#effectivedesign

[amanxkataria]

10 Common Mistakes in Graphic Design and How to Avoid Them

A common design mistake is focusing on aesthetics over a clear message, which confuses viewers. Poor font choices, lack of white space, and color misuse disrupt readability, while misalignment and weak contrast reduce visual flow. Without a clear hierarchy, designs can feel chaotic, and neglecting scalability causes issues across platforms. Inconsistent branding weakens identity, and ignoring feedback distances designs from the audience. By prioritizing clarity, consistency, and audience input, designers can create effective, cohesive, and engaging designs.

[weblinkindianet]

𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬: 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬

🌟 This blog post dives into key strategies and tips to design an 𝐄-𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞 that drives sales and keeps customers coming back for more.

𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨: https://shorturl.at/K88Qc

[mudsgraphics]

The Art of Visual Communication in Graphic Design

Graphic design is a dynamic field that blends creativity with technology to convey messages and ideas through visual elements. Among the essential components of graphic design, one of the most crucial is the art of visual communication. This article delves into the second point, "Elements of Design," which encompasses the fundamental aspects of graphic design that every designer should master.

1. Color: The Palette of Emotions

Color is a powerful tool in graphic design, as it has the ability to evoke emotions, set the tone, and create a visual hierarchy. Designers must understand color theory to make informed choices when selecting color palettes for their projects. For instance, warm colors like red and orange can convey energy and passion, while cooler tones such as blue and green often represent calm and serenity. The skillful use of color can guide the viewer's eye and elicit specific emotional responses.

2. Typography: The Art of Letterforms

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and visually appealing. Choosing the right typeface is crucial, as different fonts carry various connotations and can greatly impact the message. For example, a playful and whimsical typeface may not be suitable for a formal document, while a sleek, modern font can enhance the aesthetics of a tech startup's logo. Proper alignment, spacing, and hierarchy within text also contribute to readability and aesthetics.

3. Images and Graphics: Telling a Visual Story

Images and graphics play a pivotal role in graphic design, whether it's creating stunning illustrations, enhancing photographs, or crafting compelling infographics. Designers often utilize software like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to manipulate and edit visual elements. The choice and placement of images should align with the design's purpose and message, reinforcing the overall visual narrative.

4. Layout and Composition: Organizing the Visual Space

Layout and composition involve arranging all design elements within a defined space to create a harmonious and visually pleasing composition. Concepts like balance, contrast, alignment, proximity, and repetition guide designers in achieving effective layouts. A well-structured layout ensures that the viewer can easily navigate the content and grasp the intended message.

5. Hierarchy: Guiding the Viewer's Eye

Visual hierarchy is about emphasizing certain elements over others to lead the viewer's eye through the design. This involves using techniques such as varying font sizes, colors, and placement to guide attention to the most important information. Effective hierarchy is vital for ensuring that the viewer can quickly and intuitively understand the content's significance.

6. Simplicity: Less is Often More

The principle of simplicity emphasizes the importance of clarity and minimalism. Graphic designers should avoid clutter and excessive detail that can overwhelm the viewer. Often, simplicity leads to elegance and a more profound impact.

In conclusion, understanding and mastering the elements of design is fundamental for any graphic designer. These elements serve as the building blocks for creating visually compelling and effective designs. By harnessing the power of color, typography, images, layout, hierarchy, and simplicity, designers can craft visual narratives that captivate, inform, and inspire. Whether working on a logo, a poster, a website, or any other project, these design elements remain at the heart of every successful graphic design endeavor.

