Top Articles On The Web Design Billboard In December’09

A per­fect lay­out, A Good Design and Nice Resource can pro­duce a cre­ative out­put. Lay­out, tex­tures, typog­ra­phy and pat­terns are used more often than one may think but the out­come of dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion can result ver­ity of excel­lent designs. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism is built upon knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence. How­ever, When it comes to selec­tion of right resources you need to be very care­ful and spe­cific about needs.

In this round-​​up, you’ll find num­ber of top resources, tuto­ri­als, free­bies which left deep impres­sion on web design com­mu­nity, as the month of Decem­ber had a lot of inter­est­ing arti­cles pro­duces by dif­fer­ent sources.

The more time and effort you ded­i­cate for use­ful and cre­ative resources, the higher are your chances for get­ting bet­ter results.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing related arti­cles as well.

• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In November’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In October’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In September’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In August’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In July’09
• Cor­po­rate Web­site Designs For Design Inspi­ra­tion – Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Tutorials, Web Design | Comments Off

25 Quality PSD Files for your next Web or Graphic Design Projects

We appre­ci­ate to all those tal­ented Pho­to­shop Design­ers who designed and share their Cre­ative design stuffs with their efforts, so oth­ers design­ers can learn and get inspi­ra­tion from their works.

Here we are listed 25 Qual­ity PSD Files for your next Web or Graphic Design Projects to Down­load from var­i­ous direct loca­tions, hope you like the down­load list.

If you don’t want to miss out our next posts, you can Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Sticker byTLMedia

Under Con­struc­tion Page Design by Creamania

One page Free Port­fo­lio Design by PsdThemes

Col­or­ful Video Them by PsdThemes

Cool Blog Design by PsdThemes

Laptic2 by TLMedia

BEER Can by TLMedia

PSD Book by TLMedia

Star Fish Watch TV by TLMedia

Carpati Cig­a­rettes by TLMedia

Old Paper by TLMedia

Eti­quette PSD by TLMedia

Idle PSD by TLMedia

Dacia by TLMedia

World Music by psdgraphics

Web News Icon by psdgraphics

Zoom Icons by psdgraphics

Red Christ­mas Bags by psdgraphics

Light Bulb by psdgraphics

Trash Can by psdgraphics

Money Back Guar­an­tee Seals by psdgraphics

PSD Vote Empty But­tons by psdgraphics

Gears Icons by psdgraphics

Shield Icon by psdgraphics

Umbrella Icons by psdgraphics

Enjoy this Post? Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Our blog is updated reg­u­larly with con­tent related to web design, inspi­ra­tion, tuto­ri­als, word­press, free­bies and much more. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can sub­scribe by RSS or Email

Posted in Graphic Design, Photoshop, Resources, Web Design | Comments Off

Unveiling Photoshop Masks

Design is a fluid and shift­ing process in which lay­ers are con­stantly mod­i­fied and tweaked. As com­plex­ity builds, so does the need for pre­serv­ing data in a flex­i­ble way. Learn­ing non-​​destructive edit­ing tech­niques helps you pro­duce doc­u­ments that bend along with your cre­ativ­ity. Pho­to­shop Masks are the cor­ner­stone of this process. Not only do they pre­serve impor­tant pixel data, but they allow for the cre­ation of flex­i­ble inter­face ele­ments as well. In this arti­cle, we’ll explore the tech­ni­cal aspects and cre­ative advan­tages of incor­po­rat­ing masks into your workflow.

Pho­to­shop offers five meth­ods of mask­ing: Pixel Masks, Vec­tor Masks, Quick Masks, Clip­ping Masks and Clip­ping Paths, all of which define pixel opac­i­ties with­out affect­ing the orig­i­nal data. Each of them has its own pros and cons, and know­ing which method to use is extremely impor­tant for cre­at­ing clean, flex­i­ble and prop­erly masked layers.

