Blog

Today we have a special treat for you!  We’ve given you a glimpse into the lives of a graphic designer, a copywriter and a web developer, but today we bring you a glimpse into the life of a creative director.

Last week we talked about five of the most common issues we see with websites that didn’t get proper attention when they were being designed and built.  Sometimes business owners resort to less than ideal solutions in order to save money, and sometimes they just don’t realize what their choices are. Today we’re going to talk about your two most viable and safe options for a clean and user friendly website. Your budget will play a big role in which option you choose.

Custom designed websites

Sure, a plain peanut butter sandwich is ok, but it’s a little dry. A plain jelly sandwich is also edible, but it’s lacking something. This is exactly how it is when you have a great design with uninspiring or meaningless copy, or great copy with a visually unreadable design. You need the two to be equally fabulous if you really want to have a winning combo that keeps people coming back for more. That’s why it’s so important for copywriters and designers to work together. We work in a content-focused industry, so we place high value on this symbiotic relationship.

Copy inspires design, design inspires copy

At GLAD WORKS, we love to champion a good cause. When a client comes to us with a project that strikes our hearts, we get deeply involved. Their mission becomes our mission. We bring it home with us, we think about it on the weekends, we talk about it with our friends.

In the world of design and marketing, there’s a lot of talk about how color can influence consumer’s purchasing decisions. It doesn’t seem like it should make that much of a difference since a great product should speak for itself, right?  Ah, yes, but you’ve got to get the product into the consumer’s hand first!  That’s where the color of the packaging and of the product itself becomes really important. Color doesn’t only affect the buyer’s feelings toward the product, but also toward the store as a whole.

When we were approached to design a logo for Paula Abdul’s latest project called IGNITE! Spark the Moment, we were pretty stoked to help out. In fact, we were all saying “yahoo!” on the inside. We love taking part in great projects like this, so we were happy to add this feather to our cap. Today we’re going to talk about the project a bit but we’ll also talk about what got us the job. It’s a little something called “relationships.”

The Paula project

This is the last edition of our three part series on the anatomy of a website!  By now you know what a sitemap and a wireframe are and you know all about the different kinds of navigation. Today we’re going to wrap it all up by going over a few of the other important elements of a website that you already know about, but maybe haven’t thought of in quite the way that we do.

After our discussion of sitemaps and wireframes from last week, we thought we should move on to talk about some of the more fun parts of a website’s anatomy and talk about navigation. Web users are very impatient, so navigation is incredibly important in helping them find what they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible. It can actually make or break the success of your website, so it’s certainly a very big deal and something you should pay close attention to.

Still got your dissection kit from last week? 

Good!

You’re gonna need it!

Website navigation

In an effort to let you into our wild, wacky (but not too wacky), wonderful GLAD WORKS world, we’ve got a fun series for you!  Ready? 

It’s about the Anatomy of a Website. 

That’s right, GLAD WORKS friends! We’re gonna get elbow deep into the innards of a website. From the very bare bones and structures to some of the bigger parts, we’re going to explain it all. By the time you’re done reading this series, you’ll be able to dissect a website and identify all its parts and pieces. And when you come to us to design one for you, you’ll be able to talk about it like a pro.

Greetings GLAD WORKS friends!  Due to the smashing success of our post on RGB vs. CMYK color spaces, we decided to dig in a little more and explore the wild and wooly world of Raster Images vs. Vector Graphics. They’re two different kinds of computer graphics, and just like with RGB and CMYK, they have everything to do with the way your projects come out. We’re telling you about all of this so you won’t feel quite so lost and in the dark when we start speaking GLAD WORKSIAN on you.