[getyouonline-us-blog]

DNS Propagation

Have you ever updated your domain’s A record and noticed that, for at least several hours, your new domain displayed the new site on one device (such as your smartphone), but the old site on another device, such as your home computer? Have you ever updated your domain’s MX records and found that, for at least several hours, not all new emails were delivered to the new email server you specified? I cannot count the number of times I have seen these sorts of situations cause website owners to panic, pull their hair out, or get frustrated with their hosting provider. So what exactly is going on, and what can you do about it? What is happening is that the change you made to your domain’s DNS is propagating throughout the internet. In what follows, I will explain what DNS propagation is, and ways that you can reduce propagation times so that your changes update faster. What is DNS Propagation? “Propagation” is a term with several related meanings, but here it simply means the spreading of something from one thing to another. DNS was devised to be decentralized, so that there is no single, massive file that everyone needs to continuously download in order to have up-to-date records of which domain resolves to which IP. A natural consequence of this decentralized system is that any DNS changes would need to propagate or spread, to other systems in order for the rest of the internet to see those changes. This is a process that requires time. Fortunately, you do have control over some of that time. One of the steps of the DNS resolution process is when your ISP (Internet Service Provider) caches, or stores, the looked-up record for a certain period of time. This is done so that the next time that record is requested it can be given automatically, which speeds things up on your end and reduces traffic on the ISP’s end. When you’ve made a change to your domain’s DNS, any nameservers (such as those belonging to your ISP) that have already stored that record in its cache will continue serving it until the record has expired and it has to request an update. That is why on certain networks it can take hours or even days for a DNS change to be seen, while on others it is immediate: one network has a cached result, and one does not. Fortunately, the length of time that caches are stored before being updated can be determined by you, provided that you have access to edit the TTL, or Time to Live, a field of a given DNS record. Doing so is quite straightforward. How Long Will it Take? You will notice that each record has a TTL field containing a large number. This number is simply time in seconds. A TTL of 14400 means that any nameservers caching results for that record will do so for 14400 seconds, or 4 hours. After 4 hours, the cached record will expire and those nameservers will request an update from your DNS zone. In general, a TTL value of 14400 is perfectly adequate for anyone’s needs. Lowering that value will only increase the burden on your website’s nameservers by causing it to respond with a greater frequency to any other nameservers who are caching your domain’s records. But if you are, for example, migrating your website, or you want to change a DNS record for some other reason, then temporarily lowering the TTL value of certain records not only makes sense but can be beneficial to you. The one caveat that you have to keep in mind before doing so is that you need to plan ahead. So, let’s suppose that I want to change an A record for blog.example.org to some other IP, and I want that record change to propagate as quickly as possible, minimizing the effects of longer record caching. Because that A record’s current TTL is 14400, or 4 hours, I first need to lower it to, say, 300, or 5 minutes, and then wait for at least 4 hours. This is to give any caching nameservers enough time to expire my record and request a new one with its new TTL value. Once I have done that, I can change the A record to a new IP, and after 5 minutes that change should have propagated to every nameserver caching my DNS records. Read the full article

[rubiotografy]

Simple Effective Interior Design Solution for a Small Studio

[renovatiointerio]

" Be so good they can't ignore you ". - Steve Martin. #renovatiointerio #renovatiotipsandtricks #benchmark #innovativedesign #costeffective #simplyamazing #basiccolors #woodeneffect #woodlover #interiordecoratingideas #ineedthissobad #wowfactor #dreamhomegoals #newprojects #latestcollections #designerseries #designstandards #tallwalls #highendvilla #modularhome #newcollection2020 #chevronpattern #woodenlovers #designcollection #moretocome😉 #designoptimization #effectivedesign #twotonecabinets #interestingdesign #fulllenghtmirror https://www.instagram.com/p/CEb2geMpPuw/?igshid=z67fmadixd0h

[criticallyandculturally-blog]

Integrating Theory and Creative Practice

Creating an emotional connection with an audience through graphic design theory and practice.

Here’s what I’m concerned about -

My main interests and concerns as a practitioner are in developing an emotional connection with my chosen audiences.

