The Blog Studio

Web designers are less than a dime a dozen these days. They’re more like a dime a gross. Everyone with a web connection and a copy of Fireworks hangs their shingle out and calls themselves a web expert. It’s a lot like social media experts, but that’s another topic for another day. When you’re looking for a web designer, how do you separate the bad from the good, and the good from the great?

This is a topic near and dear to The Blog Studio, and something everyone who works with us discusses on an hourly basis. Choosing the best designer for your project isn’t easy. Here’s 3 topics you should explore when looking to hire a pixel slinger for your project.

1. Does their work appeal to other designers, or to your potential market? Some designers achieve notoriety because their work appeals to the creative fancy of other designers. This isn’t always the most practical choice for a commercial product. A good, successful design will appeal to the end users, the public & not only to the design community. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but in many cases it’s a choice between one or the other. Choose the designer that has your users needs in focus.

2. How many sites in their portfolio are still up and running? When you view a designers portfolio, take a second and chase down those sites live on the web. Are the sites still live and in business? Are they successful? Take a look at the site traffic on a site like Alexa, are they generating numbers? Have the sites been re-designed by someone else? It’s one thing for a designer to have a portfolio of great looking sites, but it’s another for a designer to have a track record of sites that have become commercially viable. Ask the hard questions above to get on the right track for success.

3. Is your designer active in the design community? While you don’t want a designer that is so wrapped up in the ‘art’ of design, they don’t put your audience first, you also don’t want a designer who works in a vacuum. Take a spin around the internet and see what other designers have said about their work. Find out which magazines, blogs and podcasts they consume. Have they won any awards, or participated in any design initiatives? Are they active in writing about design or commenting on other designers work? Check some of the Twitter hashtags like #design and #web and see if they pop up. Participation in the design community ensures they’re up to date on the newest trends and design techniques. You don’t want to hire a dinosaur.

This is just a jumping off point, because choosing a designer should be a conversation between the designer and yourself. I hope these questions spark some thoughts and conversations the next time you’re starting a new endeavor. What are your favorite questions to ask a potential web designer? We’d love to hear your successes and your horror stories, so drop some science in the comments.

Colour selection is a key element when building a strong brand. At The Blog Studio, colour selection has always been an element that clients seem to struggle most with. Some clients overlook the importance of colour in branding their product or service, while others are unable to decide on a colour that best reflects the brand.

Choosing the right colour is worth the time and effort. It has been
reported by current marketing research that approximately 80% of
what we assimilate through the senses is visual.


More than Personal Preference I often hear clients say, “I don’t like red. I don’t like green. I don’t want it to be blue, but I love pink.” These comments are based on personal preference. It is important that an individual like the branding and design of their product and website. It is equally important to think of what emotions are evoked by the end-user in response to your colour selection.


Colour can be a tricky topic to negotiate.You have to step into your
clients’ shoes, and ask how they perceive the colour choices for a particular
project. Do they have the same positive emotional response you have?
Examine your colour design choices from every possible angle, including
aesthethics, and the geography of your audience.
Color choices may signify one thing in the West, and have a different, or
wholly opposite meaning in the East. The best colour selection combines
personal preference with public perception.


Emotions Associated with Colours
Colors, like smells and sounds, conjure an immediate emotional reaction in people. As a designer, it is necessary to know the emotions that are associated with the
different colours. To denote calm, excitement, or complexity to your clients, thought
must go into choosing the right color. You need to figure out how people respond to colours used in a specific design capacity. You must choose colors that will bring
maximum emotional impact, while appearing attractive.


Consider how your clients will respond to colour choices. Part of this is knowing
which colours evoke emotions that represent your brand and industry. A company within a conservative industry may not want to use loud colours, because they lack the needed gravity. Then again, a company could purposefully use an unexpected colour to distinguish itself from the competition, but it must be a carefully considered choice.


Colour selections can complement one another, or contrast one another. There are strategic uses for each case. Colours that complement each other are more appealing to the eye. Colours that contrast each other can help items stand
out. Decide which is a better fit for your project right in the beginning. It will
make selecting the correct palate much simpler.


Usability
You may have created the most gorgeous site or logo, with an exquisite pallette,
but if no one can read it, it’s an automatic failure. Colours play a practical role in how people receive information. As most people realize, black on white is the easiest to read, on paper and on computer screens. The most legible of all
colour combinations are black on yellow, green on white, and red on white.

Here are some simple guidelines to help you choose the right colors for nearly any project.


Tips on Choosing Colours for Emotional Impact

• Of the primary colours, blue is considered the most calming and suppresses appetite. Red is said to increase blood pressure and heartbeat, while yellow evokes cheerfulness. Children tend to prefer primary colours.
• Nonprimary colours are more calming than primary colours. Pink is said to enhance appetite, while black (like blue) suppresses appetite.
• Colour shade also matters when trying to evoke different emotions. Green gives the feeling of nature, calmness, and freshness, but certain shades can also give the feeling of envy and
possessiveness. Black can be gloomy and scary, but can also be elegant and sleek. Red can be associated with the joy of Christmas, but also with blood.
• Colour can help determine the worth of an item, so choose thoughtfully. Forest green and burgundy appeal to the wealthiest 3% of Americans and often raises the perceived price of an item.
Conversely, orange is often used to make an expensive item seem less expensive.
• Too many colours can make things busy and chaotic, which generally will make a website less user-friendly.

As if we didn’t have enough trouble getting sites to render across browsers! Once upon a time I knew that Safari rendered colours slightly differently than other browsers. That’s one of those arcane bits of knowledge that is rarely useful outside a bull session with copious amounts of beer and my fellow web designers. But it was driven home just now when I happened to have the same page up in both Safari and Firefox.

The root of the cause and it’s simple solution is best explained in this article.  To summarize: it’s the colour profiles stored with the images. Safari honours them. Others don’t. Frankly, I prefer the way Safari handles it, and wish other browsers would follow suit. By specifying a colour profile, the designer can more accurately predict the way the image will look on a variety of monitors.

I believe I am over-simplifying things somewhat. No doubt someone will tell me that we’re always going to be dependent on how the user has his or her monitor configured. Still, I’ll take some control over none, thank you very much.

Just how much traffic of a spike will a redesign cause? Obviously it’s different in every case. Since we relaunched our site last week, we’ve seen traffic jump by an average of 300%. If we were an ad-supported site, that would translate into significant increases to our bottom line.

To be sure, this won’t last forever, but after a traffic spike, the daily average is always higher than pre-spike levels. Statistically speaking, the extra traffic should result in an increase in requests for work. I expect that we’ll recoup our investment in just a few months.

As the blogosphere matures, we’re starting to see a lot of redesign work. Smart folks are realizing that a new design will help give them a competitive edge, and can result in significant traffic increases.

In addition to total visitors, a site that is well designed can increase the average number of pages viewed by each visitor. If your revenue depends on page views, a redesign can make a *huge* positive impact. Hmmm, do I smell a case study?

A new article at User Interface Engineering brings some current (ish) hard data to illustrate how vital good design on the web is today.

There’s not a lot I can add here, other than to urge my current and future clients and colleagues to invest the 5 minutes it will take you to read it. Then, after, I can say “See, I told you so!”.

Hat tip to Moxie for the link.