The world that surrounds the topic of Web Design is home to many debates and opinions on best practices or generally how things should and shouldn’t be done. While many of these opinions are accepted and taken on board by everyone, there are some that end up being split into two opposing camps. One camp will provide an expert opinion for one side of the argument, while the other contradicts with an equally valid argument. Let’s take a look at the five most popular debates; the ones that often end up developing into digital riots with opinions flying like arrows across the vast no-man’s land known as the comments section.

Should links open in a new window?

Camp one says:

Links to external sites should always open in new windows. There’s nothing more annoying than browsing a website, clicking a link and being whisked off to a totally new site, losing the page you wanted to revisit. Internal links should maintain the browser session in the current page, but anything that leaves the site should open in a new tab or window.

Camp two says:

As web designers we shouldn’t take the control away from the user. Whether a link needs opening in a new window is their choice. There’s nothing more annoying than a website taking control of my browser and opening a new tab or window for a link without my permission; if I wanted to open it in a new window, I’d do so! The problem only gets worse with inexperienced computer users, new windows break their trusty ‘back button’.

The mediator says:

In general, opening a new window should be avoided, but is recommended for some situations such as opening a help link in a shopping cart or opening a non-html document such as a PDF. To further aid the usability of your site, use a small icon to identify links that do open in a new window, or provide an options panel that’s configured with Javascript.

Further reading:

• Should Links Open In New Windows?
• Beware of Opening Links in a New Window”
• Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents

continue reading…

The importance of a unique, memorable and well designed blog, especially within the design community, should not be underestimated – First impressions will always count and your blog gives you an opportunity to showcase your skills and highlight how professional and serious you are as a designer.

For most web designers, designing an original blog shouldn’t be a problem, the difficulty lies in trying encapsulate your blog writing style and character within the design – That is the tricky part.

In this article that is exactly what we have done, showcased 50 amazing personal blog designs that successfully capture the character of the designer.

Clean Blog Designs

Brian Hoff

Ed Nacional

Krisztian Puska – z8

Rientola

Trent White – TWhite Design

Zander Martineau – Rather Splendid

Julian Wilson

Justin Windle – Soulwire

Adelle Charles

Make Film Work

Bedrich Ríos

Mercy

Ray Glover – Cynosura's Weblog

David DeSandro

Illustration Blog Designs

Kilian Muster

Chris Kaufman

Nick La – N.Design

Jason Gray

D Bnonn Tennant – Information Highwayman

continue reading…

This post is a collection of latest community news submitted on tripwire magazine by readers and other blog owners.  Most new posts in the web design and development community is included making this regular post a really fast and easy consumable overview of what is going on just now.  You can find more community news here

Create an Wooden Background Website Layout in Photoshop

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10 Firefox Addons Every Web Designer Should Know

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31 Stunning Black And White Photographs

The world of photograhy is a world of passion which touches many hearts. This compilation consists of black and white pictures divided into categories.

50+ Free Fonts Collection for Web Designers and Logo Artists

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How to Convert a WordPress Blog into WordPress MU

WordPress is one of the best and very popular blogging platforms which is not only free but also released as a open source project.

10 Tips For Becoming A More Efficient Web Designer

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Free Social Network Icons from IconShock

IconShock has designed Social Network icon-set exclusively for Smashing Share readers. The IconShock – icon sets are awesome and free to use for both your personal and commercial projects.

Learn how to create a clean busines layout

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Design Envy : Make it Work For You!

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Whats the Best way to Promote your Latest Article?

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21 Wonderful Logos for your Daily Dose of Inspiration

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How to Find the Best Keywords and Ideas for Your Articles

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How to Create Perfect Radial Shapes in Illustrator

In this tutorial, It will walk you through the creation process on how to effectively recreate some perfect radial shapes.

How To Create A Retro Style Text Effect Using Illustrator

In this tutorial It explains how to easily create a 3d text and merge it into a retro-style scene. We will use Illustrator for the text,

Ten Dirty Secrets of Web Hosting Services

When looking for a web hosting service, you should be careful as there are a lot of things they may try to hide from you.

Proportion: Definition and Gallery

Proportion (or scale) refers to the relative size and scale of the various elements in a design. In essence, this takes design elements and contrasts their sizes greatly for emphasis.

