Veerle's blog

A while ago I already talked about finding inspiration. An ideal situation is when you receive shoots from a professional photographer and the product is easy to understand and to present itself. Only looking at those pictures can give you the inspiration you need to get started. But what about when you receive no material at all or only a logo or photos that you know won’t fit from the moment you laid your eyes on them. Another example that can limit your inspiration is when the company uses a difficult color pallet. I always have trouble working with colors that don’t really suit me.

Creating websites in such cases is always a challenge. I often have to accomplish the "impossible". They want a professional looking design but deliver me tasteless or "difficult" material to work with.

So what do you do? Do you say 'sorry but I can't use this', with the risk that you 'hurt your client's feeling' because he thinks the world of his material? Or do you try to make something out of it anyway? Sometimes you only have this option because, your client knows the picture isn't suitable but it is just so important that you are obligated to use it. Here's an example of what I mean

These pictures are fragments of one of my designs I did for the Library of Congress. I'm always obligated to use the pictures they deliver, since these sites are all about the use of these pictures. So I have no way out and I try to make the best of it. But sometimes I do love the pictures from the Library, like for instance the old maps used in Zoom Into Maps or the old pictures from the 40's in On The Homefront or the pictures I had to use for From Flight ot Fantasy. So most of the time I work with very interesting material. These projects are actually my favorite ones, my very special ones since they demand a lot of drawing work and a lot of creativity.

The situation where you get rather bad pictures from the client occurs more often in my experience. And there are different ways to handle this smoothly. If the picture is somehow replaceable I'll just refuse to use it and I will explain to my client why and try to show examples of pictures that would suit perfectly. One of the important arguments is that pictures just make halve of the design. This isn't an easy task since we need to convince. I must say if the client doesn't get convinced, chances are there isn't really a good connection between you and the client and you might think about the fact if this job is really worth doing.

It took my company years to be in a position that we can refuse certain jobs, if you're only getting started you probably do it any way. If this is the case you have to realize that the boundaries that you set now will affect your work later on. I've been there and it isn't easy to get the client to understand that prices go up when you're getting more experienced. Of course a lot of other factors like budget are there to think about too. Some clients want the impossible for less then nothing, but let's not get into this right now.

Say you really need to create a professional design starting from material of less quality, then here are a few tips that might come in handy:

• try converting the pictures to duo-tone and use those tones as base for your design
• if just the colors are rather flat then try the Auto Contrast, Auto Level and Auto Color features of Photoshop CS
• you can also try to use the less quality image rather small in your layout and use a nice abstract background to color things up
• or you can just search for other images on royalty free libraries (like Stockbyte, Image100, Corbis, Getty Images,... etc.
• or if you have no budget at all, go to Stock.xchng

What do you do with bad logos ?

• if "bad" means bad quality, then I suggest try re-drawing it in Illustrator, it's what I do (a lot)
• if "bad" means really ugly design, then I try to convince my client for a re-design, not always obvious but worth a try
• if you have to implement a jpeg logo with a white background you might consider using the multiply mode for that layer (Layer palette in Photoshop) to hide this background

Of course I'm talking from a professional point of view here.

Sometimes not the pictures or the material are the hard part to deal with, but the sector of business to create something flashy. If you have to create a brochure or website for a company that sells wood working machinery or for a company that sells clothing like Esprit (wouldn't mind reworking this one! btw :-P) ... which job would you choose? I guess the answer is obvious. What I try to do in such instance is trying to find elements that are prefectly connected with the product. For instance images of wood in its different form could suit very well in my example. Besides this you can use forms and shapes that creates a modern effect, like circles. Combined with suitable colors you can achieve a whole different look far from boring and unattractive.

If you think I might have forgotten something, well, please let me know. All suggestions are welcome. I'm also interested in hearing how you deal with these situations so don't hesitate to leave a comment. I'm also still learning...

So for your next challenge think about this post, who knows what may come out of it ;-)