Chibilicious

It is truly summer, when everything cold I eat and drink does not seem to hold on their effect after a few minutes. Truly, the ice cream I would be holding would melt easily if I don’t gulp it down immediately. Summer… sun, sand and waves. Everything is so clear, sunny and bright. Even in the exhaustive heat and the constant possibility of dehydration, everybody gets excited over the season.

Everybody gets high and active. I also get to realize I am getting hyped up time and again even at work. When my boss tells us designers to make a design mockup for an industry, I ended up using bright and sometimes eye-candy colors. I couldn’t help myself. When I look out of our office glass window, the street is so bright and everybody walking about has a bright color shade on their clothes to accentuate themselves.

Bright, action, speed, heat, colors.

For me, summer is all that.

I want to place here some color shades / combinations I deem worthy to symbolize the summer descriptions I stated above. This is a spur of the moment thing. Maybe I (or you) would be able to use these colors in a future project that talks of something bright and action.

I admit, one of my major problems in designing are colors. My eyes don’t have that inborn trait of easily selecting which colors look good together and which set would easily entail a specific genre to immediately depict a theme. At times, this is a hindrance of productivity at my current place of work, where tasks could pile up one after another and nothing gets done much just because I can’t move on from a color related predicament of one task. It can get really frustrating thus, mistakes happen instead of productivity.

It’s a good thing though that color aids are everywhere to help the color-problem people like me. I invested on a book before containing more than a thuosand of color combinations categorized by genre to easily choose from when time is of the essence and I needed a quick color combination to work on. The book is Color Index by Jim Krause and it is a must for all kinds of designers.

Just recently, I found this online web color chart at Visibone. Being a web color chart, this contains the 216 colors that works well on the web. Visibone contains other color related products available for purchase, such as the 8½×11 Color Card, 18×24 Color Posters, Mouse Pads, and more.

I’m still trying to decide which to purchase IF I am going to buy something from their site. I see the potential of these materials as great aids to designers like me.

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.

Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.

The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.

To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you’re done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you’re creating a unique graphic, you’re defying the very purpose of using a web template — saving time and effort.

However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site’s theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don’t redesign the whole template.

In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.