Why you should hire a professional graphic artist
There is all the difference in the world between good amateur work (like mine) and the work done by a good professional.
The best way to illustrate this is with an example.
Final "Rough Draft" Product (note that my daughter died suddenly after this project was completed, which changed everything in my life). [A peak inside the site] where the links still work -- the links were disabled on the home page when I withdrew from the campaign. You can see just how much better the buttons and such are..
Comments by Dave (explaining why/what he did).
Subj: Re:Ethesis's New Buttons
Date: 97-09-19 15:18:54 EDT
From: WD ElfBox
[Comment by a different designer] <<I have viewed Ethesis's new control buttons for his excellent site... I generally like 'em, but I'm not sure I like the color green in relation to the rich earth tones of the new "Living..." page edge (although it generally looks smart with the "Professional" pages).>>
[Dave Moon's comments] I've decided to take it upon myself to do some testing of my own. I hope it helps. The teal color isn't too bad or distracting, but I felt that the button needed some help. I've included several suggestions on http://www.mediahog.com/ethesis/. JPEG's are not the way to go here. I think you can see that from your distorted samples. GIF is a better choice when using solid colors and text. JPEG's, as a rule, are really only meant for photographs and photo-realistic artwork.
The reason why the lighter you made the image, the smaller the image is you had ,bleached out the colors in the bevel and JPEG distortion, thus using less colors, in turn a smaller sized file. You will also notice that I turned off the Anti-aliased option for the text in order to use fewer colors in the image, with a slight light grey offset to give a 3-d illusion. I used 11 pt. Arial. Verdana, as the Verdana-like font you used is a bit too wide for buttons and poor for smaller sizes on the Web. I would recommend you lose the Italics. Italics also look poor at small sizes and are unnecessary.
I tried several styles using Uleads Buttonizer Plug-in for PS and KPT's page curl, I think they did a nice job not distracting from the real purpose of the button, the text and it's destination. All of the examples were under 1.5k. If you look at our buttons in comparison I think you would agree that yours look a bit more bulky, while mine (the same size in height and width) are lighter not to off-balance your document.
On the issue of table borders... I'm not one for them either, but in this case you are using too much of a bevel. I believe my example is set at border size 1 and cell padding 1, I wouldn't stretch beyond those specs.
As always, I'm not saying I'm better than you, I'm just giving my confident opinion. I'm sure others could dispute or add to my comments. :) I welcome both.
Dave
PS: I also reworked the background... This is what I meant more in reference to the edge effect.
[End of comments]
Hope that looking at this example helps you understand how and what a professional can do for you.
Stephen
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