Pixel Masks

Pixel masks deter­mine opac­ity val­ues based on a raster image with grayscale val­ues that cor­re­spond pixel for pixel to the orig­i­nal layer. This makes them ideal for mask­ing com­plex pho­to­graphic imagery (e.g. the hair on a model or leaves on a tree). Pixel masks allow 100 shades of gray, which cor­re­spond directly to opac­ity per­cent­ages. The abil­ity to vary opac­i­ties is unique to pixel masks, mak­ing them an invalu­able tool.

Pixel Masks are ideal for extract­ing com­plex pho­to­graphic imagery. (Image Source)

While pixel masks can be eas­ily mod­i­fied, they aren’t ideal for every sit­u­a­tion. Because of their raster for­mat, scal­ing them can cause unwanted arti­facts and inter­po­lated bluri­ness. Smooth curves and per­fect edges can also be tricky to cre­ate when paint­ing a mask. Under such cir­cum­stances, vec­tor masks would be preferable.

Pixel masks should not be used when you might have to rescale.

Cre­ation

Cre­at­ing a pixel mask is as easy as select­ing the layer or layer group and click­ing the “Add Layer Mask” but­ton at the bot­tom of the layer’s palette. A sec­ond thumb­nail will be added to the layer, giv­ing you a pre­view of the mask. By default, this will be entirely white. How­ever, if you hap­pen to have a selec­tion active when cre­at­ing the mask, the selec­tion will be used to define the grayscale val­ues of the mask.

Once a mask is cre­ated, it can be edited as if it were any other pixel data by click­ing on the mask’s thumb­nail. You can then paint in black to hide areas or white to show them. The mask can also be tweaked using adjust­ments and fil­ters such as Curves, Thresh­old, Unsharp mask and Gauss­ian blur.

Paint­ing the mask black is much like using the eraser tool. (Image Source)

View Modes

While cre­at­ing a mask, there are a num­ber of ways to view the mask data. Option + click­ing on the thumb­nail will dis­play only the mask on the can­vas; this is great for fine-​​tuning areas but doesn’t allow you to see the actual layer as you work. If you’d like to see both the mask and the layer at the same time, you can view the mask as a Ruby over­lay. Sim­ply press \ with the layer selected to tog­gle the over­lay on and off. The color and opac­ity of the over­lay can also be changed by double-​​clicking the mask’s thumb­nail. Addi­tion­ally, if you’d like to tem­porar­ily remove the mask, you can tog­gle it on and off by Shift + click­ing on the mask’s thumbnail.

Turn­ing the mask off and the over­lay on can help with fine-​​tuning. (Image Source)

Chan­nels

Every time a layer with a mask is selected, the mask is shown as a tem­po­rary alpha chan­nel in the Chan­nels palette. From here, you can save the chan­nel for later use by drag­ging the chan­nel to the “Cre­ate new chan­nel” but­ton at the bot­tom of the palette or by select­ing “New Chan­nel” from the fly-​​out menu. You can also change the mask’s Ruby over­lay set­tings by double-​​clicking the channel’s thumb­nail. Because a tem­po­rary chan­nel becomes avail­able when­ever a masked layer is selected, you can use some key­board short­cuts to tog­gle between the actual layer and its mask. Press­ing Com­mand + \ will select the mask and Com­mand + 2 will bring you back to the layer data.

A tem­po­rary chan­nel is avail­able when­ever a layer with a mask is selected.

Vec­tor Masks

Vec­tor masks pick up where pixel masks fall short. By defin­ing the mask’s shape using paths, vec­tor masks pro­vide a supe­rior level of finesse and flex­i­bil­ity. They’re ideal for defin­ing shapes with clean, crisp lines, such as inter­face elements.

