Space (Negative space) We all pay attention to amount of space that we use on our projects. What about space that you don’t use? Do you notice that? Well it’s just as important. Stand back and squint again. Notice percentage of items filling up your project, what is percentage of negative, unused space? While you want to make most of your space available, you don’t want all of it used up either. Using too much makes an ad look busy too little it looks empty. An appropriate percentage can be anywhere from 60% to 80% used space and 40% to 20% negative or unused space. Keep your percentages in that range and you’ll have a nicely balanced ad, web page, or project.

Texture This is becoming important again with web design. All of really cool and interesting textures that you can use for anything from backgrounds to text is amazing. Remember one thing that a texture carries almost as much weight to eye as a photo. Just as you would not place a lot of photos on your page don’t use too many textures. Also watch your placement of these they can pull eye away from where you want it to move.

Remember one thing, when it doubt simplify.

4.Reduce color palette. Many images have millions of colors so first thing that you need to do is reduce colors to 256. You will lose some depth with this.

5. Save file in a standard format. JPEG is most common for photos and you can compress image with a JPEG for further reduction in file size. It’s not unusual to see GIF or PNG as well. Remember that with a 56k connection a 150k file will take 20 seconds to load. If you’re creating a web page every photo that you add will add to time it takes to download all of images. If you keep images small in size smaller resolution will not be as obvious.

Copyright 2004 Kelly Paal