Web Graphic Design
Web graphic design refers to the application of graphic design principles and techniques to create visually appealing and functional websites. It blends aesthetics with strong back-end functionality, ensuring that websites effectively communicate their intended messages while being easy for users to navigate. Designers in this field often focus on integrating branding elements, such as logos and promotional materials, alongside essential content.
Additionally, search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect of web graphic design, as it helps increase a website's visibility in search results. The evolution of web design has seen significant advancements since the 1990s, particularly with programming languages like HTML and CSS, which enable designers to control visual presentation and interactivity. The rise of content management systems, such as WordPress, has democratized web design, allowing individuals with minimal coding experience to create websites using templates and user-friendly tools.
Today, web graphic design continues to adapt, emphasizing mobile accessibility and user-generated content, thus making it more inclusive for diverse audiences. Overall, this discipline is vital for businesses and organizations aiming to establish a strong online presence while effectively engaging their audience.
Web Graphic Design
Fields of Study
Graphic Design; Digital Media; Programming Language
Abstract
Web graphic design is the use of graphic design techniques in designing websites. Web graphic designers must balance the marketing aspects of a website with aesthetic design criteria. They also attempt to increase the likelihood that the website will be found in search results and therefore be an effective advertising tool.
Designing for the Web
Web graphic design is a subfield of graphic design that focuses on designing for the web. It typically involves a blend of graphic design techniques and computer programming. Many websites are used as marketing materials for businesses and organizations. Consequently, web designers often incorporate business logos and other promotional materials. They also use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to increase the likelihood that the web page will be found by search engines.
Web Design Functionality
Most websites, whether business, advocacy, news, or personal sites, serve as both marketing and informational tools. A website that represents a specific brand will incorporate iconic logos, logotypes, or combination marks to aid brand recognition. An iconic logo is a symbol or emblem that represents a person, business, or organization. A logotype is a company or brand name rendered in a unique or proprietary font and style. Combination marks combine icons with logotypes.
In addition to being informative, a website should be visually appealing and easy to understand. Skilled use of typography helps web designers achieve these goals. For example, while logotypes are designed to catch the eye, important information should be presented in a font that is aesthetically pleasing yet unobtrusive. A font that draws attention to itself will detract from the message of the text. Typography techniques such as this help web designers make websites easy to read and navigate.
In addition, web designers must be familiar with SEO, which relies on elements such as keywords and links to ensure that users can find a website using a search engine. SEO techniques are most effective when incorporated into the overall design of a website. As such, many web graphic designers also help users optimize their websites for better search results.
By the 2010s, web design had begun to focus on designing for the mobile web, creating websites and e-commerce sites that could be viewed and accessed using mobile devices. Many do-it-yourself (DIY) website builders started offering mobile web design templates and conversions.
Development of Web Design Techniques
Modern web design began in the 1990s, with the creation and adoption of hypertext markup language (HTML). This markup language specifies the location and appearance of objects displayed on a web page. In the mid-1990s, web designers began using HTML tables. These consist of static cells that can be arranged on a page to specify the location of text or objects. By placing tables within tables, designers could create a richer experience for websites.
The programming language JavaScript was developed in 1995 to code website behavior. This made individual web pages interactive for the first time. With JavaScript, web designers could embed image galleries, add functions such as drop-down menus, and make websites respond visually when a user clicked on text or images. Flash, developed in 1996, allowed designers to add animated elements to websites. However, not all browsers supported Flash, so it was not as universally useful as JavaScript.
The next major step in web graphic design was the introduction of tableless web design. This approach to web design does not rely on HTML tables. Instead, it uses style sheets to format pages. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language, first introduced in 1996, allows designers to separate the visual elements of the design from the content. CSS can determine the appearance and spacing, while individual elements are still described in HTML. Personal Home Page (PHP), another language used in web design, was developed in 1994 but gained in popularity during the late 1990s. It provides further options for making web pages interactive. When used with HTML, PHP allows websites to create new content based on user information and to collect information from visitors.
In the 2010s, most web design is still based on a combination of CSS and HTML. Programming in PHP and the database server software MySQL provides options for greater flexibility and interactivity. New versions of web design languages, such as CSS4 and HTML5, offer more ways of incorporating multimedia, better support for multilingual websites, and a wider array of aesthetic options for designers.
User-Generated Web Design
The popular website WordPress is actually a content management system (CMS) built on PHP and MySQL. It debuted in 2003 as a blogging website, offering users templates and tools to design blogs. The site soon became popular as a basic web design system, allowing users with limited knowledge of HTML or other coding to build basic and functional, if aesthetically rudimentary, websites. Soon web designers began tailoring WordPress sites for customers. This has essentially served as a shortcut for the web design industry. As of 2015, WordPress remained among the most popular web design systems in the world, accounting for about half of all CMS-based websites on the Internet.
The debut of WordPress launched a new era in DIY web graphic design. Other websites such as Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly soon began offering users the ability to design websites quickly and easily, without the need to understand programming languages. Most such sites provide users templates in the form of wireframes. Wireframes are structural layouts that specify the location of images, text, and interactive elements on a web page but are not themselves interactive. Users can then insert their own images and text and, depending on the underlying program, also rearrange the layout of the wireframe. Like most elements of online commerce and marketing, web graphic design is moving toward user-generated and user-influenced design in order to open up to broader audiences.
Bibliography
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