Eight Greatest Things About Open Source

Linux Environment: This is a given, granted, but no one can exclude the brainchild of Linus Torvalds when talking about open source. What was begun as a learning experience…

What You Should NEVER do With Your Web Hosting Account

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50+ Creative Business Card Designs

Do you need the creative Business for your Business? We assembled Fresh collection stimulate your creative juices for your own beautiful business.

50+ Unique and Inspiring Blue Logo Designs

This 50+ Unique and Inspiring Blue Logo Designs are especially compiled for logo designers who are momentarily out of ideas.

The Guide To Landing A Graphic Design Job

The first question in this new series tackles the dilemma of finding a job as a Graphic Designer without much actual design experience.

35 Ultimate Useful Android Applications

Andriod (Google mobile operating system) market is growing day by day as this OS giving lot of user friendly applications, some of those listing today as our visitors and readers demand. Android on..

Golden Fish – Free Illustration

If your website is about pets or fishes, feel free to download this illustration. Not only it’s well done but also free to use.

Codeigniter shopping cart v1.1 Part 15: contact page and sending email message

Contact page allows visitors to send a message through a form. It has a reCaptcha in order to avoid spam. I will cover the contact page and sending email message to an administrator in this article.

Quote Portal for iPhone is The Epitome of Simplicity and Brilliance

Quote Portal has one of the nicest interfaces I have ever seen on an iPhone app. The concept is completely basic, yet the UI is so good, it transforms this app into a keeper. So what does the app do?

Coffee Shop Posters: 17 Creative Design Examples

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Photography By Warwick Saint

Warwick Saint was born in South Africa in 1972. With a Creative dad and a Model mom, it was not surprising Warwick Saint was to become a photographer.

Over 500 Beautiful Frames

Here are over 500 Beautiful Frames for you. These frames can be used for making different Wish cards. All Frames are Zipped in a file, some of these are inserted directly so you can view these.

3 Best Solutions to make your own custom Linux

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15 Gothic Fonts for Designers

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Over 800 Beautiful Backgrounds

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22 Fresh Web Design Tutorials using Photoshop for 2010

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Top 3 Internal link building Tactics

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Showcase Of Web Design In Ukraine

Here is a showcase of web design agencies and the latest trends in web design of Ukraine.

continue reading…

A portfolio design is a reflection of the skills and talents of the designer that owns it. Often, the hardest web design is creating your own portfolio, and thus, can take a lot of the designer’s time to create and finish. This collection is a follow up of the showcase called, "25 Impressive Portfolio Web Designs" which you should view as well.

Feast your eyes on some of the web’s most beautiful online portfolios.

1. camellie

2. Fool’s House

3. Ed Peixoto – I create Flavors

4. COO/COO CORE Graphic

5. n.design studio

6. Fully Illustrated

7. Attack of the Web

8. Ekin Yalgin

9. Twenty3design

10. Jirí Šebek

11. Nathan Sanders

continue reading…

Our sponsors Pixmac.com, are offering the chance to five of our readers to win a $199 subscription each to there marvelous microstock photo site service.

That is a huge prize fund of $995 to be shared amongst the winners!
Don’t miss this great opportunity, enter now!

How to Enter

For a chance to win this great prize all you have to do is state your Pixmac Nickname in the comments section below and describe how you are or are planning to use the images.

If you haven’t signed up to Pixmac as yet, and you want to enter this competition you will firstly need to signup, its free and you can do it here: Pixmac Registration.

And then come back here and submit your comment.
So, these are the simple steps to follow:

The winner will be chosen at random
The competition will run for the next 30 days and the eventual winners will be notified by email.

Good luck to everyone!

About Pixmac

Pixmac.com is the leader in microstock photo site services, with a monumentally huge 10 million+ stock photos and resources at there disposal, it is by far the leader in there field.

You can find almost any image you could dream of at Pixmac, from Valentine’s Day and spring photos to Easter stock photos. They also have classic royalty free pictures of business, people, animals or nature which can suit any of your advertising or professional presentation needs, as well as huge celebrity collections, Dreamstime images, Fotolia images, Corbis images and Image Source collections.

