Web Site Designers

For those of us in the business of designing the web, one area of resources that always prove invaluable to have in our design arsenals is tutorials. Learning how other web designers have crafted their designs, and which tools they always rely on can always help to guide us as we are either developing or honing our own skills. So we search the web for useful tutorials. Well today we have done the searching for you.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner and designers are eager to try out their creative skills. With the holiday comes a time of bright colors, attractive graphics and shimmering effects which can make for some romantic manipulations. We have collected some very useful tutorials, which will help you use Photoshop patterns, brushes and much more to create awesome Valentine’s graphics of your own.

Endless layers in Photoshop. Overstuffed image folders. That jQuery plug-in that has 12 files associated with it. Hundreds or thousands of individual pieces go into making a website. No wonder we go off the deep end when we can’t find a closing div — er, section tag.

We work with a ridiculously large number of things, and how we organize them (or choose not to) is often left to personal preference. But our messy habits result in confusion for the designer or developer who inherits your work. Does it really need to be this way?

It goes without saying that high-quality PSD files are some of the most precious resources for a designer. This is the reason why even the most skilled and experienced designers are constantly on the look out for new PSD files to add to their toolboxes so they are armed and ready for whatever their next client or project has to throw at them.

Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Its beauty lies in our ability to create an effect and then copy, modify, export, hide or trash it, without degrading the content of the layer.

Below we present, step by step, several practical techniques to help you refine your designs, increase productivity and reduce layer clutter. You will find more useful Photoshop techniques and tutorials in our hand-picked selection, Best of Photoshop on Smashing Magazine.

   Creating something out of the ordinary by combining two or more elements is not a new concept in the graphic design field. Photo manipulation is a true example of such collaboration that almost always brings astonishing results. Photo manipulation basically is a technique combining graphic design and photography. In photo manipulations, the photographs are [...]

   Photoshop is a wonderful tool that not only lets you create amazing graphics but also automate your work and improve your workflow. With Photoshop Actions, you can perform your repetitive tasks with a simple click that not only saves you time but helps improving your efficiency. Photoshop actions allow you to record a sequence [...]

   With all of the various techniques and lenses that photographers use to create over the years in the development of their craft, we see many spring to the forefront of the industry to take hold. Of these that are popular with the public, several have been adopted by graphic artists who attempt to replicate [...]

   Designers all over the world are on a constant search to find useful Photoshop brushes. This is because they know having a good collection of Photoshop brushes can save them in their time of need. Although there are countless brush sets are available for Adobe Photoshop that make finding Brush sets an easier task. [...]

Productivity is a crucial asset of professional designers. Photoshop is an extremely powerful application for photo processing and image manipulation, and we can make it even more powerful by using handy tools, actions, plugins and templates to save time for solving mundane regular tasks. The better our professional tool set is, the more time we can spend to focus on the actual design process rather than the tool we are using to implement it on screen.

Here at Smashing Magazine, we’re continuously searching for recent time-saving, useful Photoshop resources for our readers, to make the search of these ever-growing techniques easier. We hope that these techniques will help you improve your design skills as well as your professional workflow when using Adobe Photoshop. A sincere thanks to all designers and developers whose articles are featured in this roundup. We respect and appreciate your contributions to the design community.