Saturday, February 19, 2011

Simple Icons And Minimalistic Website Design

Simple icons are created to combine minimalism along with modern trend. Awesome and light Simple icons are aimed to increase webpage user interaction.

Minimalism in webdesign

Minimalistic design means simplicity and light-weight elements such as Simple web icons. It minimizes complex wordings, figures, textures and patterns. Often less even means more. It depends on areas and extent. Web page design is exactly such area.

Minimalistic design is quite an unexpected trend nowadays. As far as you know high present day technologies have one great disadvantage - usually they lead to the loss of simplicity. These days the modern trend is to mix minimalistic web design with CSS3 and HTML5. Website that uses simple design often has off-color effects and also actively use CSS and Ajax.

Among important features of the present day simple web design are the following:

  • grid based design;
  • simple icons;
  • light shading and reserved color transition;
  • light texture of patterns and backgrounds (often transparent like);
  • more empty or white space;
  • simple shapes and figures, clear lines;
  • less amount of various bright colors;
  • readable and clear typography;

Friday, February 18, 2011

Vintage Web Icons As A Part Of Vintage Design

Vintage icons is one of the most noticeable and easy-to-apply graphical elements you may use in your web site to make it look archaic. With a help of vintage web icons you can easily create the vintage atmosphere at your web site Also use vintage typography, less-saturated colors and retro textures. Your internet site visitors will definitely like antique air of your new design.

Retro came from the70s and 80s. Retro advertising art from the 1950s is bold and striking. Nowadays with a help of computer technologies you are able to put a new face on this type of art and easily use its characters in web design and printing. Often such faces in the vintage web icons are retro cars, pin-up girls, soldiers and politicians of the former times as well.Most frequently used retro cars are Fiat 500, the 1970 Dodge Challenger, the 1969 Chevrolet Samara, the 1964 Ford Mustang etc. You can effortlessly find Vintage web icons that include hints to retro cars concepts. This will help to attract much more attention to your webpage layout. They are ideal for the internet sites concerning auto sales, transporting services, tour sites etc.A pin-up model is another popular character used in vintage icons design and other website graphics styling. It often depicts exaggerated, idealized images of how the really beautiful and attractive woman should look like. If you're an owner of the web site regarding health and beauty areas or the model agencies - keep in mind that you can use pin-up images that are great for vintage web icon.

Military and security guard web sites may successfully use soldiers and officers with an outdated appearance to win the visitors favour and trust.

Usage of specific characters is not limited to the above-mentioned ones. Apply your creativity and use them as you wish. This will help to make people surprise and thus memorize your web-site.

Patterns and Typography for vintage icons

Vintage patterns recommended for usage in vintage icons design is the following:

  • patterns containing vintage papers;
  • with vintage frames;
  • with outmoded florals;
  • paper and bagging, gold-cloth as the texture fabric;
  • wooden or bronze textures for vintage icons.

For developing vintage icons titles, content headings and texts you can use such authentic fonts as Matchbook, Bazar Medium, Embossed, Hill House,-Fontleroy Brown, Fusty Saddle, Just Old Fashion, Goudy Bookletter 1911, Rocket Script, Parisian, Star Avenue etc. You are free to find and purchase the fonts to match your design on the net.

Try to get a such vintage-inspired design that looks contemporary and suitable, but no old-fashioned. The goal is to create the cozy and noble, antique feel using Vintage web icons and also images and styled blocks for the webpage design. Without any doubt your visitors will return to your internet site with a grateful smile again and again.

But try not to make your vintage design look too stuffy, you need to be aware that professional layout is formal-looking and the major emphasis should be made on the products, services or content material your site provides.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

2d Icons Rule

2D web icons is a wide spread trend in the web development of nowadays. These two-dimensional icons are well known for their flexibility and comparative simplicity. 2.5D Icons is the type of 2D Icons that is closer to pseudo 3D representation.

Being initially based on vector graphics devices 2D computer graphics traces back to the 50s. 2D icons are one of the most essential two-dimensional digital design items.

What's actually 2D?It really is being associated generally with computer graphics and determined as the two-dimensional way of digital images generation. Two-dimensional models mostly are 2D geometric ones, digital images and texts. The term 2D includes not only the models themselves but the techniques and tricks specific to them at the same time.

