Sunday, January 30, 2011

Business Icons - Professional Tips

Choosing design for your future web-site is a complex and tedious task. The header graphics, logos, business icons and content placeholders and of course the fonts - all this stuff needs to be well designed. While doing this keep in mind the business area and wishes of your potential customers.

Consider your potential customers expectations - use the proper business icons, buttons and styles for content blocks.

The first step as the first brick is really essential. At the very begining you need to decide what's the main audience of your web-site. After this think about what can your potential customers expect. Name, hosting provider, content material and design style must be carefully chosen in line with the results of your research. Initially you are to correlate the planned color scheme and layout together with your potential customers expectations. You should feel what colors and styles of business icons and other elements of design reflect the business area your company represents.

To make the right choice you should bear in mind that various colors evoke certain emotions in various groups of people. For example if you are planning to create the website for some club, it is more efficient to use business icons of bright disco colors and nonstandard forms. Also in such a case pay attention to the fact that tints of red as manifestation of passion and sex are pertinent for business icons, logos or buttons. But don't use bright colors if you want to build the website for some consulting company. Web design should be clear, calm and reserved. You need to avoid playful lines and light-minded graphics. So develop a web page using cool colors and simple recognizable shapes of business icons. As a result you'll get an internet site . that show professionalism and stability of your company to your potential clients.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Glass Web Icons

Glass icons can be considered an independent icon style.Nevertheless it is logical to assume that glass style is just one of the types of the shiny, glossy design.

Other types of the glossy web icons design that can be marked out:

  • glass icons;
  • metal icons;
  • glass-metal icons;
  • transparent icons.

Transparent and half-transparent glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc.

Glass web icons are often depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the "Web 2.0" icons. Creation of vertical reflection effect for web icons is certainly simple moreover you can find a great amount of tutorials on the net teaching how to do this.

It is the effect when icons are like images placed on a shiny, reflecting surface or tower above the water surface.

The crisp and pure look of glass icons makes navigating through the websites eye-catching and playful. If you want to create such neat web icons it is simple to find hundreds of tutorials on the Internet.

Creation of glass web icons.

Adobe Photoshop is the most well known software program for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming more and more flexible and multitasking software for design. Originally it was rather an image editor and nowadays it allows to produce almost all visual effects used for the graphic design. A lot of the great web icons designs were created with a help of this software program. The ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc. is the most important feature of the latest Photoshop versions.<\p>

The easiest way to design Glass web icons is to make the "glass" layer overlap the image. By using the "eraser" tool you will be able to build an empty diagonal line through the image. You are supposed to proceed using eraser for making adjustments to the glass layer until the moment when the glass effect repeats the contour of the icon. As a result it should create a kind of the glass haze in the opposite sides. As soon as this procedure complete the further adjustments should be applied.

Professional web designers should use this effect carefully and remember that glass-fever may look ridiculous. Glass icons really should be used with taste so that the internet site style could remain professional and reserved.

3D icons: Artistic Or Realistic - That Is The Question

Nevertheless sometimes advantages can be turned into drawbacks. As an example the thoroughness and truthfulness of the picture may be the downside of 3D icons. It means you are more free to use artistic vision while drawing some object. One example is, if we take a cell-phone, you are able to draw it rather similar to what we associate with its name but eliminate some extra details, shades and highlights. Sometimes schematic drawings work even better than 3D models. You should analyze each definite case. To create an object and make it seem closer to real one 3d icons should repeat thoroughly each detail and line. So it is much more a kind of technical representation than a piece of art. However we sometimes can see 3D icons that involve innovative thought and look like true works of art. Realistic and accurate modeling is the most popular trend of 3D design today.In case you are going to use some characters as icons, 3D icons are going to appear much more realistic than 2D ones. The characters may remain cartoonish all this will add some humor and zest to your website (especially if it is associated with the goods and services your company provides).

The technical issues you may face while using 3D icons in your project layout.

So pay attention to these useful facts while creating the icons design for your site:

Bad resolution of the viewers displays makes it impossible to show 3d icons in all their glory and details;

because of the fact that the monitor screen is 2D device we cant see the true three-dimensional object as we see it in reall life.