Vec­tor Masks are ideal for mask­ing crisp-​​edged objects. (Image Source)

The dis­ad­van­tage of vec­tor masks is that they are unable to vary pixel opac­i­ties; they are basi­cally either 0 or 100. For this rea­son, many mask­ing jobs require a hybrid imple­men­ta­tion. By using a vec­tor mask to define the solid edges and a pixel mask for the more com­plex areas or for vary­ing opac­i­ties, you can effec­tively extract objects while max­i­miz­ing flexibility.

Cre­ation

To add a vec­tor mask to an exist­ing layer, sim­ply Com­mand + Click the “Add Layer Mask” but­ton at the bot­tom of the layer’s palette. If a path is cur­rently active, the mask will be cre­ated using it. Oth­er­wise, the mask will be empty. Paths can then be added, sub­tracted or mod­i­fied by click­ing the mask’s thumbnail.

Being able to cre­ate flex­i­ble inter­face ele­ments is one of the best advan­tages of vec­tor masks. Using the Shape Tool (U) set to Shape Lay­ers allows you to quickly cre­ate a fill layer with a Vec­tor Mask. These lay­ers are far more flex­i­ble than a raster level and are per­fect for cre­at­ing but­tons, rules and other ele­ments that can be resized with­out inter­po­lat­ing data.

The flex­i­bil­ity offered by Vec­tor Masks make them per­fect for inter­face ele­ments such as buttons.

View Modes

By click­ing on the Vec­tor Mask’s thumb­nail in the the Layer’s palette, you can show or hide the paths saved in the mask. These paths can also be accessed from the Path’s palette, but only if the layer itself is selected. Tog­gling the mask on and off can be done by Shift + click­ing the thumbnail.

Paths

Much like how layer masks appear in the Chan­nels palette, a tem­po­rary work path would be dis­played in the Paths palette when a layer with a vec­tor mask is selected. You can then save the mask by drag­ging it to the “Cre­ate new path” but­ton at the bot­tom of the palette or select­ing “Save Path” from the fly-​​out menu. This tem­po­rary path can be accessed at any time by first select­ing the Path Selec­tion tool (A) and then press­ing Enter; it can be dis­missed by press­ing Enter again. You can also quickly cre­ate a selec­tion from an active path by press­ing Com­mand + Enter.

Apply­ing

Before a vec­tor mask can be applied to a layer it must first be ras­ter­ized by right-​​clicking the vec­tor mask thumb­nail and choos­ing Ras­ter­ize Vec­tor Mask. If the layer already has a pixel mask, the two masks will be com­pos­ited together to cre­ate a sin­gle pixel mask. It can then be applied like any other layer mask (right-​​clicking the thumb­nail and choos­ing “Apply Layer Mask”).

Quick Masks

The Quick Mask mode allows you to cre­ate a selec­tion using pixel edit­ing tools as opposed to the prim­i­tive selec­tion tools. This is a more log­i­cal approach to cre­at­ing a com­plex mask with vari­able opac­ity. You can access this mode by click­ing on the “Quick Mask” but­ton in the Tools bar or by press­ing Q.

Once in Quick Mask mode, you’ll no longer be edit­ing the cur­rent layer. Instead, you’ll be edit­ing a Ruby over­lay that can be edited as if it were reg­u­lar pixel data. By default, enter­ing this mode will cover the entire can­vas with a semi-​​transparent red color. You can then paint white to remove the over­lay and black to add it back. The Quick Mask is essen­tially a more visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a selec­tion. There­fore, every area that you remove from the over­lay is added to the selection.

Quick Mask mode allows you to quickly paint a selec­tion. (Image Source)

Options

You can mod­ify how the Quick Mask mode is dis­played by double-​​clicking the “Quick Mask” but­ton in the Tools bar. Here you can change the color and opac­ity of the mask as well as whether the mask color indi­cates masked areas or selected areas. Per­son­ally, I find paint­ing selected areas more intu­itive than paint­ing masked areas, which is the default.

The Quick Mask Options menu allows you to change the color, opac­ity and tar­get of the overlay.

