I've also found great success tending towards minimalist. The advantage is that you're mistakes will be of the variety "this could have been a little more impactful" and not "Dear God why would anyone do a 3d rainbow extrude with 17 different grunge fonts on a space background???".
In short, you embarass yourself less. You already know how to make a 'good enough' simple design. You might prefer to make a glorious, exciting complex one, but odds are you don't know how. Which makes sense, because this is hard to pull off. If you stay simple, you get 'good enough'. Try to get complex and fail, you get visual torture. If you'd like to make more interesting designs, learn the techniques little by little, but make your finished products no more complex than you can be confident in.
Regarding gradients: when you do use them, be subtle. A gentle shift from one color of red to a slightly deeper one can be nice and help draw attention. A shift from red to a green will make babies cry. As a general rule of thumb, colors should only gradient towards different shades of themselves or towards black or white. Seems obvious, I know, but...
You make a good point r.e. gradients. Honestly, though, even the most subtle gradients can go very wrong - I'm usually referring to background or header gradients where it justs wrecks the emphasis of the page or clouds text etc. Speaking for myself I prefer highlighting as a more unobtrusive way to add the "extra touch"
Also I think it is about personal taste; my designs tend towards the same minimalist, centered, coloured menu bar, links in a certain way etc. design because I vastly prefer sites like that :)
(also the beauty of minimalism is that you can "impact" buttons and so forth really easily if you have a good colour scheme - Startup Wiki is an example of where I got this pretty wrong...... :))
In design for the real world, absolutely avoid gradients. But in design for the screen, subtle gradients can help add a nice shade of realism or texture.
For example: Holiday Inn Express just redesigned their logo to look like some Web-2.0-style icon thing with gradients and drop shadows. They look absolutely horrible on signage. They look like gas station signs now.
Sorry, forgot to put in my last post. Check out my blog at http://www.impactsignbc.com/ . I try and put out useful tips and ideas for different types of signage. Hope you find it useful
In addition to this list, you absolutely need feedback from someone who's honest. I know some designers (and live with one), and they always want opinions on their latest work.
In the limited design work I've done, I've found it extremely helpful to look at the subject's face when they see your design. You want to see their gut reaction: you'll see displeasure in their eyes long before they'll verbalize it. You can break the social tension around criticism by saying, "Oh, I see there's something you don't like. Where are you looking right now?"
You want feedback to be a conversation - if your subject knows what you intended, they can give you hints on what you actually wanted to design.
I'm a bug fan of Adobe's Kuler for palettes. It gives several different methods of relatedness for your colors, and is really easy to tweak: http://kuler.adobe.com/
The interface is glitzy/flashy, but the “methods of relatedness” provided are unfortunately pretty much arbitrary (with respect to human color perception). Alas. If one does the trick, go for it, but don’t feel bad if one looks awful: it’s not you, it’s the site’s model.
Comments
I'm pretty bad at design but what I have found has sufficed for me in the past [1][2] is:
- bold colourful blocks
- tend towards minimalist
- use no more than 3 colours in a design
- use colourlovers.com for palettes
- copy nice bits/ideas off other people (obviously without ripping off entire designs)
- avoid gradients
EDIT: oh, one other thought. One or two fancy bits of design or JS magic == good. Too many == very bad :)
1. http://www.errant.me.uk (minamilist) 2. http://www.startupwiki.co.uk (bold colours, blocks)
I've also found great success tending towards minimalist. The advantage is that you're mistakes will be of the variety "this could have been a little more impactful" and not "Dear God why would anyone do a 3d rainbow extrude with 17 different grunge fonts on a space background???".
In short, you embarass yourself less. You already know how to make a 'good enough' simple design. You might prefer to make a glorious, exciting complex one, but odds are you don't know how. Which makes sense, because this is hard to pull off. If you stay simple, you get 'good enough'. Try to get complex and fail, you get visual torture. If you'd like to make more interesting designs, learn the techniques little by little, but make your finished products no more complex than you can be confident in.
Regarding gradients: when you do use them, be subtle. A gentle shift from one color of red to a slightly deeper one can be nice and help draw attention. A shift from red to a green will make babies cry. As a general rule of thumb, colors should only gradient towards different shades of themselves or towards black or white. Seems obvious, I know, but...
> A shift from red to a green will make babies cry.
Yes. I want to share a design an unqualified team member once seriously proposed: http://img.skitch.com/20100630-m473a35wsrcwsis547mmxjetcq.pn...
You make a good point r.e. gradients. Honestly, though, even the most subtle gradients can go very wrong - I'm usually referring to background or header gradients where it justs wrecks the emphasis of the page or clouds text etc. Speaking for myself I prefer highlighting as a more unobtrusive way to add the "extra touch"
Also I think it is about personal taste; my designs tend towards the same minimalist, centered, coloured menu bar, links in a certain way etc. design because I vastly prefer sites like that :)
(also the beauty of minimalism is that you can "impact" buttons and so forth really easily if you have a good colour scheme - Startup Wiki is an example of where I got this pretty wrong...... :))
In design for the real world, absolutely avoid gradients. But in design for the screen, subtle gradients can help add a nice shade of realism or texture.
For example: Holiday Inn Express just redesigned their logo to look like some Web-2.0-style icon thing with gradients and drop shadows. They look absolutely horrible on signage. They look like gas station signs now.
Yes; I wouldn't disagree... in general.
But as a "pretty bad designer" gradients tend to be territory that is destined to fail. :)
Sorry, forgot to put in my last post. Check out my blog at http://www.impactsignbc.com/ . I try and put out useful tips and ideas for different types of signage. Hope you find it useful
Unfortunately, not all designers plan their designs to incorporate signage. I own a sign company in Canada and we have this issue all the time.
In addition to this list, you absolutely need feedback from someone who's honest. I know some designers (and live with one), and they always want opinions on their latest work.
In the limited design work I've done, I've found it extremely helpful to look at the subject's face when they see your design. You want to see their gut reaction: you'll see displeasure in their eyes long before they'll verbalize it. You can break the social tension around criticism by saying, "Oh, I see there's something you don't like. Where are you looking right now?"
You want feedback to be a conversation - if your subject knows what you intended, they can give you hints on what you actually wanted to design.
I'm a bug fan of Adobe's Kuler for palettes. It gives several different methods of relatedness for your colors, and is really easy to tweak: http://kuler.adobe.com/
The interface is glitzy/flashy, but the “methods of relatedness” provided are unfortunately pretty much arbitrary (with respect to human color perception). Alas. If one does the trick, go for it, but don’t feel bad if one looks awful: it’s not you, it’s the site’s model.
Of course it has to be a flash application. facepalm
Can they make the buttons any smaller or the scrolling any more touchy?
Forgive me if I am making a baseless accusation, but is your sketch art copied from XKCD?
It is; actually there should be an attribution somewhere on there - thanks for the catch (not sure where it went)