With its one stop shopping it takes less than three minutes to download an image and local payment methods are accepted.
What more could you want from a stock image service?
You can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

Whether you are reading a printed magazine or a web article it is very rarely the content that draws you in at first, the hook is always the title or the headline. A well written and thought out title or headline are fundamental, it has to not only describe with very few words the articles content but also has to be formatted in a way that it draws the attention of your readers and is a seemingly must read – a difficult combination to achieve.

There are many ways of of making your headlines that little bit more distinctive, none are as important as choosing the correct font. Most fonts can be big and bold, but finding one with a little bit of character that helps emphasize and describe the title and the content can be difficult.

With that in mind, Peter Olexa from Fonts2u has put together this article of his top 20 beautiful, professional and distinctive free fonts you shouldn’t be missing from your font library.

01 Diavolo

02 Fertigo

03 Museo

04 Comfortaa

05 Raspoutine Demi Bold

06 Gauntlet Classic

07 DuePuntoZero

continue reading…

We all love Javascript. With jQuery, it is now so easy to write really nice JavaScript effects. jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development

Creating right click with the help of jquery is real easy and can be implemented very quickly. While trying for my one of the project , I made one and sharing it today.

A design showcase is a website dedicated to seeking out the latest and greatest designs from the web, whether it’s a website, flash presentation or a piece of print work.

A showcase of the very best web designs from the last week

If you are a software manufacturer and you need a great design to represent your company and your products then you need to design an eye catching web layout.

In the previous posts this and this, I wrote about a Codeigniter Event Calendar. The problem with them was you can’t use it with javascript disabled. This time I added a link to a date. When you click the date where there are events, it will take you to a page showing all the event for that day. So you can use it with javascript disabled. Check it out.

A showcase of most outstanding and spectacular castle artworks from around the web.

If you use the Windows 7 operating system, you will find here useful wallpaper for your PC. Overall, I've compiled the best 30 Windows 7 wallpapers from deviantART community. I hope in this post you will find most perfect for your PC.

These are 100 beautiful and colorful vectors for design and inspiration. Free EPS Files for Floral Ornament backgrounds. I hope you find them useful and cool.

Amazing nature and wildlife photograhy. Roeselien Raimond is a passionate photographer – totally in love with animals & nature- who’d like to spend almost every minute of the day on photography.

Google has for many years doodled on their homepage. These doodles are decorative changes that Google makes to their cooperate logo to celebrate certain holidays and other world events. In keeping with the decade long tradition, Google has doodled Olympic events on their website to commemorate this special global event.

Beautiful portrait photography by Mehmet Turgut, creative fashion photographer, based in Turkey

If you're a movie fan I am sure you'll enjoy this collection of 20 beautiful movie/brand fonts. All these are free and I think they should be part of any designer's font library.

Amazing photos of beautiful women by creative fashion photographer Evan Romine.

As you know, new icon sets are published every day on various web design blogs. I have monitored many of these blogs a long time and I thought, therefore, show some of the best-looking icon sets I’ve seen recently. I hope you will like them.

Domestic Landscapes is an ongoing archive that includes hundreds of images, the product of more than ten years’ work by Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen.

Orlando wedding and engagement photographer. Leigh Taylor Photography is an award winning, natural light, on location photographer

Not only have watercolor brush strokes become a popular trend in modern web design, but so have advanced layers of transparency (or what I call, translucence). The new Envato design has received a lot of kudos for using this effect, and this tutorial will show you how to create a similar effect, while combining it with other popular web trends.

Final Image Preview

Take a look at the image we’ll be creating. Want access to the full PSD files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Psd Plus for just $9/month. You can view the final image preview below.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Adobe Photoshop CS3+
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: 2 hours

Step 1 – Set up the Template

Let’s set up our document. I tend to create my sites with a fixed 960px width and variable height. For this tutorial, I chose a height of 800px to ensure we have enough room for all of the content sections we would like to include. Creating the original document at the exact size you want the site to be makes it easier for creating the guides.

Next, we’ll set up our guides. Drag guidelines from the document rulers to the four edges of your document.

