How to design and code a beautiful web button

button

The internet is daunting, disorganized and idiosyncratic. Web designers should try to make the user’s journey as simple and as pleasant as they can. What’s more, there are certain actions that webmasters would like visitors to perform – to go to a page, to submit some information, for example. For these reasons, knowing how to [...]

Designing a Web Page with Photoshop

computer photoshop

It is usually better to show a client what a website will look like before the development stage starts. Here are a few tricks for creating website visuals in Photoshop. Getting started Create a large Photoshop document, at least 1200 pixels wide by 900 pixels deep (this can be increased later with Canvas Size), RGB [...]

Free open source alternatives to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator

photoshop-vs-gimp-150

A guest post from Louise Baker of Zen College Life For web designers, developers and amateur creative types that work with a lot of graphics and image manipulation, the decision of which software to use is an important one. While Adobe Photoshop and its related Creative Suite programs are well respected throughout the world, open [...]

How to create a simple flat web button

flat-button-thumb-150-button

Here is an in depth tutorial explaining how to create the flat web button below in Photoshop and introducing the concept of the web designers’ secret penultimate pixels! Go cmd/cntl-N or File > New… to create a new Photoshop document of the size of your button. This one has a width of 175 pixels and [...]

How to put an image in another image

Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao's heads put on babies' bodies with Photoshop

I’ve done many articles about Photoshop in this blog. And many of them concern photo montage where a composite photograph is created by joining two or more other photographs. However, this article has come from something I’ve seen in studying my Google Analytics. An awful lot of people arrive at my site having typed the [...]

Changing the shape of a leaf in Photoshop

a seedling in earth in a pair of hands with leaves in the shape of the continent of Africa

I did this montage to illustrate marketing material that was highlighting Africa as a young and emerging economy. I had a photo of an ordinary seedling growing out of earth in someone’s hands. I created another layer of this picture (Cmd/Ctrl-J) and cloned out the seedling using the Rubber Stamp Tool (S). I then went [...]

How to design a color page magazine advertisement

Color-page-advertisement-sample

H’mm, well, I’m not going to explain everything about print advertising in one little blog post. However, having just supplied a page ad for a magazine I thought I’d explain a bit about the process I went through from the initial ideas to supplying the final artwork. Supplying initial ideas Some designers will tell you [...]

How to pitch, promote and market your ideas

lectern with how to pitch and promote your ideas on it

I did this lectern idea for a company that did events where entrepreneurs pitch to investors. People from the UK will be familiar with this notion from the Dragons’ Den TV show. I’ve been a big fan of the show and I’ve always wondered how I would fair pitching a business idea. I would do [...]

Photoshop a flag inside a country

China's flag inside African continent

This is was a Photoshop image I did to illustrate how Chinese national oil companies were active in Africa. I’d tried recently many vector flags and country outlines solutions to similar illustrative quandaries and I thought this time it was nice to do it all in Photoshop. I created the mask of the outline of [...]

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