It never ceases to amaze me that after centuries of baking bread, a 21st century baker can bring something new to the recipe. Almost routinely, talented people produce astonishingly unique results by adding a little something different to the mix.

That is what this column is about—for you and I to have a conversation about the ingredients of design: type, illustrations, photography, and color. Notice I said conversation. I want to see what you're seeing—a unique Web layout, design style, or color scheme--and I want to hear what you're hearing—about resources such as clip art, royalty-free and stock photography, typefaces, and such. In return, I'll keep you posted on what comes across my desk and suggest some combinations of ingredients that I think work well together.

• A design palette: Each column will discuss four components of a design palette—typefaces, photographs, illustrations, and color.
• The graceful palette: This first column looks at the grace and elegance of bygone days—and challenges you to use a muted form of today's technology.
• The typefaces: This palette harkens to the classics.
• The illustrations: Many wood and metal engravings from the 1700s and 1800s have been preserved in current clip-art collections.
• The photographs: Custom photography can help you make that personal connection.
• The colors: Here's a case in which less is more. The two-color palette enhances the graceful tone we're trying to achieve.
• New ingredients: To check out your site's logo in various typefaces, spend a little time with EyeWire's Type Viewer.
   

Let me preface my enthusiasm about the ingredients with one proviso—that the most important design element has little to do with appearance.

An eye-catching design created with a keen understanding of current trends, the latest typefaces, and professional-quality images will not save a bad idea. In fact, a poor idea that is well presented will fail faster than one that is poorly designed—the better your audience understands the message, the faster it rejects it.

I mention this because, more than once, I have gotten so caught up in the process that I elevated the design above the idea. I don't want you to think I'm pushing appearance over substance—content is king.

I'm going to call the mix of ingredients I mentioned above a design palette. I'll show you a new palette in each column. It will include four components—typefaces, photographs, illustrations, and a color scheme that, in my opinion, represents a particular mood or style. My hope is that some part of it will get your creative juices flowing or that you might even want to use a similar palette for your next Web site.

This first palette centers on elements of design from the early years of commercial design and printing in the 1700s and 1800s—ornate script, engraved woodblocks, and limited, muted color. I chose it to kick off this series because I'm a troublemaker—I want to jump right in and challenge your thinking.

The challenge? My first instinct is to design Web sites that look as new as the technology used to publish them. On the World Wide Web, we see some of the best, most exciting design being done anywhere—so it feels as if everything I create for it should look new, too. But, in this case, my instinct is wrong. Like any other design project, the focus of a Web site should be on the subject, not the medium.

The graceful palette is used to market a graceful product—The Virginia Cliffe Inn, a stately bed and breakfast. Obviously it is significantly different than the palette I'd use to design a Web site for a software company or a skateboard shop. The elegant typefaces and muted colors work better for a fine furniture store, a law firm, or a custom homebuilder.

This palette uses a combination of three classic-looking typefaces. The title, The Virginia Cliffe Inn, is set in a "display" face called Bickham Script from Adobe. "Display" means a typeface designed for use in sizes larger than standard body text. Richard Lipton, a current-day type master, rendered it using the style of 18th century engraver George Bickham. The display typeface is the star; the other faces are the roadies—they set the stage and do all they can to make the star look good. The word Inn is set in Copperplate 33BC, and the body text is set in a serif face—Minion. For the subhead and menu labels, try using the body text face in all caps with one or two spaces between letters.

Where to get it: Bickham Script, Copperplate 33BC, and Minion are published by Adobe Systems and are available through Precision Type. Precision Type's site is great because it has the largest selection on the Web, and it lets you see any font in your own words. Very useful.

In the 1700s and 1800s, when you wanted to illustrate print materials, you used a wood or metal engraving. Many artists of the day were able to create near-photographic images that offered an idyllic picture of people, places, and things. Thankfully, many have been preserved in the collections of modern-day clip art companies, in book and electronic form.