Now we need to allocate some space for the background we’ll create. Go to Image > Canvas Size and expand the document to 1100 pixels by 1000 pixels. This should give us plenty of area to fill in our unique background.

Fill the bottom layer with white (Shift + F5). Rename this layer as “background.” Your document should now look like the image below.

Step 2 – Create the Gradient Background

Right-click the “background” layer, and choose Blending Options. We’ll be adding a Gradient Overlay to our “background” layer. I chose a three color gradient with some blues and tans, however you can essentially choose any colors you want. The beauty of using the Blending Options for the background is that at any time, you can easily switch out colors and adjust the gradient to taste.

Your document should now look like this:

You may want to skip this step, however I feel the sharp gradient is a little too glossy for this design. We’ll add some noise to tone it down a bit.

Create a New Layer. Rename this layer “noise.” Next, fill the layer with white (Edit > Fill). Once you have the layer filled with white, we need to add some noise by applying Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Set the Amount to 400%, with a Uniform Distribution and non-Monochromatic. All of the colors of the noise will give us much more depth in our background.

Set the “noise” layer to Multiply, and set the Opacity to 5%. This should give us just enough graininess to tone down the gradient.

Step 3 – Add the Texture (Brush Strokes) to the Background

First, you’ll need to download some Brush Stroke brushes, if you don’t already have them. Here is some I’ve used in the past: “Brush Stroke.”

Create a new layer, above your “background” and “noise” layers. Rename this layer to “brush1″ (we’ll be creating multiple layers like this). Set this layer to Multiply. Choose a warm foreground color (to offset the cool tones) in our blue gradient background. I chose a warm brown: #996726. Select the brush you wish to draw, and place it in the top left of the document, ensuring that the brush stroke is outside the bounds of your guidelines (we want the background to expand outside).

Adjust the layer Opacity to 50% (so the graininess shows through). Repeat the previous two steps for multiple brushes to suit your taste. Your background should now look like the image shown below.

Congratulations, your custom, unique background is complete. Since you placed the brushes randomly, it will differentiate you from those designs that bought a similar stock background.

Step 4 – Create the Inner Opaque/Translucent Container

First, we’ll need to grab the Rounded Rectangle Tool, and set the radius to 20px. Above all of your background layers (brushes + noise + gradient), drag and draw a rounded rectangle within the original guidelines we set up. Your rectangle should be 960px by 800px. Rename this layer “container,” and Right-click the layer, and select Rasterize Layer (we’ll be making some changes to this layer later, so we might as well get this out of the way now).

To make the “container” layer look opaque, we’ll need to do a few things:

1. Set the “container” layer’s Fill to 0% (we’ll be using the Color Overlay layer style to give it some color).
2. Add a Drop Shadow: Opacity of 41%, Angle at 90, Distance of 0, Spread of 1, and Size at 10
3. Bevel and Emboss: Style of Inner Bevel, Technique set to Smooth, Depth at 100%, Direction of Up, Size at 20px, Soften of 0px, Angle at 135, Altitude at 58, Highlight Opacity at 27%, and Shadow Opacity set to 15%
4. Color Overlay: White with an Opacity of 73%
5. Stroke: Size of 1px and Opacity at 100% (to give it that extra bit of depth)

Once you’ve set all the layer styles, your “container” layer should look like this:

Step 5 – Set Up the Inner Padding Guides

To ensure that we stick with consistent padding on the “container” layer (assuming we don’t want to count our pixels each time we place an element), let’s add guides at 40px inside our original guide box.

Step 6 – A Cutout Navigation

As you saw in the Final Preview, we want to make the navigation look like it is sunken or cut out of the “container” layer. To do this, we’ll just remove some of the “container” layer and let the Layer Style’s do their magic.

To create the selection for the cutout, we’ll create a new rectangular shape in the space that we want the navigation cutout to be. Use a radius of 10px here (which is half the radius of the “container” layer), to ensure that the corner has consistent spacing where it is rounded.

If necessary, move the shape to the top right of your inner padding guide lines. Once you have the layer in place, Command-click the layer in the Layer’s Palette so it is selected. Choose the “container” layer and hit Delete. You can now hide your 10px rounded rectangle for the navigation, and your “container” layer will now show a cutout as seen below.