2D icons and objects don't just depict the real world items but are independent objects with their own semantic value. 2D graphics means that we can get much more direct control of the image than 3D technology. This one of the reasons why they're so preferred in the world of modern web site design.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Business Icons For Your Web Page - Helpful Tips

Choosing design for your future site is really 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 needs of your potential customers.

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

The initial step as the first brick is really crucial. At the very begining you have to decide what's the main audience of your web site. After this think about what do your potential customers expect. Name, hosting provider, content material and design style must be carefully chosen according to the results of your research. You should feel what colors and styles of business icons and other elements of design reflect the business area your company presents.

You need to keep in mind that various colors evoke certain emotions in various groups of people. As an example if you are planning to create the site for some club, it is more effective to use business icons of bright disco colors and unusual forms. You may design them to give a dynamic and lively feel, air of relax and pleasure to your website. 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 please don't use bright colors if you need to develop the web page for some consulting company. Web site design should be clear, calm and reserved. As well avoid playful lines and also light-minded graphics. Cool colors and simple recognizable shapes of business icons are preferable. Such a website will make your potential clients believe into professionalism and stability of your company.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Queen Simplicity - Business Web Icons

Remember the easiest way to success -it is simplicity. Simple business icons, clear typography and enough air (white spaces) are indicators of serious potential, safety and stability of your company. The most traditional colors for designing business icons are black, white, gray and blue. Verdana is the greatest readable font ever, so it is highly recommended for use in the wordings for business icons if there are any. This font is the easiest one to discern in various sizes. Black text on white business icons with some boardings or light shapes is classical. As far as you have already known business icons style requires minimalism. Creating a large amount of multi-color icons, flashy objects, logos and graphics you risk to produce the internet site messy.

One-of-a-kind business icons is the right choice

The new website pages which are not so reputed yet require professional look to make the Internet surfers notice them. The most widespread web page design style used by the artists worldwide is web 2.0 style. An original logo is the face of your company.

Cool content used in the modern design is efficient. In case you wish to make your internet site unique use unique design. Copying and stealing ideas of other companies trade logos or corporate styles is harmful for your website reputation. The unique and recognizable logos as well as business icons that reflect the idea of your online business will help you to take the rightful place on the Internet.

Glass Icons Great Information

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

Today Glass web icons are extremely well-liked elements of webpage or blog decor. This glass icon style is so effective thing that can easily impart the perfect, clear and professional look to your web site, presentation or desktop and embody a kind of the "Web 2.0" spirit.

Glass icons usage pro and contra.

In spite of the elaborate and intricate look and feel of the web icons designed in the glass style, it is obvious that the process of their creation is rather simple. Glass web icons can normally be designed within a few minutes with Photoshop, Illustrator or Corel software, so it's not a big problem even for the newbies in the design sphere. All you need is some helpful tutorial, some skills of working with these pieces of software program and the images you are going to turn into glass web icons.

The glass effect with all its glass buttons, tabs and rollovers is considered to have beenborrowed from the Apples OSX operating system style and copied by Windows (especially Windows Vista). Some may argue that Glass icons are so strongly related to 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 worthless, nevertheless the benefits of the glass icons style are obvious.

Social bookmarking web icons is a crucial feature of the modern web site. If you wish to have got a great advantage for the web-site promotion use eye-catching glossy icons for this purpose. Attractive social bookmarks improve the probability of the site visitors clicking on them and the amount of the clicks increases correspondingly. Due to this fact you are able to promote and bookmark your content more effectively.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Glass Icons Tips And Tricks

Glass web icons can be considered an independent icon style though 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.

Glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc. and at the same time transparent and half-transparent.

Glass icons are frequently depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the "Web 2.0" icons. You may find various tutorials on the net teaching to make vertical reflection effect for web icons.

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 website pages eye-catching and playful. If you want to create such neat web icons you can easily find hundreds of tutorials on the Internet.

Creation of glass web icons.

Adobe Photoshop is the most popular software program for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming steadily more and more flexible software for design. Originally it was rather an image editor and nowadays it enables to produce almost all visual effects used for the graphic design. A great amount of the prominent web designers and illustrators create their great web icons designs with this software. The most important feature of the latest Photoshop versions is the ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc.<\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. It should 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. Don't forget glass icons should be used with taste so that the website style could remain professional and reserved.