Sav­ing

After cre­at­ing a quick mask, you can imme­di­ately apply it to a layer by cre­at­ing a layer mask or save it for later use. By select­ing Selec­tion → Save Selec­tion, you can save your selec­tion as a new chan­nel or apply it to an exist­ing chan­nel. This allows you to come back to the selec­tion at any time by Con­trol + click­ing the chan­nel in the Channel’s palette or by select­ing Selec­tion → Load Selection

Sav­ing a Quick Mask cre­ates a new channel.

Clip­ping Masks

You’ll often run into sit­u­a­tions in which mul­ti­ple lay­ers require the same mask. You could group the lay­ers and mask the layer group, but that is not always ideal. Clip­ping masks allows for a layer sim­ply to adopt the opac­ity of an under­ly­ing layer. This is extremely help­ful when using adjust­ment lay­ers; by clip­ping them to a layer, you can apply adjust­ments to a sin­gle layer with­out affect­ing those below it.

The eas­i­est way to cre­ate a clip­ping mask is to Option + click between the two lay­ers in the Layer’s palette when the clip­ping mask cur­sor appears. Alter­na­tively, you could press Com­mand + Option + G to clip a layer to the one below it. Any num­ber of lay­ers can be clipped to one mas­ter layer, but a clipped layer can’t be used as a clip­ping mask itself.

Clip­ping Masks are great for con­strain­ing Adjust­ment Lay­ers. (Image Source)

Clip­ping Paths

Clip­ping Paths are a lot like Vec­tor Masks except that they apply to an entire doc­u­ment rather than a layer or layer group. They are pri­mar­ily used by print design­ers to spec­ify uniquely shaped objects that are imported into a page lay­out pro­gram. The path is imported along with the image to ensure a crisp clean edge.

To cre­ate a clip­ping path, first be sure that you have a path saved; hav­ing a tem­po­rary Work Path does not suf­fice. You must select “Save Path” from the fly-​​out menu in the Paths palette if your path is not saved. Then, from the fly-​​out menu, choose “Clip­ping Path.” Your document’s appear­ance will not change, but if you were to import the doc­u­ment into Illus­tra­tor using the Place com­mand, it would be clipped to the path.

Masks Palette

The Masks palette, intro­duced in CS4, adds some use­ful fea­tures to help with cre­at­ing and refin­ing both pixel and vec­tor masks. For the first time, you can feather a mask and change its den­sity with­out los­ing the orig­i­nal mask.

The Masks palette was a great addi­tion to Pho­to­shop CS4.

Create/​View Buttons

At the top of the palette are two but­tons that can be used to select the layer mask or vec­tor mask or to cre­ate one if one doesn’t exist.

Den­sity

The den­sity slider basi­cally con­trols how strong the mask is. At 100%, fully masked areas will be com­pletely trans­par­ent. When den­sity is set to 50%, those same areas would be only 50% transparent.

The Den­sity slider con­trols the strength of the mask. (Image Source)

Feather

Feath­er­ing the edges of a mask used to require apply­ing a Gauss­ian Blur, which would destroy the orig­i­nal mask shape. With the Masks palette you can now change the amount of feath­er­ing at any time while main­tain­ing the orig­i­nal mask data.

With the Feather slider, you can now change the mask’s soft­ness on the fly. (Image Source)

Mask Edge

The Mask Edge menu pro­vides some long-​​desired fea­tures that aid in refin­ing a mask’s perime­ter. They come in extremely handy when the extracted object is still pick­ing up color from the masked background.

Radius
The Radius set­ting is sim­i­lar to feath­er­ing, but it retains some of the edge’s crisp­ness. This can be help­ful with reduc­ing awk­ward or overly sharp edges on com­plex shapes.

Con­trast
Con­trast sim­ply mod­i­fies the con­trast of edge ele­ments, which helps crispen any soft edges. Using this in con­junc­tion with Radius can help remove unwanted arti­facts in the mask.

