I’ve been spending some time on the Etsy forums for the past couple weeks and have been monitoring a thread arguing against using the Papyrus and Comic Sans fonts in your shop banners. The main argument is that these fonts make your banner and your store by extension cheap and unprofessional looking. There were of course some rebuttals by the Papyrus and Comic Sans font lovers and general fur flying and pleas of “Please, can’t we and all of our fonts just get along?

While I’m not a big fan of Comic Sans or Curlz for that matter, I’ve always found a place for them and Papyrus in my font archive. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar or the trailer or at least the movie poster, you’ve seen what looks to be a close cousin of Papyrus being used in the logo…so it can’t be all bad.

Where do I stand on the debate? I’ve designed a number of banners and logos throughout the years and while there are some fonts that I use more than others, there are very few that I would absolutely refuse to consider. When it comes to designing a logo or a web banners, here are some the “rules” that I use:

1. The font you use should fit your brand- This is THE biggest consideration when it comes to designing something for your brand. Whatever you use, must fit the kind of image that you’re trying to portray. In many cases, that might not be Comic Sans or Papyrus, but I’ve seen some pretty good work that have used those fonts. And the reason why those fonts worked in those particular cases is that those fonts were used in a way that fit the brand.

2. It’s not always “what” you use, but “how” you use it- The mark of a great designer is the ability to take just about any material and transform it into something great. If you’re a Project Runway fan, then you’ve probably seen this season’s second challenge where the designers took potato sacks and transformed them from this:

To this:

If you’re designing a banner or logo on a budget, take a look as some of the free font sites like dafont.com. There are literally hundreds of free fonts that you can browse through and experiment with. Download what you like, what appears to fit the image you’re trying to project and play around with them.

Remember to use what you have in fun and different ways. Play around with color, shading, and size. Combine different elements like illustrations, photographs, and special effects to make your plain old simple font into something great.

3. In some cases you might have to consider paying for a font- You have to pay for certain fonts for a reason…it’s because they are usually a higher quality than those that you get for free. The characters are are finely formed, most come with full character choices, including punctuation and other special characters. And many of the paid fonts also have true bold and true italic version instead of the “faux bold” and “faux italic” options you have to use in Microsoft and Photoshop. Therefore your logo or banner looks a bit more professional. There are many projects in which I had to bite the bullet and buy a font because it fit the needs of a project perfectly.

4. Keep it simple- Just like you can take a plain old free font and do something spectacular with it, you can also take a nice paid font and make your banner look like a hot mess. In most cases simple will do much better than something that’s overly worked and complicated. This is especially true if the font itself is fancy or have complicated looking elements. In that case, balance out a heavy or complicated looking font with simple elements, layouts or colors.

5. Keep it readable- This should go without saying, but if you’re making a banner or a logo that contains the name of your business, anyone looking at it should be able to actually read it. Don’t sacrifice readability for style.

6. Keep an eye on what everyone else is using- Just like everything else, fonts seem to go in and out of popularity. So keep your eyes peeled as to what kind of fonts designers seem to be using. If you see a font that you love, then you can find out what it is by going to What the Font! If you want to seem trendy and up to date, keeping up with the trends might be good for you. On the other hand, if you want to be unique and want to stand out a bit, you might want to do the opposite and pull an old but perfectly great font out of the mothballs.

7. When in doubt…take it to a professional- If you don’t know what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what font you’re using. Some artists can easily take their design expertise and make some perfectly beautiful logos and banners. Some can’t. If you’re in the latter group and nothing you try looks right, then get a graphic designer to help you. Getting a professionally designed Etsy or blog banner shouldn’t set you back too much. I typically charge between $40 to $50 for a blog banner. So you can look for folks in that price range and you’ll get something that looks nicer and less stress inducing.

So where do you stand on the great font debate? Is there a font you love or one that you love to hate? Drop me a comment and let me know!

This weekend I got a frantic email from a possible client that I had spoken to earlier last week. This client was unhappy with their current web designer and was interviewing me as a possible replacement. I asked the potential new client if they had ownership of their website and they said that they would check and get back to me.

Apparently, the talk with the old web designer didn’t go very well as the next email and phone call I got was panicked one asking me to please help them. The current web designer didn’t like the fact the client wanted to leave and had started to shut down parts of their various websites…and had threatened to erase them completely.

Now how could something like this happen? While most web designers I know are trustworthy and ethical, unfortunately this is not the first time I’ve witnessed something like this. If you have someone that’s helping you to design or maintain your website, you have to be very careful not to give them absolute control or allow them to own critical parts of your web presence…lest you might find yourself in the same situation as my unfortunate prospective client.

Here are some tips on how to keep control of your website:

1. Always purchase your own domain names- Never, ever allow anyone except yourself to purchase the domain name(s) for your website. Some designers will offer to buy the domain for you as a “convenience”. Don’t let them! It’s a simple matter for them to name themselves as the owner of the domain name which will make it impossible for you to do anything with it without going through your designer. That means that if you get into a dispute, then the designer can keep your domain name or refuse to allow you to transfer it over to another web host. You web designer can easily hold your entire website “hostage” this way.

