Posts Tagged ‘design’
Popular Places to Use Clip Art
You have the words. You have the photos. But your project is lacking something you can’t quite put your finger on.
Why not try clip art? The selection of clip art you can find online these days has come a long way.Back in the early days of the Internet, it was difficult to find quality clip art.
My, how things have changed. Thanks to companies like GraphicsFactory.com, who pioneered the online clip art industry, there are millions upon millions of images to choose from, on a staggering variety of topics.
Here are a few excellent places to use clip art :
- Family newsletters: So the Christmas card evolved into the Christmas letter, which then spawned the yearly family newsletter designed to tell everyone in your family tree all you accomplished this year. Run out of things to write but still have space to fill? Insert a piece of clip art and voila.
- Flyers: Flyers are easy to produce – so easy, in fact that everyone can and will do it. All the time. Then they have to post them so that others can see them. Which means that your flyer is competing for eyeballs with dozens of others, hawking apartments, pets, aromatherapy, whatever. A good way to make yours stand out from the pack is, you guessed it, clip art.
- Business cards: You business card is your portable billboard. It’s your one-second commercial. Your miniature PowerPoint presentation. A few lines of copy aren’t going to cut it. You need to differentiate yourself from the rest of the stack. And don’t try to do it by making your card a different size. Research shows seasoned networkers find that annoying. An easy and effective way to grab attention? Clip Art Images.
- T-shirts: Your high school doesn’t have a uniform policy, but you feel like it might as well. After all, everyone walking up and down the hall is wearing the exact same T-shirt bought at the exact same store. Who can blame them? T-shirts are comfortable and cheap. So why not step out on a limb and create a custom T-shirt that’s all about you? Easy enough with printable clip art.
- PowerPoint presentation: The subject of your speech to the rest of the department might be a little dry, but the actual presentation doesn’t have to be. Jazz up important key phrases of your talk with interesting bullets, clever animations and other varieties of clip art.
- Greeting cards: Sure your homemade greeting card won’t play a song every time you open it, but it will also free up some extra cash that can then go toward a quality present. Greeting cards adorned with clip art are infinitely more customizable, and therefore more personal than store-bought.
- CD covers: With the advent of mp3s, people are downloading and customizing their own CDs more than ever before. But the recordable CDs you can buy in packs at the store are blah. Why not use clip art to create one-of-a-kind covers that pop out from the rest? You can experiment with different themes that go with the vibe of the album you created yourself.
In summary, there are many places to use clip art, both at home and in the workplace. These are only a few ideas please post your own as a comment to this post.
Why You Should Incorporate Clip Art Images and Animations in Your Project
There are gazillions of websites on the Internet that focus on every topic under the sun. What do 99.92 percent of them have in common? They use images and animations to help convey what they’re trying to say.
Think about it. When was the last time you picked up a newspaper or magazine that consisted of page after page of copy? I’ll bet never. Both media use illustrations, photos, and clip art to break up the text and make it more appealing to read.
Same goes for the family newsletter that your Aunt Bertha sends out every Christmas. Right before the update on her bunion and right after she chronicles the latest accomplishment of Chester the cat, she probably inserted an image of one or the other. Hopefully the cat.
The web opens up a whole new world of what you can do with images. Take the said image, code it to move and you’ve got an animation. Everyone was using animations for their personal web pages. Copy blinked, pictures danced…it was all very wacky.
These days, animations are mostly used in ads – banner ads that stretch across the top of the page, embedded ads in the middle of an article, or pop up ads that appear when you click into a page.
Hard on the heels of the Internet explosion came community web forums, where people can chat about diets, religion, politics, or the current contestants on “Project Runway.” At first these chat participant used clever screen handles. Eventually, those were accompanied by avatars, or icons. These days many people use animated avatars. Some are funny, some are annoying, but they’re all guaranteed to draw the eye faster than the non-animated versions.
The images and animations you choose for your own project depends on the purpose of said project. A banker looking for a business card logo for a business card would probably stay away from dousing it with not-so-subtle”$” signs. Especially when a card in a conservative color, that lists his name and contact information in elegant script will do nicely.
However, if you’re a local car dealership and need a website designed to move cars off the lot fast, then go crazy with the animated dancing chickens or whatever your gimmick is this week.
The December issue of the company newsletter could get away with images of a candy cane here or a sprig of holly there, but probably not much else. However, your MySpace page is a perfect place for a multitude of blinking, sparkling images of animated holiday cheer.
Remember, images and animations can add a lot to your project. But only if they’re used appropriately. And, in the case of animations, sparingly. After all, you’re using images and animations to draw the eye to your text, so people will read what you’ve written. Once they get to the actual copy, you don’t want them continually distracted by the rotating photo you’ve embedded in the upper left hand corner.
Tips on Choosing a Color Scheme for Websites
Thinking about the perfect color combination can be as perplexing as thinking about how to build a self-sustaining raft with a slab of cement with a metal chain connected to it. What makes selecting color combinations equally scary is that the wrong combination will send your company into bankruptcy and you’ll be the talk of the business world if you mess up (what did he/she expect would happen after pairing those colors together.
Amateur!) Okay, none of that may be true, but that is how many people feel when confronted with the task of color coordinating. Choosing hues for your website doesn’t have to be a dreaded task, and with a little planning you will be more successful than you thought possible.
The first step is to write down the objective of the web page for which you need these graphics (and colors.) Is the content formal (business) or informal (fun or personal)? What is the tone of the site? The voice of the content? The message you wish to pass on or the action you want the reader to take? Knowing the purpose of the content will immediately help you eliminate colors from your choices.
Now make a list of colors that best convey your message.
One way to do this is to look at websites, magazines and TV ads. What colors trigger certain emotions in you? Which grab your attention? Even black and white trigger emotions (ask any marketer.) If your website is for fun, you may want to stay away from gray or brown. Fun choices would be hot pink, bright green, or yellow. For formal, business sites you will want to stay away from purple or pink unless those colors are associated with the business.
Choose Your Colors
Another great way to choose a color scheme is to simply find a web template or graphic that you really like and pull a color from it to inspire the rest of the site. Once you choose a color from the graphic, select a light, medium and dark color that complements it. To help you with color ideas, go to ColorSchemer, a web studio with free ideas for color schemes. Print out a color copy of your graphic and hold it up to each of these combinations to see which works best!
Just remember, some basic design tips are that the background is always the lightest color; the largest graphic isn’t the darkest or the lightest color, but somewhere in the middle; and your accent graphics are your darkest or brightest color.
Color Wheel
To further help you choose colors, look to the color wheel which shows us how colors are arranged in the spectrum. By using each color’s position in the wheel we learn which go best together, which complement others, and which are contrasting. Okay, so let’s say you choose red-violet as your first color. Where do you go from there?
Colors next to one another are not complementary. If you were to choose red and violet, the two colors next to red-violet you’d be selecting a bland color scheme. The most complementary colors are listed opposite of each other on the wheel, so the color that will really make red-violet pop on the page is yellow-green, while yellow and green (the two colors on each side of yellow-green) are also complementary to red-violet.
Source: Cornell University
The color wheel is a basic tool that should always be consulted when pairing graphics on a new or existing site. You are making a terrible design error if you think color coordination and schemes do not apply to graphics on a web page. You can avoid this by brainstorming the purpose of your website, listing suitable and unsuitable colors, and then making sure that any new images added complement your existing website by consulting the color wheel.