illustrator / photoshop
imagery — the other element of visual style
a good look requires something good to look at
Design is vital to your site's look; but it's usually not enough.
You also need images. Even if you don't strictly need pictures for content purposes (like product shots or process diagrams), the right images can do a lot for you, like:
- giving users an immediate idea of the content on the page.
- making a page more interesting by breaking up blocks of text.
- giving users a focal point to look at and remember.
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let us paint you a picture...
custom illustrations give you exactly what you need
Clip art may be fine for personal projects (or not, depending whom you ask), and stock photos can be nice, but custom images on your site show that you cared enough to do it right.
ec+g has years of experience creating original illustrations for the web, as you can see in our illustration gallery and website portfolio. We favour custom illustrations for a number of reasons:
- you can create an illustration of anything you want, even things that don't exist
- you can create unique and meaningful icons for your site that tell users about you and your site at a glance
- you can include elements in the illustration to complement design elements elsewhere on the page
- you can exactly match the colours in your web design
- unlike photographs, they can be resized as you like with no change in image quality.
The element icons on this site, as well as the background pictures for the menu and content area are original illustrations we created.
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photoshop — better than reality
no photo is picture perfect
Sometimes a photograph is better than an illustration, as with product or people shots. Even in these cases, you'll want to edit the photo:
- at very least, to resize it or crop it (cut out parts you don't want).
- to add an effect to the photo (like the "dry brush" effect we've given the photo in the right sidebar).
- to enhance brightness or contrast, or to modify the colours.
Our Photoshop expertise makes such tasks quick and easy, and also allows us to give photos much more complex treatments (such as combining parts of different images) for unique effects.
ec+g also has the technical knowledge to "optimize" your images — to make sure you achieve the right balance between image quality and file size (to make downloading your pages faster for users).
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the best of both worlds
the power of combining illustration and photoshop
Using Photoshop and Illustrator together gives an extremely powerful toolbox for creating just the right image.
For example, the picture in the right-hand sidebar of this site's pages started with a photo. In Photoshop, we:
- resized and cropped the photo to show only what we wanted to show.
- changed the contrast, brightness and colour balance to make the image clearer and better-suited to our colour scheme.
- applied a "dry brush" filter effect to give it the feel of a painting.
Then, in Illustrator, we created the transparency effects which give the picture its "ragged edge", and also added the text for the element name.
The result is a unique image that perfectly suits the site's visual design, which would be difficult to produce any other way.
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