The GL Marshall
Primer For Designing
On The Cheap

At <COMPANY NAME> we do not reinvent the wheel. Where design boutiques run up your bill in search of the newest and coolest and spiffiest, we apply established design principles to improve your site's visual impact.

— Color scheme. People smarter than us figured out years ago the ideal color scheme includes three colors -- your chosen color, the mathematical reverse / color wheel reverse of that chosen color, and a complimentary color that's 30-to-50 percent as saturated as one of those colors. For a real-world example of those principles, look at a Virginia fashion basic -- the blue blazer, khaki pants, and a red or yellow tie.

— Organization. Items that are organized logically need to be organized visually. This is generally handled in tints of color or typographic blocks. Remember, people scan Web pages, they do not read them like written pages, so you need sub-heads and such to catch their eye.

— Typography. Different fonts carry different personalities. Fontography also provides visual clues as to what words are navigation and what words are context.

— Flash. Because it's unreadable by search engines, we very rarely use it. Flash is very effective when developing educational materials, but on the Web, it's content use peaked years ago. Now it's mostly used in a desperate attempt to get people to look at online ads. Here is the rule content-wise: If you have to move your words around to have them make an impact, then the words themselves are not strong enough.

— Readability. The easiest type to read on the Web is a standard height font on a line 380 pixels wide. Top designers seem to set type at 120 percent or so of normal. Works for us.

— Imagery. A rule of fiction writing is "show, don't tell." The same principle applies on the Web. There is no substitute for good pictures. Imagery plays a secondary role on the Web as it provides an inherrent sense of credibility -- important when projecting an image in a virtual realm.

— Our process. Without getting into logo design or graphic identity campaigns, we can generally start with some client-provided artwork and come up with a functional new design in two-to-three days.

As I said at the beginning, at <COMPANY NAME> the focus is on SEO, so design is relegated to whatever improvements are necessary to turn image links into text links, whatever is needed to make the top of the page include spider-friendly text, and whatever visual improvements can be done without adding too much of a price hike to the pitch.