed at children, and for children’s websites to make them feel more exciting and playful. Now imagine, if you will, that you are searching for an accountant online and you come across an accountant’s website that uses a colour scheme based on the primary colours. Is this likely to inspire your confidence? The chances are it would make you less likely to take them seriously.
A lot of research has been done into the psychology of colour, and the meanings of colours can vary depending on what country you are in. You can easily see this by looking at the websites of international companies. Lots of these companies have separate websites for each of the countries they operate in, and to a certain extent, their websites will have varying colour schemes to suit the country as well. Of course, for those corporate giants with worldwide branding, their logo and marketing materials will influence colour choice, but there should still be some subtle differences.
Some generally accepted meanings of colours here in the West include: Purple for luxury or royalty, Blue for trust and tranquillity, Green has come to signify ecological concerns as well as its traditional associations with nature, money and encouragement. Colours also tend to take on a slightly different meaning depending on the other colours around it You can use colour schemes that fit certain ideas, for example, such as a colour scheme of reds, yellows, oranges and browns for Autumn, or you could use orange and black for Halloween.
Another consideration when choosing your colour scheme is that of contrast. The eye will naturally move to the area of highest contrast whenever we look at something, and you can use this principal together with a good knowledge of colour theory to guide the viewer’s eye around your design anyway you choose.
Learning more about colour, the many meanings of colours, and how to choose an appropriate colour scheme based on the content and the target audience, is definitely time well spent. A good understanding of colour will show through in your work, adding that little extra something that makes your designs stand out from the rest.
Website Accessibility
Monday, September 1st, 2008 | Web Design, Web Development | No Comments
One of the most important considerations for every web design project is the target audience. Whilst in the past a lot of people were content simply to identify the main demographic such as “male teens” or “IT professionals” and to design accordingly, with technology such as screen readers becoming readily available for those with disabilities to get online much easier these days, it is important to take them into account as well. In fact, if you don’t take the needs of disabled users into account when building a website, you might find yourself getting in trouble for discrimination.
Web accessibility is about making your websites accessible to the largest possible audience, and this includes taking into account the many different devices the website may be accessed with, and the ways in which you can allow users to customise the content. For example, even just designing your website so that it can easily scale when the user increases the font size can make it much easier to use for those with a visual impairment.
There are many organisations and agencies attempting to standardise web accessibility to make it easier for the designers and developers to integrate accessibility into their sites. This is all happening alongside the standardisation of XHTML, CSS and the other web technologies, and you may find that you only need to make a few changes to bring your sites up to scratch. One great resource for accessibility information is the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). You can find a copy of their guidelines at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and a more specific list at Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 which sorts the guidelines according to priority. Priority 1, for example, are all those guidelines that a web designer or developer must adopt in order for their website to be considered accessible. Priority 2 includes all those guidelines that should be implemented and the final priority is for those that a designer may include.
Putting in the time and effort to make your websites more accessible should be one of your top priorities when building new sites. Not only will this broaden the websites potential audience, but it also shows that you are a considerate designer and that you care about the people who view your work.