Architecting Great Websites, Graphic Design

Contents

After you have laid out your site and decided how the information is structured, where the navigation will go, and generally the layout of content on the page (all under the User Interface), it’s now time to paint the website’s canvas with the graphic design.

But what makes great graphic design? Eyecatching? Minimalist? Impactful? Pastels? Unobtrusive?

The truth is there is no magic bullet for great graphic design in the sense of the web. Being an art form, it’s impossible to wrap it up in scientific principle. However, whatever the design, it needs to be on-brand and reflect the personality of the company it represents and be effective and not distract the visitor from doing what they need to do.

When approaching a new design project, it’s important to look at other sites in the same market; if you design something so original that it’s not what people are going to expect when they visit your site next in the list of 350,000 they just got back from a search engine then they may dismiss your site as not as relevant to their search as they other 349,999 sites. That said, you must not also copy other sites designs; apart from copyright issues, it’s unoriginal and has the opposite effect of not differentiating your site from the crowd. Therefore, originality plays an essential part, but within the context of the market you are designing for.

There are other factors in the client’s brief which may affect the design choice and approach, the use of technologies such as Flash, and these need to be understood before embarking on the design work itself.

Once the context of the design is understood, it should be relatively straightforward for a good designer to create a good-looking and effective design for the website. Remember that if the designer is not asking about the context or plans to look at competitor sites, your design process could take a lot longer than you first expect.

In the next episode we’ll look at Application Development (aka the Site Engine).