Best Graphics - Secrets of Getting the Best

By Christopher James
Published by Janet Schlarbaum

There are many kinds of graphics on the Internet, but getting the best graphics can be a problem if you don’t know exactly what to look out for. Some people want best graphics for their personal use while others want best graphics for their business or website. In any case, you should consider what others feel, think from your customer’s perspective, don’t clutter your graphics, choose graphics related to your need or site and choose appropriate color mix. This article will address these points and let you know how to select the best graphics that can suite your needs.

Everybody has friends or family members that can help you to assess any graphic you want to choose. You can get two or more people’s opinion about any certain graphic you want to choose and base your final decision on the graphic that carries the majority approval. This is one way of choosing best graphics. This is an indication that your chosen graphic will be generally accepted by the majority.

If your aim of looking for best graphics is because of your website, then you have to think from your customer’s perspective. Your graphics will be best if it actually conveys the message it is intended. For example, if you are to sell cell phones on your site, don’t choose cell phone graphics that are not clear or looks like something else, and make sure your cell phone graphic is very clear and easy to understand.

Some graphics are cluttered with so many types of texts, designs and pictures. This is not supposed to be. Use less text on your graphics that are straight to the point. Best graphics have one or two short phrases. Your fonts should be readable and your colors should not be too many. Putting too many designs on your graphics does not only make it to look shabby, it also causes a lot of distractions.

One of the ways professionals identify best graphics is to see whether any set of graphics collection has varieties. This can make them to be placed in more than one location of a website. This secret is really important especially if the graphic collection is exactly related to the theme of the site. With this, you are not only proving the worth of your hard labor by choosing best graphics that fit your site’s theme; but also justifying the fact that you have actually got your money’s worth.

The best resource will be the ability to get all the graphics that meets the requirements above, and the ability to adjust your texts, fonts, shadows and any styles anyway you want. This great tool does all my graphics jobs for me. It comes with so many kinds of graphics you can adjust any way you like.

What Do All These Graphics File Extensions Mean?

By Sheryl A. Skutelsky

Vector Files store images as a series of descriptions of simple shapes. They will split an image into lines, rectangles, circles etc. and will describe the positions and colors of all of these shapes on the page, and then reconstruct the image when the file is opened.

There are advantages to using vector files, because you have a description of a scene you can increase its size indefinitely and still have enough information to keep a high quality image. Some programs use a vector format by default. All PowerPoint drawings are in a vector format, as is all Microsoft clip art. Vector images are suitable for putting simple images into documents and presentations, but should not be used in web pages.

Bitmap Images are analogous to taking a photograph. The whole image is split into a grid of tiny squares, called pixels, and the color for each pixel in the whole image is recorded. This format allows extremely complex pictures to be described (such as photos), but can produce extremely large file sizes.

Unlike vector files, you cannot enlarge a bitmap file without losing resolution. One last point about these two formats is that it is easy to convert a vector file into a bitmap (that’s what happens when you look at it on your screen!), but rarely possible to convert a bitmap into a vector. Typically, BMP files are uncompressed, hence they are large; the advantage is their simplicity, wide acceptance, and use in Windows programs.

JPEG or Joint Photographic Experts Group files (DOS filename extension is JPG) suffer generational degradation when repeatedly edited and saved. The JPEG format also is used as the image compression algorithm in many Adobe PDF files. Advantages of JPEG images:
• Huge compression ratios mean faster download speeds
• JPEG produces excellent results for most photographs and complex images
• JPEG supports full-color (24-bit, “true color”) images

GIF or Graphics Interchange Format is limited to an 8-bit palette, or 256 colors. This makes the GIF format suitable for storing graphics with relatively few colors such as simple diagrams, shapes, logos and cartoon style images. The GIF format supports animation and is still widely used to provide image animation effects. Advantages of GIF files:
• GIF is the most widely supported graphics format on the Web
• GIFs of diagrammatic images look better than JPEGs
• GIF supports transparency and interlacing

TIFF or Tagged Image File Format is a flexible format that normally saves 8 bits or 16 bits per color (red, green, blue) for 24-bit and 48-bit totals, respectively, using either the TIFF or the TIF filenames. The TIFF image format is not widely supported by web browsers. TIFF remains widely accepted as a photograph file standard in the printing business.

