Graphic Design

Graphic Design has become so so so important in this new Web 2.0 era that we are now in. It’s not just the ease of use of everything, but the online user these days is starting to expect everything to look good too. This is getting very hard with Firefox and IE being so different and having to code very tightly to the W3C standards.

A websites design is not just about pretty pictures and colours, its about alignment, effective use of white space, and making sure your getting the message across on your site by visual subliminal clues (Yes I do have marketing degree wink wink). A great graphic designer can throw together a great mockup in Photoshop pretty fast, but early on the design should be a testing cycle. Get peoples feedback on the look and feel, make sure you are more than excited about the colors, and then proceed with purchasing the right stock (photographs) for your site etc.

One exciting thing about today’s online environment is that there are a lot of great resources for the people who cannot immediately afford a graphic designer. Wordpress for example has thousands of free templates just like the one you see here (that I modified). Looks pretty good right? Depending on how much customization you want done or how big your business is, you may want to hire a graphic designer, or take the route of getting your hands on a great template and giving it a go yourself. There are pretty good templates for sale online as well.

Also depending on how serious you are about spicing up and customizing your site you will have to either purchase a program like Adobe Photoshop or use the free alternative Gimp. Photoshop extended will take about $1,000 out of your pocket and you will run into some steep learning curves if you have not worked with a photo editing program before. It most likely is the most powerful image editor in the world at the moment. It has recently incorporated editing 3D objects as well. For the penny pincher Gimp is a great alternative. Every version is getting better and better and does a lot of similar things as Photoshop. I recommend downloading it and giving it a try. If it meets your needs then you are good to go.

If you are looking to get some work done externally you must make sure to get the original PSD, AI, or EPS file from the designer. You may not be familiar with these extensions but they are extensions from Photoshop and Illustrator (two professional programs). The reason for this is, if you ever want your image modified down the road you can get any professional designer to edit it instead of being limited to the one you used the first time around. There are some amazing designers out there, just make sure you have someone reliable.

I will leave you with a very important tip. Make sure that your logo and all graphics that you want to blow up or put on signs, vehicles, whatever, are in VECTOR format. If you receive an .EPS file that means you have a vector file. Be very clear to any designer you work with that you want your logo especially in vector format as well as web format. You can get yourself in a pretty bad situation if you do not take care of this from the get go. Some print companies will charge you thousands of dollars when it comes down to crunch time and you do not have your logo or graphic in vector format. (which is usually what most print and sign specialists need).

My company, Memorywalk, customizes web graphics and creates company logos for amazing prices. You can see some of our work here.

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