Most web designers start out creating a photoshop document with the size intended to fit universally with all screen dimensions. However, print designers, literally design on a whole other scale. Photoshop is a program that shares compatibility useful for both the Web and Print documents. The two are unique forms of design that cross paths every now and then, but definitely have their distinguished members of the family.  Below I am going to illustrate the main attributes of both and point out their differences.

Audience

The experience of your audience becomes important when creating a project for both Web and Print design. In print design, the attention of your audience is important, such as getting the audience to sit on a page of a magazine long enough to get the main concept and message across. The main limitation of this particular area is quantity. It is expensive to put an Ad in a magazine, therefore your company only has the budget for a one page ad. In this ad, you have to design it using textures, shapes and imagery to sell your product and/or services.

In web design, you really have no limitations as far as quantity. Your website can consist of as much interactivity and links as you would like (within reason). Your main challenge is to get the user to stay on your website. What keeps them interested? What drives them away? For example, as far as a standard sky scraper ad on a website page, you have the ability to have that ad link to another site and so on and so forth.

Layout

The experience of your audience becomes important when creating a project for both Web and Print design. In Print Design, the attention of your audience is important, such as getting the audience to sit on a page of a magazine long enough to get the main concept and message across. The main limitation of this particular area is quantity. It is expensive to put an Ad in a magazine, therefore your company only has the budget for a one page ad. In this ad, you have to design it using textures, shapes and imagery to sell your product and/or services.

As far as layout in Web Design, you are working in pixels instead of inches. More than likely, your design is multiple pages, designing a website for instance. In this circumstance, you need to keep consistency throughout. Another challenge in web design, is to design your site to look the best on all monitors and monitor resolutions. This is where color partakes in the difference between print and web.

Color

It’s important to know the difference between colors in Web and Print design. You are viewing colors either on paper or on a monitor. You have a choice between RGB (Red Green Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). In Print Design, You need to use CMYK for print design in order for the colors to match better with your chosen printer. These are colors you choose from a palette and identify with a code that you provide to your printer.

In Web Design, you need to use RGB, which gives you the colors that will show up best on a monitor. Consider the difference from monitor to monitor (brightness vs. contrast). Colors are represented by “hexadecimal values”, which are in a 6-digit format. Followed by Color, you get quality, and that is what I’m going to hit on next.

Quality

There is a difference between printer quality and web quality. For instance, with Print Design, you want the best given quality for print. Pixels are highly important in this case. For a high quality print, you are going to want to set your image at 300 dpi (digital pixels per inch). This will make your illustration, photograph and/or graphic look at it’s tip top best.

For Web Design, putting documents at 300 dpi is completely unnecessary. If you begin to design a website in such a large formatted document, you better have the patience for it to load on the web! No websites are designed (or should be designed) in 300 dpi. In fact, the resolution used to design anything for the web is 72dpi, whether it be as little as a tiny button, to as big as a half page web ad. There you have it–some insight on the difference between web and print.

Now, here is a fun video I found in vimeo — pretty sweet!

Digital Art Triptych: Web Design from Tyler Joynt on Vimeo.

Have you ever went a day without electricity? I bet not. Try it. Should be interesting. Well, iPhone dependence is becoming more and more common every day. There are so many applications out there that appear to be so helpful, it’s hard to think what you would do without it.

The iPhone can now be used as your very own GPS. GPS systems started out at $900 a piece when they first came out. Now they are going down in price. Who needs a GPS, when you can download an app. to get around on your iPhone for as low as $0.99! The iPhone is now being looked at as the All-In-One, helpful tool. Heck you can even use the thing as a level to put up a picture on the wall!  Yeah, you have the internet to get you to Map Quest from your phone but that takes five-thousand extra steps, so why not get something customized for your phone and your patience.

Again, another new piece of technology, which started out being an auxiliary, is now a necessity for people who are highly adaptive to convenience.

CHECK IT OUT:

5 Navigational iPhone Apps for your curiosity and convenience

iWant is essentially the combination of 3 location based apps:

Restaurant reviews (Yelp, UrbanSpoon), Movie showtimes

(Flixter, Fandango) and Yellow Pages.

G-Park is an Easy-to-use interface for taking a photo of your

parking spot or entering additional notes (if desired), such as

the section or the floor/level you parked on.

Zhiing is a location based messaging utility for sending,

receiving, replying to and forwarding messages with

maps relative to where you’re at now.

Where To? makes it incredibly easy to locate the closest

steakhouse, bank branch, billiard club or anything else

you may be looking for, at the drop of a hat!

With one touch, ETA shows accurate drive-times

from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.

One more click and it tells you the optimal route to take.

I bet you never met someone so in love with typography? Well, I will try and make this short and sweet and show you lots of examples but bare with me !

Not sure what “typography” means? Well, it’s basically a fancier word for  visually communicating through the design of fonts. Check out  http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/basic/g/typography.htm
First off, from a credited, experienced designer, there is no great design without a great font pairing. If you are one to be attached to Comic Sans then we have a disagreement. I mean come on, that’s SO nineties! It is also a design NO-NO! Another typeface that is over used (especially in most spas these days) is Papyrus. Helvetica is a GOOD example of over-used type as well, but in an exceptional way. Helvetica is beautiful and contemporary, with it’s round curves and delicate appearance–that is why people feel comfortable with it and that is why society accepts it for who it really is, deep down inside.