PNG or Portable Network Graphics file format was created as the free, open-source successor to the GIF. The PNG file format supports true color (16 million colors) while the GIF supports only 256 colors. The PNG file excels when the image has large, uniformly colored areas. JPG files are smaller than PNG files. Many older browsers currently do not support the PNG file format. However, Internet Explorer 7 and all contemporary web browsers fully support the PNG format.

This article brought to you by Janet Schlarbaum.

The Logic Behind Branding Graphics With Watermarks

By Sam Miller
Posted By Janet Schlarbaum

Let us face it: branding is certainly something that each and every company should acquaint themselves with. This is because no successful company or brand has ever attained its success without employing branding to some extent or degree. And if you are delving into the arena of branding graphics, then you should know the important role that visual vocabulary plays.

Visual elements should always be prioritized by any company, especially when building brand identity. You may think to yourself that the logo should be enough to build a strong brand for your company. If you think all that it takes is just your logo, then you should think again. You should go way beyond the logo because this is just not enough for you to convey to the general public all of the attributes that your brand holds to its name. Visual vocabulary then is the only way to go. And this would be comprised of all sorts of graphics that you use, particularly on your website, to strongly mold the identity of your brand, making it a force to reckon with in the market. Just to name a few of the aspects that comprise visual vocabulary, this would include the font styles, the colors, layout conventions, the shapes, the background, the text treatment, taglines, and the photographic library employed.

Since all of these graphics and visual elements will be used to make your brand stronger, then you should take it upon yourself to employ watermarks all over them. Let us say you are operating an online store that sells all sorts of gadgets, such as mobile phones, digital cameras, iPod players, MP3 players, laptops, and the like. Surely you will be posting pictures of the items you are selling online for your potential customers to see. However, not all of your visitors are actually potential customers. Some of them could even be your competitors, seeking out the competition in the market, and they just might use the pictures that you posted for their own purpose. You cannot allow this to happen, right? Thus, you have to employ the use of watermarking so that you can protect your pictures from unauthorized, and most certainly unlawful, use.

The great thing about using watermarks for your graphics here is that you can use the specific type of watermark. This means you can use the name of your brand or your company for the text of your watermark. This way, you can then use your watermark as free advertisement on the pictures of the products you are selling. What’s more, this would discourage your visitors from lifting the pictures from your site because they would have to deal with the watermark you place on your images. The pictures of the products that they plan to lift from your website would be useless because they would end up just promoting your brand or company.

Thus, if you are delving into branding graphics, then you should consider using watermarks to strengthen brand identity. Aside from brand strengthening, you also protect the interests of your business as well.

Quality Assurance in Graphic Designing

By: Alan L Smith
Posted by: Janet Schlarbaum
Graphics is an excellent way of expressing oneself and communicating to the user. It uses different typographies and pictures in desirous manner. Great deal of thinking, foresightedness, vision and creativity goes into creation of graphics that appeal to the masses.

Text or graphic elements are utilized for producing something rational satisfying the clients requirements. The design should be such that it is soothing to the eyes, makes sense and captures attention of the target customers. Every company wishes to convey either some information or message through the images, thus it has to be practically designed. Professional graphic designers are much more skilled and have better understanding of the entire process thus producing better outcomes.

Be careful in selecting the graphic design company that would be your companion in offering state-of-the-art graphic design creations for your enterprise. Discuss with them the details about the project, how they are going to work on it, and what type of designs they are going to produce and how it is going to benefit your business.

Quality is always appreciated by the customers, bad quality of design are major turn -off and creates bad impression on the user. Therefore graphic design should have excellent quality and have gone through quality control check before making it online. Here the quality of graphic design is tested on particular standards for measuring their degree of achievement. If it is not done properly, the quality of graphic design would be affected directly. Thus it is an essential part of graphic designing industry. In any case images that are not displayed well cannot succeed at all. Only good look is not enough, the design has to be meaningful. Correct color combination and spellings should be there, any error in any of these would adversely affect the image of your organization.

When the risk is higher quality check becomes more significant. A website is a very important tool that can carry out effective branding of the company, communicate the targeted message to the audience and extend the online business. As and when the business grows and team increases, quality control of the graphic designs is important. The overall look of the website and its functionality is largely dependent on graphics. It affects the professional image of the company.