Emotional engagement is what drives effective design, it’s the soul of creative work. Injecting emotion into design is a special skill, but also a necessity to thrive in the industry and create good work. Ways I could improve my understanding of emotionally driven design is by exploring:

The psychology and craft of graphic design

Various brand personalities through imagery and graphical elements

How emotion is injected into design work.

Based on these three areas of study my goal is to establish if the application of psychological theories make design more effective.

Here’s what I’m going to do about it -

To start gathering information on my interests and concerns, I will focus on the following two goals:

Establish ways in which emotional themes in design can be categorised, to enable a comprehensible approach to breaking down information

Explore how emotional reactions can be heightened through various techniques available to me within my personal practice.

1. Establish Ways in which Emotional Themes can be Categorised

Brand Personality Framework -

http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/groups/finance/Papers/Dimensions%20of%20BP%20JMR%201997.pdf Accessed 29/11/16

The above ‘Brand Personality Framework’ provides an insight into the most effective ways to communicate with a particular target audience. This can be used as a tool to structure to the way I categorise and analyse content, in order to understand the personality traits brands are developing through their design decisions.

2. Explore How Emotional Reactions can be Heightened

Photo Editing -

An area of psychology with growing significance is neuroaesthetics. This deals with the effect of art and imagery on a neurological level and how subtle differences in colour, contrast or grading for example, can affect the emotional reaction to – or the quality of – a piece of design.

Saddington Baynes’ Irish Guinness ad campaign uses the subtleties of colour and grading to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. Below are the original and edited photos for that campaign.

The aim of recent Guinness ad in Ireland, It’s Alive Inside, which featured an Irish hurling ball as a man’s eye, was to shock and unsettle the viewer. The impact of the original image of an eye staring out was further enhanced to highlight the “unflinching biological reality of the eyeball”. Subtle touches, such as giving the hurling ball a wet translucency and adding a tinge of pink to the inner eyelid, helped to make the viewer feel challenged and unnerved. In addition, the balance of tone and palette of the colour grading needed to reflect the brand’s previous campaigns.

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/graphic-design/psychology-of-design-explained/ Accessed 29/11/16

Useful Resources on topic:

http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/groups/finance/Papers/Dimensions%20of%20BP%20JMR%201997.pdf

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140306031629-11082999-the-five-dimensions-of-brand-personality

http://www.creativebloq.com/graphic-design/gestalt-theory-10134960

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/graphic-design/psychology-of-design-explained/

[acorporatedesigner]

Designer vs. Client vs. End User

Sometimes I get wrapped up in my designs, and I forget the ultimate purpose of what I'm doing. You think beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and I have a concept of beauty, and so does my client (my boss), and so does the end user (the person receiving, and potentially throwing away whatever collatoral I create).

Going through school my portfolio was all about creating pieces that ultimately pleased me, and showcased my abilities.

At my first design job it was about pleasing my boss, and not getting fired as I learned the ropes and worked under real timelines, which are far tighter than they are in school.

At this point in my career I'm finally starting to realize that my work doesn't end once it's printed and tucked in my portfolio, but ultimately, how it's perceived by my company's clients is really the measure of my success.

I can use this realization for selfish gains, because obviously, when I'm arguing for more white-space, it's for the end-user's benefit! Dur.  

[getyouonline-us-blog]