There is a lot of terminology in typography. One word in particular that people don’t take advantage enough is, tracking. Tracking is the spacing between the letters in a single word. If you’re not sure where to find open tracking or what it is, take a closer look:

Here is a good example of how open tracking is used (this is a logo identity we did for Green LLP, an attorney in Corona Del Mar):

Pay attention to this feature, as it will give you more options and can make your design look completely different. You’d be surprised!

Here are some great examples of typography in advertising. My personal favorite by non-other than, Paula Scher:

Great advertisements:

Typography doesn't have to be screaming to be effective either!

New in Typography: Tungsten (a newly released typeface) CHECK IT OUT!

Well, now that you’ve got a good lesson on typographic design, I think it’s okay to say you are officially a TNS Member! Congratulations, now take the font quiz! Come on, you – can – do – it!

http://ilovetypography.com/fontgame/

You might ask, what in the heck is ORGANIC SEO? Can’t only food be considered organic? Well I can relate to the confusion, but was intrigued by the outcome of my research.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is the process of optimizing a website to increase its rankings in unpaid search engine listings.

Goals of OSEO:

- Improve business brand visibility

- Expand market share

- Attract larger targeted volumes of Search Engine users

A benefit of Organic SEO is that their organic listings consist of keywords or phrases, which are unlikely to find on other sites. A good technique to this is to arrange the words carefully and in a planned manner. A long list of ineffective words would only move consumers away.

Essentially, Organic SEO refers to manual page optimization. This is basically automatic page alteration submittal. The two different SEO’s are being used quite equally. Although, General SEO follows concepts of PPC Advertising. The main difference between the two is that SEO is automated to optimize the ranking of the particular website, where as Organic SEO is not. Search Engine browsers are used in favor of organic search and genreal search listings. General SEO is completely based on teh company’s advertising budget, however OSEO places the website in the search engines on the basis of relevancy of subject matter given by the client.

Basically it comes down to your preference and goals of your business in choosing what type of SEO works for you. I hope this breaks your confusion and opens doors to new ways of handling your business techniques.

Not only is it essential for developers to have the upper hand in new techonology for programming but for the web designers too.  CSS is rising and becoming more common. Some issues with this new revolution still arise, but it will definitely be an effective change in technology shared among the programmers, the designers and most importantly the user! There is the ability to have a lot more flexibility with alternative syntaxes, which benefits the programmer and  design techniques that let the designers use a more wide variety of fonts (this is only the least of it). Some of these tweaks in the system will cut time in half in the developing of a website.

Of course in this day and age we are looking for the most simple solution in creating for the web, but great solutions take time to produce. Many believe the evolution of CSS will further grow and expand for our benefit and this will result in excellent success.

Then, Why isn’t the new CSS being released right now?

Let’s stop and smell the keyboard people! Out of all the browsers out there, not every one of them can grant our wishes. Unfortunately, 2 companies in particular, made errors in CSS1 support: Explorer 3 and Navigator 4.

Since IE5 came out there was a positive outlook on their development of CSS but sadly it wasn’t much different than their previous version. Luckily a company called Opera Software created a new version of IE5 and displayed great implementation of CSS1, but their support doesn’t quite meet CSS2 standards.

While we push for this new technology, we will also have to put our hopes on hold until these companies can catch up with the complete application of CSS1.  Although, with the future releases of the 2 browsers, the CSS future seems bright and promising! This upcoming project will encourage designers to use CSS more and more with it’s large extent of flexibility.

http://clickbrand.com/labs/html5/css-demo/presentation.html

The importance of graphic design knowledge is underestimated by many web designers. In result of this, they struggle to create attractive-looking websites. With that said, the visual part of a website can really make a site look more valuable and credible – after all, you are representing the branding of a company.

Here are 3 Main points to keep in mind when thinking about a well-designed website:

1. Professionalism
Such a simple thing to keep in mind, but some web designers tend to screw it up. This is where experienced graphic designers come in handy! Let’s face it, you and I both have seen sites that have excellent javascript functions that are coded properly, but fail to grasp the visual aspect of web designing.

2. Usability
In order to premote functionality you need to express usability. The person viewing the site needs to be able to use it in the way it was intended to be used.  The user needs to be able to navigate and explore the contents they are looking for, without having to dig – because trust me, they will leave when patience runs out.

3. Visual Relationship
When creating a connection with you and the user, you can usually communicate more effectively with the use of simple graphical designs and elements. People like to see aestheticly pleasing websites and more often than not, return to the site again. When websites aren’t organized properly and/or get chaotic with adverse graphics, people tend to shy away from them because it’s too difficult to get around the site. Visual Communication is vital in the aspect of a strong business.

BAD DESIGN

GOOD DESIGN

Landing Pages need to be very particular in representation of design in order to be successful. The page must load in minimum amount of time as more time means testing the patience of the browser.

Just to hit you with a little statistic: a relevant landing page can easily double your conversions versus sending clicks to the home page, and testing and tuning your pages can increase conversions by 48% or more.