8 Must Have Graphic Design Skills in Today’s Market

By: Douglas Farrick
1. Adobe Photoshop
The ability to use and understand the basics of pixel based photo manipulation. The best Photoshop experts are constantly learning and experimenting through online tutorials, books and seminars. This is the grand daddy of them all. Make it a goal to spend X amount of time each week learning a new technique.

Test: Can you do complex selections via the selection tool? Are you accomplished with layers? Do you understand how to use adjustment layers, masks and channels? Can you remove blemishes, “scratches” and color correct

2. Adobe Illustrator
The ability to use and understand vector based graphics. This program is essential to creating crisp, clean artwork. You will need this program for logo/identity creation, poster work and even some print work. The program can be a bit tricky to learn but worth all and any aggravation to learn it.

Test: Do you understand the concept of bezier curves? Can you convert a bitmap image to a vector graphic? Have you mastered multi-step gradients? Do you know how to create graphic images with text?

3. Adobe InDesign or Quark Express
The ability to use a page layout program. This program is fundamental to any print work. Whether you are creating books, magazines, brochures, sell sheets or advertisements you will need to possess the skills of a high-end layout program.

Test: Do you understand the concept of Master Pages? Would you be able to set up a 32 page catalog? Do you have an understanding of how to control text with images? i.e.; how to flow text in and around images. Do you have basic knowledge of offset printing and pre-press processes? Hint: if not, schedule a visit to a fairly large local printer and ask if you can be shown their process AND bring a list of a questions.

4. Flash
The ability to use and understand this motion-based juggernaut. Flash is now the most widely deployed video platform on the Internet. Flash Player is installed on nearly twice as many desktops and devices as any other video player. As the web becomes more and more video-based having a solid knowledge of Flash, In my opinion, is one of the most important programs to learn.

Test: Can you create a simple animation? Do you understand the concept of keyframes? Do you know how to incorporate a Flash movie into a web page? Do you understand the power of interactivity and user interface design?

5. Understand Typography
One of the most “overlooked” design skills today is knowledge of Typographic design. It is one of the tell-tale signs between a good and excellent designer. Our business is all about communication and if type is not clear, appropriate or well designed the design is seriously compromised.

Test: Do you have a font management system installed on your computer? Have you recently read (or revisited) some of the classic type books? Are you up-to-speed on typographic standards? Do you know the difference between True Type, PostScript and OpenType fonts? Do you have a font reference guide resource book in your studio?

6. Idea Generation
In the design business it is critical to have a method of idea generation. Why? Some of the best designers in the world are paid the most money not because they know Photoshop of Flash better than you do but because they have the ability to consistently come up with new and innovative ideas that make their clients serious money.

Test: What methods do you use to generate ideas? Do you know how other innovative thinkers come up with their brilliant ideas? How often to you read (in general) so as to have myriad references and viewpoints to call upon? What do you do when your idea well has gone dry?

7. Building a Network
To be successful in area of life you need the help and support of others. This is especially important for designers who need to spend much of their time in their studios/offices. Building a network of trusted confidants and friends will pay off in more ways than you know.

Test: How often do you attend networking events or seminars? Have you made a list of 5 influential people that could help your career? Do you have some sort of system for capturing and entering your new contacts information? What can you do this week to open and expand your network? Have you sought out a successful mentor?

8. General Business Skills
You do not have to be a genius at business but you DO need to know basic business skills, like; sales, marketing, accounting, tax strategies, database management, etc. This tends to be one myth that designers rather not deal with. If you are marketing your own design firm or you are a freelancer the sooner you learn your business is NOT graphic design but the advertising and marketing business you will be light years ahead of your competition.

Test: Do you know the basic outline of a sales call? What new marketing strategies have you learned/implemented? When was the last time you wrote a hand-written thank you note or sent a surprise gift to a client?

Graphic Design For Beginners - 5 Basic Principles

By: Martin Vine
This article references my experience in magazines, but the principles apply equally to other media in both web design and print. No matter what software you work on, or what industry you’re in, these guidelines are universal. Understanding them and practicing them will pave you a rock-solid foundation for a successful career. The rest is up to you!

