For a website to appear great, it's not always about how well the web designers can implement their skills. Graphic designers can also take part, but as they take a minor role, their job is to assist the tiny bits by making them as astounding as their bigger counterparts.
In web design, the aspects involve the layouts, positioning, colors, grids, image-text ratio, HTML-CSS codes, and how all of the aspects can blend well together into one piece of art. Graphic designers improvise what web designers often overlook, and this is by doing the small portions that seem to be secondary, but in fact could give a significant impact in the overall design.
The job of a graphic designer is self-explanatory: create graphics that accomplish tasks. But how graphic designers can put their skills into use when concerning web design? The answer is using their skills in alignment of design-elements, colors, and symbolism.
While graphic design and web design are often interchangeable, what sets graphic design and web design apart is its ancestry. Graphic design is a lot older than web design, and the missing link between those two is animations. On the web, interactive design is the key. While web designers focus on the 'moving parts' of the web, graphic designers can look at the static parts.
What graphic designers do here isn't doing anything fancy, but their job is to improve the process of a better design by essentially giving "aesthetic" appeal that provides better usability and influence. Graphic design is doing only a fraction of work, but the job is done when it's done.
So when web developers are trying to create things behind the scene, web designers are those who visualize the codes. Graphic designers are the ones that take everything to the next step.
Playing With Font
A typeface isn't just a font to spell the words inside a page. In a website, fonts are what those that makes things more pronounced, easier to read: making whatever the site has to say in a way that is more pleasuring to read. It's a way to make people get the message clear.
Pick a font that stands out for titles and headers. But for subtitles and the content, fonts should be simple and visually more readable. There are many font palettes to choose, and pick whichever best describe the site.
Contrast Colors
When web designers do the layout and the overall design, graphic designers use more colors to concept art as visuals. When picking a corresponding visuals for an article, graphic designers should create something that is both visually appealing and self-explanatory, adding the value of the page's content.
Contrast colors won't only make visuals stand out better, they'll also be more visually appealing and distinguishable. A great combination is a light background with darker-colored text, or vice versa
High-Quality, Small Size
As the display of many devices are improving, people are expecting more crisp and outstanding colors. But for web designers and web developers, better images mean larger file size. Larger files mean heavier loading website and that's the least they want.
Graphic designers can create smaller file size without sacrificing much of the image's quality. One trick is to use lossless image compression. .PNG images do well when they're compressed if compared to .JPEG files.
Further reading: Choosing The Best Images To Make Your Web Contents More Appealing
Transforming Images, Protecting Quality
Altering and editing how an image looks are common when creating a visual for the web. The most common software to use is Adobe's Photoshop. Using "Smart Object", designers can create, copy and paste images so they can be resized, wrapped and transformed without destroying their quality.
Images that are altered can lose data, making them less sharp and crisp that their originals. Protecting the quality of the image as it's edited can guarantee a better overall result.
Graphic Design For A Website
When web designer approach a web design on one side, graphic designer comes from another. Both despite having two contrast opinions about something, they can work together to create a wonderful piece.
For a website to succeed, it involves a lot of things. From how well the content is written, how good the marketing efforts and other internet marketing strategies are implemented, how many backlinks and SEO is made, to how the site is structured, made and design, and many others that is not limited to brand awareness, competitors and the targeted market.
So for a website to succeed, it should be optimized to be found whether via organic terms (non-paid), through advertising, social media networks, public relation and others.
But when it comes to design, a website's looks should live up to its potential. Visuals should attract the right audience using the right way.
Graphic designers tend to know colors combinations better. They may not be good in determining the layout of a website or doing other fancy things that web designers need to know in common. But when it comes to playing with colors and understanding how each elements interact with each other, graphic designers excel.
The very good reason for this is because graphic designers put more attention to details, more than how they're stuctured. When web designers tend to create something with a big goal in mind, seeing a website as a picture that represents something bigger, graphic designers work in the opposite way. When web designers see things from big to small, graphic designers see the smaller bits first.
Every website should have a purpose. Without a goal, there is no use of getting online in the first place. How professional the products/services a website has to offer can often be determined on how well the design presentation of the website in overall. While content delivers visible information, design is the wordless information that hits the mind without talking.
The whole process of web design is just to create attention, delivering the best possible user experience by making people comfortable at whatever they're doing on the page, while graphic design is the one that adds value to the overall content. So when a site's usability and brand's pronunciation is at stake, a graphic designer's point-of-view can always come in handy.