Choosing NGINX for growth with Wordpress

Do it Because They Do

WordPress.com is the cloud version of WordPress that is hosted and supported by Automattic. WordPress.com serves more than 33 million sites attracting over 339 million people and 3.4 billion pages each month. Since April 2008, WordPress.com has experienced about 4.4 times growth in page views. WordPress.com VIP hosts many popular sites including CNN’s Political Ticker, NFL, Time Inc’s The Page, People Magazine’s Style Watch, corporate blogs for Flickr and KROQ, and many more. Automattic operates two thousand servers in twelve, globally distributed, data centers. WordPress.com customer data is instantly replicated between different locations to provide an extremely reliable and fast web experience for hundreds of millions of visitors. Problem WordPress.com, which began in 2005, started on shared hosting, much like all of the WordPress.org sites. It was soon moved to a single dedicated server and then to two servers. In late 2005, WordPress.com opened to the public and by early 2006 had expanded to four web servers, with traffic being distributed using round robin DNS. Soon thereafter WordPress.com expanded to a second data center and then to a third. It quickly became apparent that round robin DNS wasn’t a viable long-term solution. While hardware appliances like F5 BIG-IP’s offered many features that WordPress.com required, Automattic decided to evaluate different options built on existing open source software. Using open source software on commodity hardware provides the ultimate level of flexibility and also comes with a cost savings “Purchasing a pair of capable hardware appliances in a failover configuration for a single datacenter may be a little expensive, but purchasing and servicing 10 sets for 10 data centers soon becomes very expensive.” At first, the WordPress.com team chose Pound as a software load balancer because of its ease of use and built-in SSL support. After using Pound for about two years, WordPress.com required additional functionality and scalability, namely: On-the-fly reconfiguration capabilities, without interrupting live traffic. Better health check mechanisms, allowing to smoothly and gradually recover from a backend failure, without overloading application infrastructure with unexpected load of requests. Better scalability both requests per second, and the number of concurrent connections. Pound’s thread-based model wasn’t able to reliably handle over 1,000 requests per second per load balancing instance. Solution In April 2008 Automattic converted all WordPress.com load balancers from Pound to NGINX. Before that Automattic engineers had been using NGINX for Gravatar for a few months and were impressed by its performance and scalability, so moving WordPress.com over was the natural next step. Before switching WordPress.com to NGINX, Automattic evaluated several other products, including HAProxy, and LVS. Here are some of the reasons why NGINX was chosen: Easy, flexible and logical configuration. Ability to reconfigure and upgrade NGINX instances on-the-fly, without dropping user requests. Application request routing via FastCGI, uwsgi or SCGI protocols; NGINX can also serve static content directly from storage for additional performance optimization. The only software tested that was capable of reliably handling over 10,000 request per second of live traffic to WordPress applications from a single server. NGINX’s memory and CPU footprints are minimal, and predictable. After switching to NGINX the CPU usage on the load balancing servers dropped three times. Today in 2012, WordPress.com is serving an average of 70,000 req/sec and over 15 Gbit/sec of traffic from its 36 NGINX powered load balancers, with plenty of room to grow. Most of NGINX load balancers serve about 5,000 req/sec, sometimes peaking to 20,000 req/s, and have about 50,000 established connections. Typical hardware configuration is Dual Xeon 5620 8 core CPUs with hyper-threading, 8-12GB of RAM, running Debian Linux 6.0. As part of high availability setup WordPress.com previously used Wackamole/Spread but has recently started to migrate to Keepalived. Even distribution of inbound requests across NGINX-based web acceleration and load balancing layer is based on DNS round-robin mechanism. Following a successful deployment of NGINX as web acceleration, load balancing and traffic management solution, WordPress.com recently completed migration from Litespeed to NGINX across all application backend servers. NGINX combined with the FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) for PHP allows greater control, easier configuration, and no additional maintenance overhead for the 5-member Automattic Systems Team. Read the full article

[getyouonline-us-blog]

