Variety of Website Designs
The job of a website designer isn’t always easy. With the number of designers out there today, being unique out of the millions is a difficult challenge. A designer must be able to create a design different from all others, but also retain the successful characteristics of certain templates. In this I mean that designers must be able to experiment with their own ideas and imagination, but not forget certain basics that everyone should conform, too. Just like writing, a book should be unique, but it should still retain the basic grammar and spelling so that readers would actually be able to understand.
Whenever I start a design, I always look at corporate designs and Wordpress themes for an idea. The corporate designs, such as the templates you see on Yahoo, AOL, or MSN, give a hint at what one should conform to. It’s not difficult to understand that black on a white background is the most preferred method (the simplest, yet the best method) in text writing. The text should also be at a clear font size, usually 10pt for a page covered with links and 12pt for the actual text in an article. This allows people of all sorts to be able to access the website and not have to go to their eye doctor afterwards.
A white background also does so much more than allow people to actually read. It also serves as a basis of what colors one can use. You can use any colors with a white background! Any color looks good with white, whereas if you have a green or a blue background, certain colors that oppose that green or blue will make the entire website look wacky and out of date.
However, although black on white is usually ideal, imaginative choices that still retains a dark font on a light background can be perfectly fine. Dark layouts with light fonts usually do not look so good, but talented designers, such as from Apple, have made a pretty good enter page. Perhaps it’s the contrast from all other websites that makes that one page stand out, but one must also notice that once in the actual website, the background is white and the font is dark gray.
So, when I looked at certain website design sites that used to have pretty good designs, I get disappointed at the new “unique” layouts. Effluence is just one example. I remember a year or so ago, I went to the website and I liked navigating around because all the colors were fine on my eyes, but this recent layout change has destroyed any further visiting attempts. DigiCreation is yet another example. It’s better, since the colors or more pastel, so they are better on the eyes, but the mixture of incompatible colors can also create not-so-good results.
Functionality should come first before any eye-candy. This being said, I am currently not satisfied with my Portfolio layout, nor my ???? theme (the colors and navigation are soon to be changed), but I acknowledge the lack of functionality and practicality in certain aspects of these designs.
2 Responses to “Variety of Website Designs”
July 16, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Actually, I don’t think it’s so much the ethnicity that likes a certain thing rather than it is a trend. It’s just that more innovative designs are developed in America and slowly transported overseas. Soon, I’m guessing that a lot of Asians (not the mad anime fans) will start to have these designs as well. But Asians do like their emoticons!
July 15, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I really enjoyed reading that. A lot of what you said was very true. The white on black (now grey on black as everyone pushes towards web 2.0) appeals to quite a large audience and conforms to the precedents set by books and other reading materials.
While designing for an investment company a while back, I realized that ethnicity plays a factor in design/colour preferences as well. My boss specifically told me to aim for a “clean and light” layout with the occasional “fresh” colours to appeal to an Oriental population. I never thought about it like that but I guess that explains why my previous layouts all had dark text on light background. Then I started paying attention to other people’s blogs and sites, and noticed that indeed, most (there are always always exceptions) Oriental folks leaned towards lighter colours while Southeast Asians went for a huge dash of colour.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s a definite thing and that I can judge the ethnicity of the designer through the layout. Everyone wants change once in a while!