Dover Publications has been publishing collections of images in book form for many years. It publishes some titles that include modern-day illustrations, but the real treasures are from its Dover Pictorial Archive Series. My favorite is 1800 Woodcuts by Thomas Bewick and His School, edited by Blanche Cirker. It includes 250-pages of intricate images by England's foremost wood engraver divided into chapters on natural history, people, business and trades, and the graphic arts.

Unlike most copyrighted books, you can scan and reproduce up to 10 illustrations from the book for any one project free and without special permission.

Where to get it: Get the book at Amazon.com. You also can get a complete catalog of Dover copyright-free books (by regular mail only) from Dover Publications, 31 E. 2nd St., Mineola, NY 11501—ask for the Pictorial Archive and the Ready-To-Use Series.

In future issues, I'll talk a lot about stock and royalty-free photography—there are some great collections available. They are convenient, easy-to-use, and, in most cases, fairly inexpensive. But first time out, let's talk about custom photography.

It is awfully tempting to use generic images to tell a story—it's fast, easy, and most clients don't fancy paying a good photographer $800 or $1,000 a day to shoot their product or location. But nothing can replace it.

I remember reading one Web site's how-to comment that suggested you not include a picture of the people in the organization—the writer reasoned that no one was interested. To me, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, one foundational piece missing from most Web sites is a personal connection.

If I'm visiting your site from hundreds or thousands of miles away, I want to see the people behind the screens and learn a little bit about their piece of the planet.

Even more important is to show your product or the result of using it. Obviously, if you are selling handmade furniture, you're going to show it—but even if you're selling accounting services, I urge you to show it. How? Commission a photographer to photograph the package of information you send when people inquire about your business. Show the old photograph of the founder in his 1920's office. Make your Web site personal and you have a far better chance of building the kind of relationship people need to feel comfortable enough to work with you.

A note of caution—use common sense when you show people, places, and things. Don't show what you don't want a stranger to see. To me, identifying and showing pictures of family members, for example, is an unacceptable risk and breaks the privacy barrier.

Where to get it: To find a photographer, look in the Yellow Pages under photographers, commercial. Some specialize in staged studio shots of people and things, some in location shots, others in aerial photography, and so on. I use Dennis McWaters in Richmond, Virginia—a great all-around photographer. If you can't find a good shooter locally, call for his sample sheet and prices: 804-644-0015.

Why use two colors (black and green) when you have hundreds to choose from? Because, at times, less is more. And, as you are doubtlessly well aware, less is faster, too. The type and color palette images above were saved in Photoshop with the color depth set to four bits per pixel. The photograph and illustration look fine even at three bits. That means that even at more than 200 pixels wide and 150 deep they are below 8 kilobytes each.

But the overriding reason to use this basic two-color palette is because it fits the rest of the palette. It wasn't until the late 1800s that full-color printing became a reality. Though your viewers may not know the history of it, they have likely seen enough materials from the era that they instinctively accept the limitation.

In the past, Web-safe palettes were a must, but today I wonder. For large areas of flat color, they're still a good idea. But since most people have computers that show at least thousands of colors (16-bit and above), you don't have to stick to those 228 colors. In this case, I used 90/123/107 – the closest Web-safe color would be 120/85/153.

If you haven't tried it yet, treat yourself to a few minutes playing with EyeWire's Type Viewer. It allows you to type in a phrase and see how it looks in any of the hundreds of typefaces it sells. It's not just a gimmick—before you plunk down your hard-earned bucks to buy the font you think is perfect for your site logo, type in the name and see what that specific string of characters looks like.

Looking for a palette for a particular type of project? Searching for an obscure typeface? Found a great source for royalty-free photographs of pineapples? Send your questions and answers to me at chuckgreen@ideabook.com. I'll include the most interesting conversations in columns to come.

Chuck Green is the author of the Desktop Publisher's Idea Book, 2nd Edition (Random House), and the publisher of the design and marketing resource www.ideabook.com.