Why Responsive Web Design Is So Important

Mobile internet browsing is on the rise people!  As of this posting the number of people browsing the internet from a mobile device is up to 18% vs. a declining 82% browsing from a desktop computer.  These numbers are up 6% since this time last year. ~ http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201209-201309 What does this tell us? Well, plain and simple, as time goes on and mobile devices keep improving we will see these numbers reverse... meaning soon enough it will be 82% browsing from mobile! How does this relate to web design? It means that we as web developers really need to take a step back and start planning more for the future of our clients and their online presence(s).  Even if it means we have to take a hit to our wallets, there is no reason anymore to delay the inevitable outcome.  We need to start planning and designing from the small screen smart phones up instead of the other way around. Smartphones and tablets have changed the approach toward design and user experience. Before the proliferation of mobile devices with advanced web-browsing capability , web designers had only one primary challenge to deal with - keeping the same look and feel of their websites in various desktop computer browsers. However, interacting with websites on smartphones and tablets is not the same as doing that on a desktop computer monitors. Factors such as Click versus Touch, Screen-size, Pixel-resolution, support for Adobe's Flash technology, optimized markup and many more have become crucial while creating websites with Responsive Design But, why is responsive design so important for your website? Before we understand that, we must understand what is "Responsive Web Design". Responsive Web Design by definition is a web design approach aimed at crafting web sites to provide an optimal viewing experience, easy reading, and navigation across a wide variety of devices from mobile phones to desktop computers. So, Why is it So Important? Time & Money The notion that making a responsive website is expensive is just that, a notion. The fact is, while the cost to make a responsive website is somewhat more than making a conventional website, but the expenses to duplicate a website for mobile and other devices gets completely eliminated, as a result - that cuts total development costs, significantly. In addition to that, a responsive design cuts the total ownership cost, by means of taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website i.e. a "desktop-version", a "mobile-version".  Thus, in the long term, investing in responsive website design is the smartest decision. Pervasion of the Mobile Devices Internet traffic originating from mobile devices is rising exponentially each day. As more and more people get used to browsing the web through their smartphones and tablets, it is foolhardy for any website publisher to ignore responsive web design. The "One Site Fits All Devices" approach soon will be the norm. User experience While, content is king and discoverability of content are foremost success metrics, it is the user experience that enables visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice and preference, anytime. Thus, responsive web design is about providing the optimal user experience irrespective of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV. Device Agnostic Responsive Websites are agnostic to devices and their operating systems. A responsive web design ensures that users get the best and consistent experience of a website on any device of the user's choice and preference - be that the iPhone, the iPad, the smartphones running the Android OS, or the Windows OS and several others. As a result website owners and content publishers can need not exercise the option to build versions of their website for every popular device platform which they expect their audience might be using. The way ahead Thus, rather than compartmentalizing website content into disparate, device-specific experiences, it is smarter to adopt the responsive web design approach. That’s not to say there isn't a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices; for example, if the user-goals for your mobile content-offering are limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach. But that kind of design-thinking does not have to be our default. Now more than ever, digital content is meant to be viewed on a spectrum of different experiences. Responsive web design offers the way forward. Read the full article

[getyouonline-us-blog]

Setup SVN With Attached Drives on CentOS

These are the step that I took to create a SVN server using CentOS 7, while attaching drives as repositories instead of creating a monstrous system drive and importing everything there. If you follow to a "T", you too can have the play-ground I have =) I will lay out my exact steps, including creating the virtual machine I used for this.  If you are currently using a VM or dedicated machine then you can skip those steps.  I imagine this would work on CentOS 5 and up, but don't quote me on that. 1.                                                               i.       Install CentOS as Basic Web Server, no GUI                                                              ii.      Run yum update f.      Run the following 3 to allow ports 80 and 443 through the firewall                                                              ii.      firewall-cmd –reload i.       Run the following                                                              ii.      chown –R apache:apache /svn          Now we need to configure SVN                                                              ii.       Now we need to setup user access a.                                                               i.      Type in the new password twice 3.                                                               i.      n                                                            iv.      mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 (sdc1, sdd1 as well) b.      mkdir /mnt/Disk1 (also for Disk2 and Disk3)                                                             iii.      /dev/sdb1           /mnt/Disk1         ext4       defaults               0              0                                                            vi.      Now we add the proper permissions        chown -R apache:apache /mnt/Disk1 2.      Now create & import the repos (replace Disk* with each disk you mounted, or whatever you want to name it)        Copy all content from the disk to the ‘trunk’ directory we just created                                                             iii. Read the full article