10 things I wish I had known about web designing 10 years ago

web-design-thumb

10 years ago I had a big problem. I was a print designer but I loved the internet and desperately wanted to work with it. I wanted a software package that would let me mess around with drag-and-drop functionality and when I was ready I could click “GO” and miraculously produce perfect code. I was [...]

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 market yourself #7: How to write and design a WordPress page or post

wordpress icon on a blue blackground

Constantly updated quality content is the mainstay of any website or blog. I have already described how to set up a WordPress.org blog and what to write about when you have one. Here’s the “how to” for those new-ish to WordPress… There are three things to remember when you are writing: Make your text scannable! [...]

Changing an image to match your design’s colours

woman on beach different colors

You have a great photo. You have a great design. One problem: the photo doesn’t “go” with the design. The solution is to change the image in Photoshop to more accurately match the colour scheme of the design or, more commonly, to match the client’s or brand’s colours. In the above example the final image [...]

How to design water reflections in Photoshop

ripple_reflections

“Reflections are the new drop shadows!” If that’s the case, here’s how! Copy the text layer – or layer – that you want to reflect (Cmd/Ctrl-J). If the layer that you want to reflect is a text layer then you should Rasterize it. To do this, right-click on the text layer in the Layers palette [...]

How to design a 3D crystal ball in Illustrator

crystal-ball-illustrator-square

This starts, as most tutorials start, with something very easy: draw a circle. So, select your circle tool and drag diagonally to preferred size, not forgetting to hold down the shift key. Fill the circle white, with no stroke. Next, select the Gradient Mesh Tool (U) and click four points diagonally across the circle. Make [...]

How to design a montage in Photoshop

montage-girl-s

Here, as promised, is a short tutorial about creating montages. Here is a montage of three different images which gel together without having to laboriously cut anything out. Layer masking with a brush I sized the cityscape image over the picture of the girl and played around with layer blend modes until I chanced upon [...]

How to do distressed, grunge or rubber stamp designs in Photoshop

grunge-s

Put type or whatever you want distressed, grunged or “rubber stamped” on one layer in Photoshop with a white background layer beneath it. The create a blank layer above it (Cmd/Ctl-Opt-Shift-N). Then you need to create some clouds. Very easy. First of all make sure your background and foreground colours in the Tools palette are [...]

Download the free e-books "How to Market Yourself Online" & "Starting An Online Business"

How to get clients online and advice on starting up online!

  • Creating websites
  • Setting up WordPress
  • Writing blog posts
  • Getting links
  • Driving traffic to your site
  • Using social media
  • Getting clients
  • Getting found on Google
download icon
download button