Discover Tennessee

With the increased excitement surrounding AJAX and all the associated frameworks, jQuery, mootools etc.., the web has become a great place to live. Just discovered over at CSSRemix, Discover Tennessee Trails showcases one of the newer applications of jQuery, Parallax Effect. This allows a background image, or anything else for that matter, to move at a different pace than the web page . The differences in tempo of motion creates a wonderful illusion of depth to the site.

Here are some other examples of this Parallax Effect in action:
http://www.thebeatlesrockband.com/videos/cinematic
http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax_demos.html

Designing A Logo

Smashing Magazine is one of my favorite resouces on the web. If you are unfamiliar with this site, it serves two purposes. One, it provides unique content about current trends in web design, techniques and tips for blog development and tutorials on anything from photoshop to illustrator and wordpress (among others).

Smashing Magazine also creates posts that aggreagate design and development trends and techniques from around the web; including but not limited to, WordPress Templates, Writing Resources, and Vexel Artwork Trends and Tutorials.

A recent post, 10 Common Mistakes In Logo Design, caught my eye. This is a shining example of what I love about Smashing Magazine. The post provides a great demonstration of some of the pitfalls that a designer can come across when developing a logo.

Point number 2 Relies on Trends, is a great thought for designers to consider when creating a logo. Logos are a tricky thing, you want it to be fresh and up to date, all the while taking into consideration how trendy you want to be. A trend based logo potentially has a reduced half-life, requiring the logo to be rethought in three to five years. Their advice:

“completely ignoring logo design trends is best”

However, if every designer ignored trends, would logo design ever evolve? What about those logos that buck conformity, go out on their own, and succeed? The history of the Xerox logo is a great marker of this idea. Without a team of designers rethinking the Xerox brand, there would be no eveolution of the logo. Sure, the current logo falls in to the pit of “trendy”, but without these steps, where is the progress? So it’s really a matter of figuring out how trendy or classic you want your specific product to look.

For a great article on design trends, check out Logo Lounge. A great article summorizing the logo trends of 2009, so far.

Impact Of Color

How much impact does the color of a website really have?

I can spend days developing an entire web solution for a client, and through this process, colors have a tendency change. Certain elements require stronger impact, the client doesn’t like the background (which means you need to change everything), or I am just not happy with the color choices I made in the beginning. But, what is the real impact of the color of a website?

Currently, degreego.com is going through a transformation. The client isn’t happy with the color choices for the home page and wants something different. It isn’t that the colors don’t work, or that they are unreadable, it’s that he thinks that if the color of the website is changed, there will be an increase in performance.

Performance? I could see where you can get an increase in website performance when you change the colors to increase the website functionality, or increase emphasis of conversion elements. But where is it that red is a stronger performer than green?

Does brown improve performance?

I have seen studies on the impact of color on a button selection (all of which say that color doesn’t matter, so long as you make it stand out). So what would make the color of a website that important that it can influence conversion rates?

I can see a general logic to the idea of website color. If you build a website for a kid that is about fun and exciting toys, an all black motif might not be the best choice. You could come up with a plethora of examples like this one to strengthen the argument that color has an impact on the success of a website, and I wouldn’t disagree with you.

Will gray convert more?

Where I do challenge my client is when the specific shade of green is hindering website performance.If I increased the saturation of the green bar at the top, we will see a marked increase in conversions — really?