Hi,

I am a Web and Graphic designer living in Colorado and have been asked by the folks at reencoded to write some articles for their blog.  I’ll be doing some pieces on Photoshop and web design. In my tuts I will be original and always include two or more downloadable full-sized images or practical code demos that you can hopefully use for something right “out-of-the-box.”

Today I’m going to begin a Photoshop tutorial on textures and blend modes. This technique is one I use often when designing web graphics. I’m going to focus a lot on what’s happening rather than just re-tracing the steps and mouse clicks I used to create a single image. Hopefully, this will allow you to understand the process to the extent you can create your own images and not just an identical copy of mine.

Continue Reading

I am very much influenced with wordpress and keep on discussing about wordpress in my various posts on reencoded these days. Thanks for appreiciatign 85 Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes, 26 Free Wordpress Photo Gallery Themes, 20 great Wordpress Footer Designs, 30 great uses of Wordpress and 23 Wordpress Themes for your Website.

There are countless designers developers using wordpress for blogging and as a CMS for their website. Some of them use to go for paid themes, some like to customize free themes according to their need and some love to create a new wordpress theme from scratch. To help desingers entering into the wordpress world I would like to share some tutorials which can help creating a new worpdress theme from scratch. The list includes some great theme tutorials, tutorials to understand the wordpress files structure and wordpress codex for stepping into templates.

So here is a list of 12 great tutorials on creating a new Wordpress Theme. Hope you like them all.

How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch

Continue Reading

Two out of three times when I’m approached by a client to build them a website, I ask for prototype images to give me an idea of what they want. This is always met by baffled and suspicious looks of my true intentions as they assume a website is built off the top of the developers head. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

For that top-notch, breath-taking website you have in mind with 3-D like effects, drop shadows on starry background, round corners and flickering flash images, you need to put that into still images called prototypes. These are high-resolution pictures, usually JPEG for its fantastic pixels that capture screenshots of the proposed website. They are used to quickly communicate visual ideas between a web designer/client and the developer about the proposed website’s layout and design before coding. The devil is in replicating the images details painstakingly in HTML code.

Illustrator is probably the best graphic design software I’ve encountered so far. Other major contenders for this coveted position are FireBuilder , Balsamiq, MindNode, and OmniGaffle which use a combination of wireframing and rapid prototyping to generate the layout and designing of a website.

Coming back to illustrator, drawing web concepts is so practically simplified that, save for the creativity aspect, one would credit it for the picturesque art it facilitates a designer to create! Below are some cunning, behind-the-scenes tricks I use to make web design a lesser nightmare than coding:

Continue Reading

It really demands hard work and time to Design a great looking website layout in Photoshop to make it ready to get coded. Now when it comes for coding its really tough to code a well designed photoshop mockup specially to make it browser compatible as coding (css/xhtml) standards changing day by day. Today I would like to share with you guys some great tutorials on converting a PSD to HTML / XHTML specially for beginners and intermediate learners to advance there coding skills.

So please take some time to review these 20 great tutorials on PSD to XHTML Conversion. Hope you like them all.

Convert a Photoshop Mockup to XHTML/CSS

Continue Reading

As web designing is a vast field, there are millions of web designers who knows the value of software called “Adboe Photoshop”. Its really important to have a great knowledge on Photoshop for every web desinger – there are thousands of expert desingers (masters of Photshop) but still there are some beginners struggling to find out their way to learn photoshop techniques. Today I would like to share some awesome tutorials on creating website template/layout with Adobe Photoshop.

These are all great to follow as a beginner, and learning to use Photoshop is a huge part of being a sucessful web designer. So here is a list of 45 awesome Adobe Photoshop website template/layout tutorials that can help learning some basic, intermediate and advanced techniques too.

Hop you like them all!
Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch

Continue Reading