Radius and Con­trast can be used to remove unwanted arti­facts. (Image Source)

Smooth
Smooth sim­pli­fies the com­plex­ity of the mask’s edges. This can be use­ful if you’ve painted the mask by hand and need to quickly clean up some rough edges.

Feather
This feather com­mand is nearly iden­ti­cal to the Mask palette’s pri­mary feather com­mand, but it restricts the blur more to the edge of the mask. The dif­fer­ence is slight yet noticeable.

Contract/​Expand
The Con­tract and Expand slider allows you to grow and shrink the edges of the mask. This is extremely use­ful for reduc­ing unwanted color fringes.

Smooth and Con­tract helps tighten up masks to reduce color fringes. (Image Source)

Pre­view Mode
At the bot­tom of the palette are five dif­fer­ent pre­view modes that allow you to view the mask as a (1) selec­tion with march­ing ants, (2) quick mask ruby over­lay, (3) black matte, (4) white matte or (5) grayscale mask.

Check the mask in dif­fer­ent views to ensure its qual­ity. (Image Source)

Color Range

The Color Range menu is one of the most pow­er­ful ways to extract an image from an evenly col­ored back­ground. With only a few clicks and adjust­ments, even the most com­plex object can be cleanly masked. For fur­ther details, see the “Tech­niques” sec­tion just below.

Tech­niques

Each mask­ing job is unique and requires a dif­fer­ent method of cre­ation and refine­ment. How­ever, some com­mon tech­niques can dras­ti­cally improve the effi­ciency and max­i­mize the flex­i­bil­ity of your masks.

Color Range

When your mask­ing task requires an object to be extracted from an evenly col­ored back­ground (much like the video edit­ing process of Chroma key­ing), the quick­est means is often the Color Range com­mand. First, use the Eye­drop­per Tool to select the pri­mary color of the back­ground. Then, you can use the “Add to sam­ple” and “Remove from sam­ple” tools to refine the color selec­tion. The fuzzi­ness slider lets you broaden the range of col­ors selected. If the color data is there to sup­port it, this process makes short work of an oth­er­wise tedious task.

The Eye­drop­per tools allow you to eas­ily select the sky in the photo.

Color Range can make quick work of com­plex masks. (Image Source)

Chan­nels

A mask is often hid­ing in one of the layer’s chan­nels, just wait­ing to be unlocked. Depend­ing on the image you’re using, you may be able to find a chan­nel with strong con­trast between the tar­get object and its sur­round­ings. You may even want to try tem­porar­ily chang­ing the color mode to Lab or CMYK to pro­vide alter­na­tive chan­nel options. Once you find a chan­nel with a strong enough con­trast, Com­mand + click it to cre­ate a selec­tion. Then, apply the selec­tion as a layer mask. You’ll then be able to tweak it as you would any other mask.

As the image below demon­strates, sim­ply select­ing a chan­nel is not always suf­fi­cient for a clean mask. You may need to do some mix­ing with other channels.

(Image Source)

1. The orig­i­nal image has strong vibrant col­ors, mak­ing it a great oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate a mask using channels.
2. The red chan­nel has the foreground-​​to-​​background con­trast, so we’ll start there. We’ve copied and pasted it onto a new layer and then inverted it.
3. The green cup is still very promi­nent, so we’ve con­verted the blue chan­nel to a layer and will use it to negate the green and red cups.
4. By set­ting the Blend­ing Mode on the blue channel’s layer to Mul­ti­ply, we can effec­tively erase any extra­ne­ous white areas.
5. The two lay­ers are then flat­tened and applied as a layer mask to the orig­i­nal image. This leaves us with a cleanly masked blue mug.

Pixel/​Vector Hybrid

Objects will quite often have a com­bi­na­tion of sharp edges and soft feath­ered edges. In instances like these, using both a pixel and a vec­tor mask may be best. One com­mon exam­ple of this is extract­ing a fig­ure. You can use the pen tool to draw all of the smooth edges along the figure’s body and then use a pixel mask to paint in the fine details such as hair.