Buying a domain name is not difficult. You can get one at My Namespot Domains in less than five minutes for less than $10 per year. Remember that your domain name is like real estate on the Internet and once someone purchases one, it’s theirs until they decide to give up ownership. Don’t delegate something that important to someone else.

2. Keep track of all your important account information- In most cases, your web designer will need to have access to your web hosting account information, or the log-in to your YouTube account or any kind of account that you might need to allow them access to do their jobs. Just like your domain name account, you need to be the primary contact for all of your online accounts. That means if anything goes wrong, the first person these companies will contact will be you…not your designer.

You also need to keep track of passwords, usernames, account numbers and you need to log on to these accounts on a regular basis to make sure that you have access to them. This will keep your web designer from locking you out of your important accounts in the case of a dispute.

3. Keep a copy of your website in your possession- Even if you’ve hired a professional to maintain your website for you, you should always have an up-to-date copy of your website in a place were you can grab it in an emergency like your computer hard drive, a CD, or a thumb drive. This is a good idea anyway just in case your web host starts having problems and you need to find a new host quickly. But it’s also a good way to keep an unscrupulous web designer from blackmailing you by threatening to shut down your website.

Also, if your website also uses a database of any kind…say your website has an online store like Zen Cart or OScommerce or you’re running a Wordpress blog, make sure that you also have recent backups of those as well…especially if these databases contains customer or financial information of any kind. It’s actually a lot worse to lose this information than it would be to lose your website. You can at least recreate a website…it’s much harder to recover customer information.

Ask your web designer to show you how to retrieve back ups of your website and databases if you have them and start getting backups of your website on at a weekly basis. If your web designer can’t (or won’t, which is a bad sign) show you how to retrieve your backups, contact your hosting company and have tech support show you how to do it.

4. Don’t allow your lack of knowledge get in the way- I’m always giving my own clients and potential prospects this advice and as a rule, I never register domain names or open hosting accounts for my clients, even if they ask me to. Some of the less technically savvy ones are always trying to get me to do stuff like this for them because they don’t want to have to deal with the “technical stuff”. But I always warn them that their lack of technical knowledge is the thing that makes them vunerable to getting ripped-off by someone less than honest.

The bottom line is that if you’re going to have a website, there’s going to be a certain amount of “technical stuff” that you’re going to have to deal with. It comes with the territory. And the more knowledgeable you are about this stuff, the less likely you’re going to be taken by an unscrupulous web designer. This doesn’t mean that you need to turn yourself into a tech nerd. But every small business owner who owns a website should know how to buy their own domain names, open up a web hosting account, open up accounts at YouTube, Facebook, etc, and how to make regular backups of their website. If you know how to do these things…you won’t find yourself in the position of the poor soul I talked to this weekend.

So what do you think? Do you have a web designer horror story you want to share? Leave your tips and stories in the comments section!

P.S. Some time back, I did a telephone interview on how to find and work with a web designer with marketing expert, Connie Green. You can listen to an excerpt of the interview here.

I found a really interesting link on Twitter yesterday that says the the myth of “above the fold” in web design is officially dead. If you’re not familiar with this term, it originally came from the newspaper world where newspapers are generally folded in half. The 50% of the content that fell on the upper half of that fold was said to be “above the fold”. If you look at any newspaper today, you’ll see that the main stories, major headlines, and basically anything that’s supposed to be really important are printed on the upper half of the fold.

This tradition eventually migrated over to the online world where all of the important content on the homepage (or any page for that matter) was designed to be “above the fold”. In the online world, “above the fold” meant the part of the web page that you can see without having to scroll down.

This sometimes made for some very messy layouts where designers sometimes tried to cram everything at the top of a website so that people wouldn’t have to scroll down. The logic was that people hated to scroll, so if you had something on your website that you really wanted people to look at, make sure that it was located at the top. Back when this principle was during it’s heyday, I had websites that were a nightmare to design because the client didn’t want people to scroll down at all!

According to this mini-report that’s no longer true today because:

1. Monitor sizes have gotten bigger (an Apple Cinema display anyone?)
2. Screen resolutions are getting smaller
3. Because of the different sized monitors and screen resolutions, there’s no certainty of where “the fold” actually is
4. People really don’t mind scrolling down after all…especially if you have a nifty scroll-wheel mouse

So what does this mean for you and your art website? Basically this:

• It’s still a good idea to design your website so that your most important content is up at the top…but you don’t have to cram everything else up there too.
• If your “above the fold” content indicates that there’s more good information if you just scroll down…people will do it.
• Sprinkle your “calls to actions” or other important stuff on different positions throughout the page. My newsletter sign ups are located in three different pages on any part of my blog. At the top of a blog post, at the upper right hand corner…and on the footer of the blog. The top spot still gets 85% of the sign ups…but people still sign up from the footer too!

You can download the report here. It’s a really quick and interesting read.

