Tiny Design Tidbits
The process of fashioning a visually impressive and interesting website, rich with the potential to propel its content to a worldwide audience and achieve great personal and business goals, is an undertaking relished by a number of web design professionals. This process is often initiated through thinking about a site as a whole, calling to mind the necessary structure and scope wit which a design will need to conform. But after the basics have been set out, and the primary layout and graphics have been added, when everything tucked inside a browser window seems ready to go, there are a few remaining design considerations that web designers can use to pour an extra incentive of style into their sites.
While the broad design of a site often remains its greatest visual asset and helps establish and protect the all-important concept of usability, small details can bring out the beauty of a design and help it achieve a more professional and cared-for look and feel. Just as SEO consultants might focus on keyword density and placement as the central effort in a search engine optimization campaign but complement the work with a few flourishes in headers and meta tags, web designers can add something special in a number of popular and fairly simple ways.
One of the most well-loved design tidbits used by modern sites is the favicon. Limited to just a few pixels in a square no larger than a centimeter or so, favicons present a fun design challenge for artists, and are also highly visual ways to get a bit of branding into the atmosphere of a site without a lot of work. Condensing a regular logo is a popular choice for favicons, but the size restrictions mean this isn’t always possible; taking an initial, such as “A” for a news site in Austin Texas, and adorning it with contextual elements such as a cactus or a pair of horns to give the initial a distinct Austin Tx feel, can lead to a memorable and attractive favicon.
Some designers like to enhance their sites with different and interesting navigation elements, such as cursors and scrollbars. While it can be easy to get carried away with these options and create over-worked elements that detract from a site’s usability, a few subtle changes such as a color-matching cursor or the creation of a custom, smooth-scrolling “button” bar can give a site a truly professional and modern appeal that standard navigation pieces simply fail to deliver.
Design is often, and understandably, approached from a wide angle, taking the full extent of a site’s atmosphere into account before work is started. Creating small flourishes with which to accentuate a site and add to its visual appeal may seem like an afterthought, but the right combination of design tidbits can make a great design drive its message home to visitors.
Web Design
NuArtisan
7000 N Mo Pac Expy Ste 200
Austin, TX 78731
(512) 712-5359