Notice how smooth the rounded corners are. If we would have just selected a square area and rounded the selection, the cutout corners would have looked very choppy. Also, isn’t it nice how the Layer Style’s are automatically applied to the layer, and all of the beveling and shadows we added look great.

Now we need some text. I chose Rockwell as my font (it comes standard with MS Office, but can also be purchased). Evenly space your navigation elements within the cutout as shown.

We want to give the text an etched in stone effect, and to do this, we add a drop shadow to the text (we could also add an inner shadow, however it makes the text appear thinner than it actually is). Here are the drop shadow settings I generally use.

Step 7 – Active Navigation Woven through the Page

To achieve the desired effect, we’ll create a new layer just below the text we added for the navigation. Rename this layer “active nav.” Fill this selection with any color (it doesn’t matter).

Next, we’ll need to add some Layer Styles to the “active nav” layer. I’ve provided them below (you’ll need a Drop Shadow, Gradient Overlay, Stroke, and Inner Glow).

Duplicate your “active nav” layer (Command + J), and flatten all of the layer styles. Rename this layer “active nav flattened.” We’re going to be applying some crops to this layer, and we don’t want the layer styles any longer.

Use your Selection Tool to delete the Stroke and Inner Glow from the top and bottom of the “active nav flattened” layer.

Now we need to add the shadows to make the “active nav” layer look like it’s woven through the “container” layer. We’ll create these shadows using the Ellipse Tool.

Create a black ellipse that is 20px wider than the width of the “active nav flattened” layer and roughly 5px tall. Center your ellipse on the top edge of the “active nav flattened” layer. Right-click the layer and select Rasterize Layer. Rename this layer to “top active shadow.”

We need to blur the ellipse a bit, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and apply with with a radius of 2px. Now that the ellipse looks more like a shadow, we’ll go ahead and delete the top 50% of the shadow.

Adjust the Opacity of the “top active shadow” layer to 75%. The top shadow is done. To create the bottom shadow, duplicate the layer (Command + J), apply Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical, and move the shadow to the bottom of the “active nav flattened layer.”

Step 8 – Finish Out the Header With a Logo

Before we get to the logo, let’s finish out our header a bit. First we’ll add a couple more guides. Draw a horizontal guide 40px below the bottom of the navigation cutout as shown.

We’re going to create our separating line, which will give the impression that the “container” layer has an etching or is folded at this spot. To create this effect, draw a 1px heigh horizontal line on a new layer running the width of the “container” layer. Fill your horizontal line with a dark green (I chose mine from the background). Rename this layer “separating line.”

To get the etching feel, duplicate the “separating line” layer and fill this layer with white. Move this layer 1px down so the top of it touches the original “separating line” layer.

Now we need to add our logo. I’m not much of a logo designer, so I just chose a cool font (Gill Sans) and wrote some big text in the top left corner. Just as we did the cutout for the navigation, make a selection of the logo text and then delete it from the “container” layer. Once again the Layer Styles will adjust to the new shape, and update to it.

The asterisk was done using the exact same technique as the active navigation element, to make it appear like it is sticking out of the “container” layer.

Step 9 – Featured Portfolio Items

Once again, we’re going to use the same cutout technique that we used for the navigation section.

Create a rounded rectangle with a border radius of 10px. Make sure to allow for 40px spacing on all sides (we created the guides earlier to help with this).

Command-click the rounded rectangle layer to select it, then select the “container” layer and hit Delete. You can remove the rounded rectangle as we won’t use it any longer.

We then need to create the arrows on each side, so you can have multiple portfolio items on the front page and toggle through them in a sort of slideshow. To do this, create a 40px diameter circle with the Shape Tool. Move the circle in place on the left side, centering it on the edge of the cutout.

Duplicate the circle for the other side, and once again center it on the other edge of the cutout (horizontally and vertically).

Important

Since we aren’t working with vector masks here (and our Fill is set to 0% on the “container” layer), we need to momentarily adjust this to ensure we can add on to the “container” layer.

So, let’s set the Fill of the “container” layer to 100%. Now Merge Down (Command + E) both of the circles we created for the arrows into the “container” layer. Once you have merged down, you can then set the Fill of the “container” layer back to 0%. Here is your desired effect:

Notice how the two circles have now become part of the “container” layer.

