Customer Street and UFindUs Web Design

Understanding Advertising

For those who are not aware of web design and specialise more in advertising and graphics, I am here to talk about the way I conduct myself and how thinking “outside the box” in advertising can be successful.

Many people say minimalism is the way forward, in some cases this might be the viable solution. I’m going to talk about recruitment advertising and tell you how I think outside the box. Trust me! I’ve spent years doing this, it’s all trial and error and I believe I’ve got it right.

Recruitment Advertising

We have all looked in a newspaper at some point in our lives to see what jobs are available. I would honestly say that a large percentage of job adverts are too simple and are lacking a bit of character. That’s where I come in… I believe this type of advertising should have a number of things:

A) This type of advertising should strongly define the character of the company, capturing the very essence of what the company is about. Be experimental and keep thinking outside the box!

Stock image sites are the latest way to get high quality and professional imagery cheap (depending on subscription terms). When signing up with stock image sites you should read through the terms and conditions and contact the vendor regarding anything you are unsure of. Even though your are using the stock image you are potentially only leasing it from them.

Where can I find good stock image sites?

Obviously using a search engine is the most operative choice but I also recommend cross referencing with digital photography magazines as well these will be a good source for finding stock image sites where people submit there own photos to.

Printing media from stock image sites.

When using photos from stock image sites make sure you read the terms and conditions as you may find you may or may not be able to use it for printing purposes or in fact you may even have a limited amount of times you can print the artwork.

In this Photoshop button tutorial you will learn simple ways of creating glass buttons in Photoshop. A lot of website and graphic designers spend hours, days and even weeks trying to create glass buttons. Unfortunately many have tried and failed. I’m not saying this is going to be the world’s best glass button or a perfect glass button but it will be visually good enough to do the job.

Lets make Glass Buttons!

When creating glass buttons you must first create a flat coloured object as the base graphic. Start by making a circle using the Photoshop marquee tool and fill using the paint bucket.

Select, Modify and Contract

After you have done this go to Select whilst highlighting the shape with the marquee. Go down the menu to “Modify” and you want to “Select” contract. This will bring up a pop-up box asking you how many pixels you want to contract by. For this I chose 6 pixels because of the size I have designed it at.

Good day to you all. Today’s article is going give you the once over on webdesign.

Lets get started!

First of all open photoshop and select File > New ( CTRL + N ). Input the dimensions of your site ( example: 800 x 600 ). Remember length isn’t an issue but keep you width to a maximum of 800 pixels.

Think carefully about your layout and refer to your site map. Start from the top of the page, plan your banner and navigation, then continue down sculpting the first content areas and any additional navigation menu’s.

NOTE: When designing navgation menu’s try to make them look simple and uncomplicated.

The busier the site is the more professional it should look. Try not to pile to much content on to your homepage, ideally add a “Read more” or “Go to” link underneath the snipet of content to lead to a page with the full article on it.

Choosing a font can make or break a website, designing a website isn’t as easy as you may think, you have to consider every little detail and choose colours, content and layout ideas carefully.

Where going to have a look at fonts, for those who are unsure what a font is, a font is a name given to a text style, such as Arial, Tahoma, Verdana and Times New Roman.

When you first install window on your pc, it is preloaded with standard font types. These font types or font-families can be upgraded with new fonts, You can find FREE font sources online. These fonts once downloaded are placed in a folder located in the following directory: C:\WINDOWS\Fonts

I recommend restarting your machine for windows to recognise all the new fonts or just closing down any software that generates text (word, photoshop etc).