As an artist, images of your work are a major part of your website. Therefore it’s important that you have those images as optimized as possible. Here are some tips to make sure you’re putting your best image forward.

• Make sure that you start with the best possible images. Photoshop can only do so much. An image that’s already blurry, poorly lit, or small can’t be made to look fabulous through the magic of Photoshop. For some tips on how to get great images of your artwork, you can check out my Photographing Your Artwork roundup post.

• Avoid putting images with large files sizes on your web. An image that is a megabyte (MB) in size takes some time to load up on a browser and on average, you’ve only got 8 seconds or less before a visitor decides to leave your website. Things that effect the file size of your image includes the actual size (in pixel) of your image, the format, and the resolution. Here’s a detailed explanation on how image resolution and image size can effect the speed of your website.

• Make sure that your images are no more than 72 dpi in resolution and are either in .gif, .jpg, or .png format before you put them on your website. If your images are photographs of your work, .jpg is the best format. You can check out a previous post I did about image formats for the web to learn more.

• Make sure that the actual image size and file size of your photographs are the final size that you want on your website. Don’t take a picture from your digital camera that’s 3MB and 3000 x 2000 pixels in size and expect to resize it in Dreamweaver or Expression Web. These programs don’t actually change the image, they only change how the image is displayed on your web page. You need to have a graphics editing program like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GIMP to resize your images. You can also use online image editors like Splashup, Picnik, and Photoshop Express for some quick resizing jobs.

• For the best quality images, remember that you should size down rather than size up. If you have an image that’s small, don’t try to enlarge it to make it look bigger. It usually ends up looking fuzzy. Instead, start with a large image and size it down.

• Make sure that you save your original images when you’re doing any resizing or retouching. Once you save over that image, there’s no going back. This is especially important to remember if you are sizing down an image or saving an image as a .jpg.

• Avoid saving and resaving .jpg images. The .jpg format is what’s known as a “lossy” image format. That is, the quality of the image degrades a bit every time you save it. If you can, keep your original images in a “lossless” format like .tif or .eps and save your .jpgs from those images.

Yesterday I wrote about my biggest website design pet peeve, reversed color text, or the infamous white text on the a black background. Hate it…hate it and by some of the Twitter and email response, it appears that a lot of other people hate it too.

So while I’m on the subject of text on your website, here are a few more tips:

Don’t make the main body of your text too small, especially if your audience is *ahem* mature. Don’t go smaller than 11 point, and 12 to 14 point is usually ideal.

Stay away from low contrast text. This is the old light gray text on the white background color scheme that was all the rage a few years back. Some designers made it a double whammy and also made the text extra small to boot. Folks with low vision…heck even folks with normal vision may have problems reading it. Some people have commented that they find black on white a bit harsh. If you want to go a little gray on your text that’s fine, just make it a dark grey.

Be consistent with your fonts. In an effort to make websites more interesting, some people make the mistake of using just about every single font in the world on one page. While a talented designer can pull off the multiple font families trick and make it look interesting, if you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll probably end up making it look like a mess. A rule of thumb I use is to stick with one kind of font for your headlines and subheadings and another kind of font for your body copy and captions on your website. That’s simple enough to keep most people out of trouble.

You’ll also want to be consistent with your font sizes as well. Body copy should be between no smaller than 11 point all the way up to 14 point. Main headlines can be 4 to 10 points higher than your body copy and your sub-headlines can be in between your body copy and your main headline sizes. Captions are usually 2 to 4 points smaller than your body copy.

Don’t underline any text that’s NOT a link. Sometimes people underline words in their website text to emphasize words. The problem with this method is that most people know that underlined words usually means that that piece of text is a link and they’ll click on the words to see where they’ll go. If your words are just underlined, but not a link, then you’re going to end up frustrating your visitors. Use means other than underlining to emphasize your text such as bolding, changing the text color, using all caps, or sizing.

Stay away from using blue on text that’s NOT a link. The same rule about underlined text also goes for blue text. For most people, blue text automatically means that the text is a link and they’ll try to click on it. Try to avoid using the same “hyperlink blue” color on any text that’s not a link.

Avoid overuse of text centering
Centering your headlines are okay
But centering whole paragraphs is not
It’s just plain annoying
And unprofessional looking
So don’t do it

KEEP THE USE OF ALL CAPS TO A MINIMUM. AN ALL CAP WORD OR A SENTENCE IS ALRIGHT, BUT AN ENTIRE PARAGRAPH IS CONSIDERED SHOUTING. PLUS READING ALL CAPS IS VERY HARD ON THE EYES. SO DON’T DO IT.

Stick with your standard “web fonts”. Remember that fancy fonts don’t always work on your website. In order for a person to be able to see whatever special font that you have declared on your website, they also have to have that same font installed on their computers. If they don’t, then their computer will resort to the next handiest font and you’re not always sure what that will be. So to stay on the safe side, stick with those fonts that are pretty standard across most computers. Those include; Arial, Courier, Georgia, Impact, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Palatino.

So that’s my list of tips to keep your website text visitor friendly. If you have any tips of your own, leave a comment and let me know.