Next we’ll need to add some arrows. You could easily create them using brackets, however I chose to create my own.

Create a rounded rectangle with a Border Radius of 3px, Width of 20px, Height of 6px; and place it right above where you want the arrow. Transform and Rotate (Command + T) the rounded rectangle by 45 degrees counter-clockwise so it is tilted. This is how we will make the point to the arrow.

Duplicate the rounded rectangle (Command + J), and Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Move the layer in place, such that the left corners are lined up producing a bracket. In the Layer Palette, select both rounded rectangles and merge the layers together (Command + E). Rename the layer “left arrow.” Here is how your arrow should look:

We need to add some Layer Styles to the arrow to make it fit with the rest of the design as follows:

1. Fill: 0%
2. Inner Shadow: Opacity of 50%, Angle at 120, Distance of 2, Choke set to 0, Size of 3, and Noise at 0

Duplicate the “left arrow” layer (Command + J), and Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Rename this layer “right arrow,” and move it to the right side of the cutout.

One last thing we need to add for our featured portfolio items area is a shadow to give it some depth. Add a transparent to black gradient at the bottom of the cutout as shown.

To trim off any excess gradient outside of the cutout, simply Command + Click the “container” layer and hit Delete. We’ll be placing our screenshots below this layer to give the illusion of depth.

Step 10 – Adding a Portfolio Item

Take a screenshot of your favorite site (I used one of my own portfolio, ryanscherf.net). Rename this layer “screenshot.”

Add a Stroke and Inner Shadow to the “screenshot” layer use your Layer Styles:

Duplicate the “screenshot” layer, and flatten all of the layer styles (merge the “screenshot copy” layer with a new, blank layer). Rotate the “screenshot copy” layer 45 degrees counter-clockwise, just as you did for the arrows in Step 9.

Place the screenshot at the bottom left of the portfolio cutout, ensuring that the top of the screenshot sticks out of the cutout (we’re going to be giving it some depth) and making it look like it’s tucked behind the “container” layer. Crop any excess of the “screenshot copy” from the bottom as shown.

Now that we have our screenshot in place, let’s add a short description to the right. Nothing too fancy here, but still trying to stick with our theme of depth and layers.

Create some text with an almost white (or very light blue/green) color. Use the same drop shadow etching technique from the navigation (Angle at -60 degrees, Distance of 1px, and Size of 1px).

Create an opaque square behind the text. I used an all black layer, at 30% opacity. The effect should look like this:

We need some navigation dots like the iPhone views. We’ll create one active dot, that will use the exact same Layer Styles as the “active nav” layer (hopefully you didn’t delete it), and an inactive dot which uses the Layer Styles from the “left arrow” layer.

Note: Reusing Layer Styles is important not only because it saves time from having to recreate similar styles, but also because it will keep your design consistent throughout.

Create a circle using the Shape Tool, with a diameter of 20px (I like my navigation dots large, as I find sometimes they are too hard to click and navigate through). Right-click the “active nav” layer and select Copy Layer Style. Select the circle from your Layers Palette, Right-click, and select Paste Layer Style.

Repeat these steps for as many inactive dots as you’d like, making sure to use the layer style from the “left arrow” layer.

Step 11 – Label it With a Ribbon

We need to let our visitors know exactly what we are showcasing here. We’ll create a ribbon using the exact same technique as we used for the “active nav” layer, which was outlined above in Step 7.

Merry Christmas everyone! In this week’s roundup of creative goodness, we have a fantastic icon design tutorial; a great website design tutorial allowing you to create a cool sidebar effect; a roundup of awesome snowboard designs; a handy web design tip to keep your site’s accessibility in check; and an overview of various usability tips.

PSDFan

PSDFan hosts this fantastic step-by-step icon design tutorial that shows you how to design a beautiful Google Calender icon in Photoshop. Using subtle shadows and textures the final design boasts plenty of realism.

DesignM.ag

DesignM.ag originally published this tutorial earlier in the year, but I thought it deserved a fresh look! Find out how to create the popular sticky-sidebar effect on your website with this brilliant walkthrough and demo.