Mul­ti­ple Masks

There may be times when you want to apply more than one mask to a layer. You could choose to apply the mask by right-​​clicking the layer and select­ing Apply Layer Mask, after which you could apply a new mask. This, how­ever, is not ideal because the data behind the mask will be lost.

A far bet­ter method is to cre­ate a Smart Object from the layer and mask the new layer. This allows you to apply two masks to one layer with­out los­ing data. In fact, if needed, you could repeat this process over and over.

Con­vert­ing a layer to a Smart Object allows you to add mul­ti­ple masks with­out los­ing data.

Layer Styles

If you have ever added a mask to a layer with layer styles, things may have got­ten messy, espe­cially if the mask had soft edges or vary­ing opac­i­ties. This is because, by default, Pho­to­shop uses a com­pos­ite of the layer’s opac­ity along with any masks on it to define the area used by the layer styles. This is desir­able but can also be a nui­sance. To counter the default behav­ior, open the Blend­ing Options menu for the layer, and apply either “Layer Mask Hides Effects” or “Vec­tor Mask Hides Effects.”

Messes can often be tidied by using the “Layer Mask Hides Effects” option.

Blend Clipped Lay­ers as Group

By default, Pho­to­shop assumes that all lay­ers in a clip­ping stack should be blended with the base layer before the base layer is blended with the lay­ers below it. This makes sense some­times, but other times you may need the clipped lay­ers to adopt the shape of the base layer but not the blend mode. To pre­vent this behav­ior, open the Blend­ing Options menu for the base layer (right-​​click the layer and choose “Blend­ing Options”), and uncheck the “Blend Clipped Lay­ers as Group” option. Now, each of the clipped lay­ers will blend with under­ly­ing lay­ers as if they weren’t clipped.

The “Blend Clipped Lay­ers as Group” causes all clipped lay­ers to blend together first and then blend with under­ly­ing lay­ers using the base layer’s Blend Mode.

Type Masks

Grouped with the Type tool in the Tools bar is the decep­tively named Type Mask tool. It allows you to cre­ate type just like the reg­u­lar type tool; but once com­mit­ted, the type is con­verted to a selec­tion. This selec­tion can be con­verted to a layer mask but will no longer be editable. This is not ideal. If editabil­ity is impor­tant, you may want to cre­ate a reg­u­lar type layer and use it as the base of a clip­ping mask. This is the only way to mask objects to the shape of type with­out los­ing the abil­ity to edit the text. Per­haps some­day Pho­to­shop will let us cre­ate an editable Type Mask for a layer.

Remov­ing Edge Fringes

Even after using the “Refine Edge” com­mand in the Masks palette, you may find ran­dom color fringes left along the edge of your mask. This is where some man­ual brush­work comes in handy. The Paint­brush tool can be used here, but I rec­om­mend the Heal­ing Brush, Stamp Tool or Smudge Tool because they will blend bet­ter with the subject.

First, cre­ate a new layer and clip it to the masked layer. Then, set your tool of choice to sam­ple all lay­ers. You can now select your sam­ple area and paint the fringes out; the orig­i­nal layer data will be pre­served. Often, chang­ing the brush’s Blend Mode will help pre­serve the detail of the layer.

Color Fringes can usu­ally be smudged or painted away on a clipped layer. (Image Source)

Key­board Shortcuts

• \
  View Layer Mask as an overlay
• Com­mand + \
  Set layer focus to Layer Mask
• Com­mand + 2
  Set layer focus to layer data
• Com­mand + Option + \
  Cre­ate selec­tion from Layer Mask
• Com­mand + Option + G
  Make/​Release Clip­ping Mask
• A, then Enter
  Activate/​Dismiss Vec­tor Mask
• Com­mand + Enter
  Cre­ate selec­tion from active vec­tor mask
• Com­mand + Click Mask Thumb­nail
  Cre­ate selec­tion from mask
• Com­mand + Option + Click Mask Thumb­nail
  Sub­tract mask from selection
• Com­mand + Option + Shift + Click Mask Thumb­nail
  Inter­sect mask from selection
• Q
  Tog­gle Quick Mask mode