There’s no question some people have a gift for graphic design, but even the most talented novices need some mentoring in order to learn fundamental design basics when they’re starting out. Without such guidance, many gifted designers will fall short of their potential. I’ve seen experienced Art Directors do high-impact magazine covers and creative feature openers filled with eye-popping typography and complex Photoshop collages. But the pages that follow are littered with unforgivable design flaws. Here are five basic principles - not necessarily in order of importance - which well help you become a better designer from day one.

1. Comprehension precedes typography

We’ve all seen designers do amazing things with type. Pulling words apart and manipulating individual letters to reflect the context and meaning is one of fun things about designing. Before you get that far, however, one simple prerequisite: read the copy and understand it! For people whose job it is to work with type, many designers have an aversion to reading. Before you can go and play with the text, you must understand exactly what you’re being asked to present visually. Know which words - if any - need to be emphasised; understand the hierarchy and stick to it.

2. Good typography

Once you’re ready to bend the type to your will, remember it’s not always necessary to waste hours looking for the perfect font. Try instead using a plain font and do something creative with it. This is a good place for an inexperienced designer to test their typography skills. If you can produce creative typographic designs with classic fonts such as Helvetica, Times, Garamond, etc, then you’ll be well prepared to explore and design responsibly with the more exotic fonts available. Bonus tip: if you’re combining fonts, the key is there must be contrast between them, otherwise you may as well just use the one (or the variations thereof). This can be done using size, weight and colour, but also consider the style of fonts themselves. Rarely will it be a good idea to pair up two decorative fonts. Alternatively, the combination of exotic and plain fonts can yield fantastic results.

3. Understanding hierarchy

The laws of hierarchy apply equally to text, graphics and images. Without them, your artwork trips on the first hurdle. List in your head (or jot down on paper) your design elements in order of importance, then design and assemble them so that the viewer immediately recognises which part he/she should be looking at first. Start with the most-important, then second-most, and so on. Rarely will you need more than a three or four-tiered hierarchy. Again, use size, weight and colour to affect the outcome, but it is important that this hierarchy is at the beating heart of your design, not a last-minute adjustment. Once you’ve finished, have a good look at your work. If the hierarchy isn’t obvious to you, chances are it won’t be obvious to anyone else.

4. Combining colours

You’ll either have a feel for colour or you won’t. Mostly true, however, a beginner can’t be expected to have the same balanced sense of colour as an industry veteran. So where to begin? Obviously, you’ll need to consider what kind of design you’re doing, and who it’s aimed at. But whether you’re working with vibrant primaries or a stylish earthy palette, there are ways to ensure you’re combining colours that don’t jar or vibrate against each other. Take a nice earthy purple: 50C/45M/15Y. Instead of grasping blindly for a complementary colour, try sliding the CMYK channels against one another, keeping at least one the same. If we slide only the Magenta down so we get 50C/10M/15Y, you’ll find a nice turquoise that works perfectly with the purple. Or perhaps you want a warm combination. Go back to the original purple and assign the same numeric values to alternate colour channels: 15C/50M/45Y. Now you’ve got an earthy pink - same values; different channels. Again, it works well with the purple (in fact, they all work together). Naturally, there’s nothing saying you need to stick rigidly to this rule, but it’s a good starting point for a novice designer struggling with the tricky concept of colour. And don’t forget to make sure your monitor and printer are calibrated to display accurately.

5. Is your design the best possible solution?

Graphic design is of course subjective, and there are a hundred different roads leading to the solution. You need to find the best. Once you’ve finished your work, ask yourself this: is this the best possible outcome? The measure of what kind of designer you’ll become will rest greatly on the extent to which you push yourself with this very question. Don’t settle on something if you’re not 100% convinced it’s the best-possible design outcome. If there’s even a sliver of a doubt in your mind, change it or try something new. Your client wants to see the best you can do. That’s exactly what you should be delivering every time.

The above-listed principles should be lesson 1.01 for any upcoming graphic designer. A successful, experienced professional works to them without ever pausing to think about it. Creativity without order is contemporary art, not graphic design. Never forget your client. They’re paying you to be creative, but working with these guidelines in mind will help build structure to your art so that it’s true to its purpose and sells exactly what it’s designed to sell…be it glamorous or not-so-glamorous. After all, that’s precisely what we’re employed to do.

