Flashy Effects Are Not Always the Best Choice for Designs

Part of the power of web design as a business medium is that it allows a great range of freedom as to how complex or simple any individual element of a web page can be aesthetically presented. A website can settle on a distinct visual identity that can be tied to the company's brand and associated with the business' public image. While it is common for websites about entertainment products such as video games to include all kinds of sophisticated and flashy effects, it is also common for websites pertaining to more serious subjects such as consumers' livelihoods to use simpler and less colorful aesthetics. Informational content involving charts and graphs is commonly presented without extra embellishments such as dramatically colored textures because relatively flat background textures and muted colors are commonly seen as exuding an air of professionalism in comparison.

The amount of visual ornamentation that should accompany a website's content is mainly a question for the website's designers to answer for the sake of their own brand and mission because of how simplicity and complexity each carry their own branding advantages. If a website's content includes bar charts, it can be argued that presenting them as detailed and colorful pictures would be useful for a website that is trying to present what is normally straightforward technical data in a way that might be more readily accepted by younger viewers. Otherwise, all kinds of labels, textures, and guiding lines can be removed so that trained adult eyes can absorb the data points all the more readily.

Regardless of which direction the website takes, one way to make bar charts simpler to parse is to remove the lines that often intersect them for the purpose of directly indicating milestones in whatever scale the bar chart is measuring the bars by. Instead of imposing the differently lengthy bars over lines that connect to rounded numbers far to the side, a bar chart should print precise numbers within the bars directly so that the viewer's eyes neither have to track the numbers nor make vague guesses about the bars' exact values. For more information click here http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/data-ink.gif.