DesignrFix

The skiing and snowboarding season is here, so it’s quite fitting that DesignrFix have put together this awesome design inspiration rounded of 60+ amazing snowboard designs. A great resource for fans of illustrative design!

24Ways

24Ways is back again this year, and has been packed full of daily web design goodies. This particular tip on the use of the :focus selector captured my attention, and provides a super useful tip for those who want to balance their websites between good design and accessibility.

UX Booth

UX Booth is a great place to learn about all things surrounding the topic of usability. This post titled The Weaker Side of Usability Guidelines highlights a range of uncommon usability recommendations.

Josh Keyes was born in 1969 in Tacoma Washington. Keyes graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later received his MFA in painting from Yale University. Josh’s work brings to mind the detail and complexity of natural history dioramas, and the color and diagrammatic complexity one might find in cross section illustrations from a vintage science textbook. His work has developed over the past years into an iconic and complex personal vocabulary of imagery that creates a mysterious and sometimes unsettling juxtaposition between the natural world and the man made landscape

He weaves his personal mythology through fractured and isolated landscapes that are either overgrown with vegetation or underwater, and often depict historic or military monuments covered with graffiti. The imagery functions as a way for Keyes to express his personal experience and also allows him to comment and interpret events in the world. His work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver. Keyes currently lives and works in Portland Oregon.

In this tutorial, we’ll create a textured site layout by layering multiple images. Creating highly-textured web design layouts is easier than you may think. You can learn to build image intensive designs rapidly. For intermediate Photoshop designers creating this design will take less than an hour, and you’ll learn some professional tips along the way. Let’s get started!

Final Image Preview

Want access to the full PSD files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Psd Plus for just $9/month. You can view the final image preview below.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Photoshop CS4
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: 60 minutes

Take a look at the site design we’ll be creating below.

Materials Needed

• Download grunge texture
• Download wood seamless texture
• Flower stock image (included in the Psd Plus source files)
• Leaf stock image: (included in the Psd Plus source files)

Video Tutorial

Our video editor Gavin Steele has created this video tutorial to compliment this text + image tutorial.

Step 1

In this tutorial we’ll use some stock images to create a highly-textured web layout. Let’s start by creating a new document with the following size: 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels.

Step 2

Now go ahead and download the seamless wood texture from Grafplus.com. Here you can find the download link: Download wood seamless texture. Open the “texture-small.jpg” in Photoshop and then go to Edit > Define pattern. Choose a name for your pattern and click OK. You can now close the image with the wood texture.

Step 3

Select the “background” layer and press on Command + J. This shortcut will duplicate the “background” layer. Select this new layer and from the top menu select Layer > Layer Style > Pattern Overlay… Use the pattern you created a few seconds ago.

Step 4

Use the Rectangle Tool to create some vertical bars with different colors/

Step 5

Select all these shapes in the layer palette by holding down the Command key and with your mouse click on each layer). In this way you will select all the shapes.

Step 6

When you have all shapes selected press on Command + E (this shortcut will merge all the layers into a single one). Change the blending mode to Color Dodge, and the Opacity value to between 40% and 50%.

Step 7

Now it is time to add another great stock image. Visit grafplus one more time and download the following image: grunge texture. Place this image in your document at the top. Go to File > Place, and select this nice grunge texture.

Step 8

Be sure you have this layer selected and then apply a simple drop shadow. Layer > Layer styles > Drop Shadow.

Step 9

Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to make a selection as shown.

Step 10

Be sure you have the layer with the grunge texture selected, and then press Command + J (this shortcut will create a new layer via cut). Select the new layer and rotate the layer 180 Degrees (Edit > Transform > Rotate 180. Place this new layer on top of the layout with the Move tool. Go ahead and add your logo now as well. For this tutorial I’m using the text: “PSDtuts+.”

Step 11

Change the blending mode for the text logo to Color Burn.

Step 12

Use the same technique to cut some buttons and a footer. Here you can see the result.

Step 13

If you want to create a distinct button with another color you have to select the layer with the button you want to make it unique, and then press Command + U to bring up the Hue/ Saturation settings. Check the Colorize checkbox, and move the sliders to the right or left until you’re happy with the result.

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