Inside the Color Range Menu

• Option
  Tog­gle the Reset but­ton and the “Sub­tract from Sam­ple” tool
• Com­mand
  Tog­gle between the Selec­tion view and Image view
• Shift
  Tog­gle the “Add to Sam­ple” tool

Fur­ther Reading

• Nest­ing Smart Objects for Multi-​​Mask Effects in Photoshop
• Using Masks to Improve Land­scape Images
• Pho­to­shop Mask­ing and Compositing
• Mask­ing a Tree
• Seam­less Compositing
• Fluid Mask, by Vertus
• Select­ing and Extract­ing Hair
• Mas­ter­ing Pho­to­shop With Paths

(al)

© Thomas Gian­nat­ta­sio for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | 4 com­ments | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: masks, pho­to­shop

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop | Comments Off

Big Thanks to Our Sponsor – November, 2009

Today I would like to thank all our spon­sors for their sup­port to 2ExpertsDesign month after month. Please take a lit­tle of your time to check their awe­some services.

2ExpertsDesign has in the Month of Nov, 2009 154,500 Page Loads, 114,943 Unique Vis­i­tors & 98,277 First Time Vis­i­tors.

Do you want to be the first one to know the lat­est hap­pen­ings at 2ex​perts​De​sign​.com just sub­scribe to our rss feed and be the one of 2500+ subscribers.

RapidX­HTML: We pro­vide hand-​​coded con­ver­sion of your designs into high qual­ity, W3C valid XHTML/​CSS in 8 busi­ness hours.

We guar­an­tee that the code we pro­vide will match the design perfectly.

We focus on Load Speed Opti­miza­tion, SEO Seman­tics and Accessibility.

We make sure that the code we pro­duce will cor­re­spond to all the mod­ern stan­dards of XHTML/​CSS cod­ing and com­pat­i­ble with all major web browsers.

Flash­magazine: We strive to make Flash­magazine the best place to get infor­ma­tion on Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Swift3D, SVG and related prod­ucts and services.

Ele­gant­Themes: Each Word­Press theme comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press. I make sure that each tem­plate per­forms flaw­lessly in each of the most widely used browsers to ensure max­i­mum func­tion­al­ity. Fur­ther­more, all side­bars are made wid­get ready for your con­ve­nience. You get unlim­ited access to all ele­gant themes for $19.95

Learn­Pho­to­shopVideos: is the offi­cial web­site of my strate­gic video tuto­r­ial sys­tem: Graph­ics Champ. I have cre­ated an easy-​​to-​​follow method that will give you the skills you need to design any­thing you want. That’s right– I’ll give you the skills you need to design web­sites, album cov­ers, T-​​shirts, down­load but­tons, ban­ners, fly­ers, ecov­ers, and you will learn FAST! Once you try my time-​​tested for­mula, you’ll expe­ri­ence the Graph­ics Champ dif­fer­ence. Try it today– IT’S POWERFUL!

Pan­daTh­emes: We spe­cial­ize in cre­at­ing Word­Press Themes for small web-​​design stu­dio, web-​​developers, design­ers, pho­tog­ra­phers and other free­lancers who want a pol­ished design with­out hav­ing to pay thou­sands of dol­lars for a cus­tom web design.

W3 Markup :W3 MARKUP quickly deliv­ers professional-​​grade pro­duc­tion (con­ver­sion) of art­work into CSS, (X)HTML, JavaScript (AJAX etc). Our goal is to sim­plify the process of site con­struc­tion one page at a time.