Brief History of Graphic Design

By: Bharat Bista
The very first written word of mankind was the beginning of Graphic Design! And its native land was none other then ancient caves and caverns! The very first symbol they had sketched through cave drawings, paintings, markings on boulders, bone, and ivory are the foremost indication and evidence where graphic design was born, nursed, nourished and grown! Nevertheless, the term Graphic Design was named by William Addison Dwiggins in the early 20th Century.

Anthropologists studying prehistoric periods on cave paintings leads us earlier than the Upper Paleolithic period from 40,000 - 10,000 B.C., where our ancestors were learning how to design signs and symbols that could be communicated visually; moreover they were successful on leaving their marks. The pioneers of graphic design are none other then our own ancestors, who had lived in the caves and sketched their drawing on rocks.

History of graphics design roots to our own ancestors of ancient era where civilization was cultured in caves, and left their drawings and sketches for us on their canvas of cave walls and ceilings.

The earliest drawings known today are from 6,000 years ago, are that of carved stone and pottery containers. Drawings contained in Egyptian pyramids with signs, symbols and letters are known to all and it leads us back 5000 years.

Furthermore, from 600-250 BC evolution on geometrical shape and structures in Europe played a major role for the development of designing and sketching. As an applied art of arranging images and text for an attempt of visual communication; the hand written copy of the Christian Bible “The Book of Kells”, created by Irish monks in 9th century AD with rich illustrations is a good example of the evolution of graphic design.

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a German metal-worker and an inventor, introduced a printing technology allowing the re-use of individual letters. The first book produced by Gutenberg press was “The Incunabula”. This book became the standard in the history of book printing and publishing and was a giant leap for printing and publication; though, block stamping on sheets of paper with text and signs carved, was in use in Europe and Asia long before 14th century; however, Graphic design of this era was formatting and we today have named it Old Style graphic design.

Guttenberg era of graphic design evolution was sluggish, until the 19th century, in Britain the division created between fine art and applied art boosted this evolution, and they successfully published some of the most major graphic design products through the Arts movement. William Morris made a great deal of business of publishing books with stylish printings and contributed a significant role to attract the potential market as well as commercializing graphic design; in addition he was the pioneer for the separation of commercial design and fine arts.

Another painter from the 19th century was Piet Mondrian whose innovation has greatly influenced today’s modern graphic designer. Though he was not a graphic designer, his uses of grids was the origin of modern day advertisement known as the grid system; widely used by graphic designer of our century today.

With the decadence of classical style, modern graphic design engrossed in the early 20th century with designs influenced by fine arts. The trademark of early modern fonts is the sans-serif typeface. In 1928, the book “New Typography” written by Jan Tschichold systemized the philosophy of modern typography.

Furthermore, the fathers of modern graphic design are still considered to be typographers such as Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky as they broke new ground on typography building techniques and stylizing. Modern computer technology has changed typography production altogether, but for the experimental and evolutionary approach their contribution was highly recognizable.

The booming and flourishing period for graphic design was after World War II; as the American economy thrived, the demand of graphic design, particularly on advertisement and packaging sectors blossomed.

I Love NY ad campaign (1973) and a famous Bob Dylan poster (1968) designed by Milton Glaser are examples of applied graphic design culture and its influence. Progressions in graphic design in the early 20th Century were mostly enthused by technological expansion in printing and also in photography. But at the mid of this century, the raising of the computer era in graphic design has faced little backwards as early computers were far weaker and computer memory was limited. However, within the end of this century with the immense development of computers and its corresponding technologies, modern graphic design has evolved into a business that is done almost entirely on computers.

In mid 1980, the arrival of desktop publishing and the launching of software applications like Illustrator and PageMaker introduced an era of designers to computer image manipulation and 3D image creation. Computer graphic design facilitates instantaneous effects of layout or typography changes.

Today, graphic design the visual communication, is yielded in the rich soil of computer ground, fertilized with latest hardware and software technologies. Graphic designers worldwide plough through computers loaded with the latest gadgets and gizmos, software and hardware, academic and technology, information and communication, and are generating the new history of graphic design in their design laboratories.

With express elevation of the hi-tech industry, the future assures more and today’s designer are contributing their name and effort through their creativity for the next generation. History yet has to write all of her pages for new innovation and invention in this field.