2D space is easier to be modified and manipulated in comparison with 3D one;

the non-standard applications essential for correct viewing of 3D web Icons may force the user to download additional software which is definitely not convenient.

As far as you can see both types of graphical representation are based on geometric data but 3D objects are in fact the sculpture models, more complicated items. Also 3D web Icons requirements are much severer. No doubt you can claim that 3D icons may lack creativity and abstract air, nevertheless the facts of depth and volume that are created with a help of 3D technology are incontestable.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Glass Web Icons

Web icons bring clean look to your site making its design eye-catching and much more professional. Nevertheless this effect should be reasonably used because it can be harmful for the design perception.

Glass iconsare incredibly popular and attractive elements of website or blog decor. This glass icon style imparts the ideal, clear and professional look to your web page, presentation or desktop and embodies a kind of the "Web 2.0" spirit.

Advantages and disadvantages of the glass icons usage.

Do the elaborate and intricate look of the web icons designed in the glass style turn your brain and you believe that it is a hard task to do this? Do not be confused - it is pretty obvious that the process of their creation is rather simple. It is possible to create Glass icons within a few minutes using Photoshop, Illustrator or Corel software. All you need is some helpful tutorial, some skills of working with these pieces of software and the images you are going to turn into glass web icons.

The glass effect is considered to have been borrowed from the Apples OSX operating-system style and copied by Windows. Certainly you may argue that Glass web icons are so strongly associated with Apple product that the glass-styled elements make people think of the entirely different brand which makes the usage if this type of web icons meaningless, but you can not deny the fact that the glass icons style has a great deal of benefits .

Social bookmarking web icons is an important feature of the present day web-site. If you want to have a great advantage for the site promotion use eye-catching glossy icons for this reason. This fact is very easily explained: attractive social bookmarks raise the probability of the visitors clicking on them and the amount of the clicks increases correspondingly. So due to this fact you'll be able to promote your content more effectively.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

DreamWeaver Web Templates - What Exactly Is In The Name?

You can use web templates to create web pages that have a common structure and appearance. Dreamweaver Themes are useful when you want to make sure that all of the pages in a site share certain characteristics. You are able to change info easily on the group of pages by editing the web theme and then reapplying it to those pages. While elements unique to each page (such as text or graphics) remain unchanged, common template elements (such as menu bars and links) are updated on all of the pages that use the template. For example, if you change the telephone number in the Footer of the template - Dreamweaver will instantly amend the footers for you automatically. The amazing tool to save your time!

These days you can easily discover a fantastic variety of Dreamweaver Templates to any taste over the Internet. But first of all you need to decide what kind of template you want to have: free Dreamweaver Template or premium one. Free web theme can be a very good choice if you want to save your pennies. But if you want to have exclusive design and superb quality you should look for premium Dreamweaver Templates. Anyway you have a unique opportunity to redesign your web page in no time.

So Dreamweaver website templates can help to save your valuable time and money. Themes are a great way to maintain consistency across a web page. Don't panic if you have some difficulties - 24 hour support teams always glad to help. You can also use step by step web design online course or tutorials. So make your choice today - present your internet site with a new Dreamweaver theme and attract more visitors right now! Dont miss this unique chance to be on the crest of the wave of Internet world.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

3D Icons and 2D Icons in web graphics nowadays

Basic differences between 2D and 3D icons design

Speaking about 3d Icons we need to point out that the light source plays an extremely essential role for creating authentic three-dimensional images. It is appropriate and even advisable to use several light sources in web site design nowadays but they should follow basic rules of physics and be truthful. Several lights usually make 3D icons look softer and much more realistic.

Both 2D and 3D icons represent the volume found in the three-dimensional world but use various ways of creating this illusion. Without any doubt the volume can be represented by 3D Icons to more extent than 2D Icons. More often the images are flat and present just one perspective. Detailed highlights and imperceptible soft shadows are missing as a rule. The shades usage is limited as well.

3D icons have all these functions instead. Nevertheless don't forget that 3D is nothing but mathematical replication of the data that however restricts its usage. Sometimes you can easily replace 3D Icons by 2D ones or by the videos with the sounds - but all this depends on situation. 3D dimension can be created with the software used for 3D modeling. Don't forget that 3D icons should be depicted in correlation with the other objects and the environment they are placed into.