Design
Common Mistakes Designers Make
Nobody’s perfect. I think we’re all well aware of this fact, but it’s something we hear over and over in our lives—both personally and professionally. If you’re a web designer like I am, you probably remind yourself of this fact fairly often. I think anyone in a creative field knows what I’m talking about. It’s insanely difficult to gauge “correctness” in something that’s intrinsically correct/incorrect neutral. To a degree, anyway. While mistakes are hard to define in a creative sense, mistakes are certainly made in design. Here are a few [...]
Web Design Tools I Can’t Live Without
Every designer has their own way of doing things. Certain workflows, specific quirks, and yes… particular tools that help them design the best way they see fit. I’m no different. The following are some of my favorite and most used web design tools: 1. Photoshop This one is kind of a given, no? While it’s the most obvious tool imaginable, I can’t overstate the value of using (and more importantly understanding) Photoshop. No other graphics editing program even remotely holds a candle to Adobe’s flagship product. Any designer worth his [...]
Buckeye Interactive Launches AKA Enterprise Solutions’ Website
NEW ALBANY, Ohio (April 11, 2013) – AKA Enterprise Solutions recently completed the rebranding and design of their new website with the help and hard work of Buckeye Interactive. AKA Enterprise Solutions wanted a brighter, more interactive website to accentuate its new brand. Along with creating a communication-friendly design, Buckeye provided AKA with a custom WordPress configuration to facilitate frequent content updates and implement inbound marketing and SEO strategies. The CMS was developed in a way that the website can be easily maintained and grow along with the company. “Everyone is [...]
Easy Ways to “Spring Clean” Your Website
We hate to tell you this, but your website is boring. It’s looked the same for months, maybe even years now. Same images, same content, same information. It’s time to switch things up a bit. While you’re spring cleaning the office, you may want to consider spring cleaning your website as well, to give it a fresh, new look. The Buckeye Interactive team created a list of quick & simple ways to give your website a new look without taking too much time or effort. Content Your website is a [...]
How Clients (Can) Ruin Good Design
Trust your designer. If you take nothing else away from this blog post, those three words sum up the bulk of the message pretty well. As a web designer, I’m tasked with the online visual representation of my client’s company or organization. This is something that certainly should not be taken lightly, by the client or by the designer. Design is all around us. Practically everything we see, do, or use has come from a designer or passed through the hands of a designer somewhere along the way. It’s undeniably [...]
15 Awesome Sources of Inspiration for Web Designers
Designing for the web can be some of the most fun, rewarding work a designer can do. Sure, there are countless challenges and obstacles that come with the territory, but overcoming those hurdles is part of what makes this line of work so fulfilling and worthwhile. There are two vastly different types of stumbling blocks a web designer typically runs into. The first lands on the technical side of the spectrum. Code issues, CSS disasters, FTP hiccups… these types of problems can definitely present themselves to designers. However, there’s the [...]
The Importance of Re-design Rings True for Three Clients of Buckeye Interactive
NEW ALBANY, Ohio (November 13, 2012) — Buckeye Interactive recently launched new redesigns for three of its clients: ConstructionOne, PTSPhysicians, and Warner Concepts. Each of the three clients had come to Buckeye Interactive with outdated sites, seeking a user-friendly design to enhance their online brand and drive sales/lead generation. “Buckeye Interactive helped Construction One create a new website that would reflect the technological and progressive advances we have made as a company over the last several years”, said Marissa Fagnani, Sales and Marketing Coordinator at Construction One. “The response from [...]
What Open Source Means To Web Designers
I have to be honest: when I initially pondered the concept of what open source meant to me as a web designer, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. After all, I’m in a line of work that primarily uses Photoshop and Illustrator, both Adobe products — a far cry from Open Source. What is Open Source? According to the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org), Open Source software is described as a broad, general type of software license that makes source code available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent [...]
Optimizing for Desktop and Mobile: A Build Responsively Workshop Recap
On July 9th and 10th, I attended the Build Responsively Workshop at the Quest Conference Center in Columbus. The purpose of this two-day workshop was to teach web geeks (designers, developers, programmers, project managers… you name it) all about responsive web design and its importance in the future of the web. It was presented by Sparkbox, a web development company out of Dayton, Ohio, and was sponsored by Github, Adobe, AIS, Rosenfeld, and A Book Apart. For those in the dark on what responsive web design is, it’s basically a [...]
Extending Adobe Illustrator With Scripts
Illustrator is Adobe’s professional vector graphics application. Being a personal favorite of mine to create digital art there are a lot of ways you can enhance the program using these extensions known as scripts. Illustrator supports scripts from AppleScript, Visual Basic, JavaScript, and ExtendScript. These scripts can be used to achieve a plethora of desired effects. One of the more difficult looks to accomplish within illustrator or any vector graphics programs for that matter is an overall organic feel to an element. Using scripts you can easily accomplish this among [...]