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The KROW's 'Ready, Set, PAINT' Lessons 1-4 in PDF format here
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"Ready,
Set PAINT!" - Lesson 3 (week 3)
Great
news! Mr. Bigexec liked your logo so well he's decided he
wants you to go ahead and do his web site too! Cool! The only
request he has is the look of the site be sharp like the logo
and stay with the blue colors (it's a "dog thing" , which
coincidentally, Miss Admin said the same thing of him)! No
matter. Whether Mr. Bigexec prefers Poodles from Rottweilers,
isn't the point. What matters is delivering the graphics for
his web site!
Client's
Background Check
Before
you go digging out your coolest spy equipment, let's remember
what we're talking about here. Backgrounds for web pages.
Backgrounds
are simply images you create and then place in your web page.
There's even programs out there which help you make seamless
backgrounds by tessellating images for you (tessellating?.....wait...don't
they make medicine for that kind of problem?!). But, since
backgrounds are so easy, there's really no need to further
fill up a hard drive for something you can create yourself!
It's
the background that helps set the "look" of the site as a
whole. It's one of the first images to load into your pages,
which means you must create an image of small file size. What
does make a background different from other images is it's
"tiled". That means, the image is repeated through the web
page from left to right, top to bottom. Here's what actual
backgrounds look like:
What
you see there...
- This
is a graphic for a background which would have a line of
blue color across the top of the page (scaled down of course)
- This
is a graphic of a background which would create a look of
tan texture of the entire page. This is the actual size
of the graphic for the whole background!
- This
is a graphic for a page which would have a left side border.
Not
much to look at, but place them in a web site and the pages
come alive! Some other things to remember:
- Your
background should enhance rather than inhibit the look of
your site. If you use a pattern, it's a good idea to keep
it faded or softened so not to interfere with the rest of
the page content. If you use colored backgrounds, choose
color for text which will make your pages easy to read.
- Patterned/Colored
backgrounds are great, but may cause some difficulties when
creating drop shadows on other images. There are workarounds
for this, but, it's still a good tip to remember.
- There
are no real "rules" to be followed when creating your background.
It's simply good business practice to create backgrounds
which have that "polished" and professional look.
Now,
with those few thoughts in mind, let's get to it!
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