tripwire magazine

This post pick up on the previous two parts of a very detailed tutorial for “Creating a Clean and Elegant Blog Design with Photoshop, Part 1 + 2“. This is part3 and it will be covering last steps required to finish the design by adding the Side Bar and Footer Sections. We pick up just where part 2 ended and the result of part 3 and final Blog Design will be looking like this:

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This post pick up on the previous and first part of a very detailed tutorial for Creating a Clean and Elegant Blog Design with Photoshop, Part 1. This is part 2 and it will be covering steps required in Photoshop to create the Blog Front Page Post Section.

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Creating a great looking blog design isn’t as hard as you may think but it is a long process and quite a few different techniques will be required along the way. I think it is worth the effort trying it out yourself as knowing your blog theme well and basic web design and programming is essential for serious bloggers. Also besides being good at writing on interesting subjects and driving traffic, look and feel and usability is key to the success of a blog. You can of cause pay for a premium theme and it will most likely cover your needs but it may not give you the skills needed to act on the ideas you get along the way.

In a series of articles I will go through the design process starting in Photoshop and plan to go all the way implementing it as a theme for Wordpress. The part 1 is about creating a good looking header and working with some nice to know Photoshop Tricks. This tutorial now consists of:

• Part 1 – covering the Theme Header Section
• Part 2 – covering the Blog Front Page content area
• Part 3 – covering the Side Bar and the Footer Sections

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When designing a website, a poster, a logo etc., one of the firsts (and most important) steps of the process is to choose a color scheme that support the overall idea and direction. Colors play a vital role in how people react to images and knowing how to make the right impression is important. It is also key that colors in a design match and work together and unless you’re a color expert with a trained eye you may benefit from working with tools applying the basic rules behind the scenes. In this post I have collected a set of resources that I’m sure will make your life working with colors easier and more fun.

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Textures are essential building blocks for some types of design and having the right textures at hand may speed up the design process, inspire you and improve the final result. Images of decay can be used in many ways and it is only the creativity and imagination that sets the limits. They are obviously useful for grunge style designs but can also be used to give an authentic and realistic look to other types of creative work. This post showcase more than 20 great looking textures of decay for inspiration and use in your designs. Please check license before using even though all textures are located at stock.xchng.

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Flash is getting a lot of competition from technologies like jQuery making web sites interactive and dynamic just using javascript. Still with Flash designer can create effects that are impossible or just to complex to create without it. Flash loaders is an important focus area as they need to keep users around and interested while the sometimes large files are downloaded. In this post you find some great examples of Flash Loaders and hopefully some of these will inspire you. Drop a comment if you know some really cool loaders.

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jQuery as a development platform is great and we see the result of this every day. It is almost hard to believe but every time I decide to look up a new jQuery Plugin to solve a task I find that the community is constantly providing new high quality solutions for free. The number of really bad contributions that I fell I waste my time on is very limited and this makes me come back for more. I guess most web developers fell this way right? Great thanks to everyone spending their precious time creating stuff we can all use. Below I have listed 10 great plugins I wasn’t aware of that I stumbles over today.

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Wordpress needs no introduction. It powerful, highly popular and have a huge community providing loads of free and premium themes and plugins. Still you may fell like creating your own themes or plugins could be fun or a way to get the functionality and look and fell you need. It is not that hard to customize a theme but starting from scratch requires some experience or assistance. This article provides the tutorials, cheat sheets and tools you need to get started.

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Readers at tripwire magazine daily submit links and short descriptions to highly relevant and worth investigating articles. User links are normally JUST PUBLISHED articles and have gone through a check to be relevant for designers and developers. This is a round-up providing latest user links submitted on tripwire magazine. See more user submitted links here

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Photoshop is simply brilliant for creating Stunning Effects from simple elements and for fixing Photos that got the right scene but isn’t ok fx. in the light or color balance. In the hands of someone who knows how to control Photoshop it is able to do some really cool tricks but it isn’t easy at all for beginners. I find large compilations of Tutorials for Photoshop a great resource for inspiration and learning and I hope this article will be a good help for everyone including people new to Photoshop trying to do some photo magic for the first time.

Introduction

This article focus on all the fancy thing you can do in Photoshop with photos or elements from photos. It is possible to apply effects to photos fx. making them look like comic drawings or like really old pictures – possibilities are almost endless. Also if you got the codac moment photo but for some reason it got too dark or too light Photoshop will be there to save you. Finally if you want to catch a scene with your camera but for some reason cant Photoshop may help you create the illution that you did it… Photo Manipulation is one of the really strong sides of Photoshop and it is almost possible to create any idea you can come up with. The materials used (photos, graphical elements et.) is of cause important but knowing the secret tricks of Photoshop is possibly even more important. The Tutorials in this article will not turn you into a pro-photohopper over night but you will certainly be on the way…

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