My name is Derek Van Derven, I am a freelance website designer from New Jersey. My inspiration for websites comes from painting and photoshop effects. I like websites that have great graphical appeal to them, and beauty of color, that roughly match the type of paintings that I like to create. Painting has a strong influence on my websites as I like to incorporate various background textures often in my sites.
As I do more websites, I am starting to learn to be subtle in my application of graphics on a site. The idea of "less is more" on a website is true. Probably more true for web design than for painting, as a website has text content that is main focus, not true for a painting for beauty's sake. So web design requires a designer to design the page around the text content and make that the main focus, and make the art aspect of the page secondary. This is a tough balance sometimes, and is something I strive to balance every time I make a site. I am drawn to gradients done in photoshop for my sites as they provide a soft and elegant look to the site, without too much distraction. I have been staying away from confusing background patterns lately as they tend to attract the eye too much.
As my skills in photoshop improve, i aspire to create even more beautiful designs with textures that fade off into the background. Putting texture into a page is difficult, but possible if properly done. That is something that I am working towards now, "how to put in texure and not overwhelm the text on the page. Here is an example of me trying to add texture to the site in a way that is not too distracting. Here is a second more recent example of texture. I call it "grunge". The main enjoyment I get from web design is the client's response I get when they are happy with a finished site, and the great feeling I get to know that anyone in the world can visit my site and see it and my artistic creations or content.
-Derek