We work from your source files: Adobe Illus­tra­tor (ai), Adobe Pho­to­shop (psd), Adobe Fire­works (png), or even from exist­ing sites to the fol­low­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions: W3C Valid (X)HTML (both tran­si­tional and strict) and W3C Valid HTML 4.01. Mak­ing sure at every step that the site is com­pletely opti­mized for search engine per­for­mance and render/​load speed.

VivaTh­emes: We cre­ate qual­ity and pro­fes­sion­ally designed word­press themes. We offer themes for your busi­ness, blog or per­sonal sites. All of that comes with our excel­lent free support.

We are also thank­ful to those adver­tis­ers who pur­chased fav­i­con ads.

Do you want us to say Thank You in this spe­cial way? So help us to help you!

Become one of our spon­sors and get your site noticed by our readers.

2ExpertsDesign has thou­sands of vis­i­tors each day and one of the main perks of becom­ing one of our spon­sors  is that your com­pany or prod­uct will be noticed by thou­sands of peo­ple each month. Each Month we write a post ded­i­cated to our spon­sors thank­ing them for their sup­port mak­ing our read­ers aware of our spon­sors and chance for our reader to learn a bit more about who and what are sponsor.

You can visit our buyand­sell (BSA) ads page to become a spon­sor and find out cur­rent spon­sor spots which we cur­rently have avail­able on 2ExpertsDesign.

Posted in AJAX, Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Resources, Web Design | Comments Off

66 Excellent Photoshop Web Design Layout Tutorials

When it comes to Image edit­ing or photo enhance­ment, Adobe Pho­to­shop is usu­ally the pri­mary option to con­sider. How­ever, the soft­ware pack­age itself is a quite hard to learn — and extremely hard to master.

Dis­play beau­ti­ful images is a potent ele­ment in web and graphic design, where there is less con­cern for read­abil­ity and more poten­tial for using images in an artis­tic man­ner. Pho­to­shop is use­ful for both cre­at­ing and edit­ing images to be used in print or online. Not too easy to use, but full of high-​​quality fea­tures, Pho­to­shop is the best choice for any image manip­u­la­tion job.

Below, you’ll find some of the Best Adobe Pho­to­shop Web Design Lay­out Tuto­ri­als which might help you to get inspired and learned a tip or two by the end of this pre­sen­ta­tion.

For those, who don’t know what is Adobe Pho­to­shop? And what it can do? Then fol­low the link below for detail introduction.

• Adobe Pho­to­shop | Adobe​.com
• Adobe Pho­to­shop | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The next gen­er­a­tion, rep­re­sent­ing two decades of excel­lence. This appli­ca­tion con­tains every­thing you need to cre­ate high-​​end images and graph­ics. For those artists whose work demands more than the basic appli­ca­tion, There is a Pho­to­shop to sat­isfy their every needs that uti­lizes Image edit­ing & photo manipulation.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing tuto­ri­als related arti­cles as well.

• Ulti­mate Round-​​Up Of 60 Excel­lent Gimp Tutorials
• 77 Excel­lent Pho­to­shop Tuto­ri­als For Design­ing Posters
• 145 Ulti­mate Round-​​Up Of Pho­to­shop Tuto­ri­als and Resources
• 65+ Smok­ing Pho­to­shop Text Effect Tutorials
• 125+ Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of Illus­tra­tor Tutorials
• 77 Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of Adobe After Effects Tutorials

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to more tuto­ri­als that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Tutorials, Web Design | Comments Off

Ultimate Round-​​Up Of 60 Excellent Gimp Tutorials

When it comes to Image edit­ing or photo enhance­ment, Adobe Pho­to­shop is usu­ally the pri­mary option to con­sider. How­ever the only pron­lem is, the soft­ware pack­age itself is a quite expen­sive for a gen­ral free­lancer designers.

So what about you!!, Gives much sleep lately or lower open Pho­to­shop, and some do not con­sider eth­i­cal pirate down­load, so many free soft­ware sup­port­ers choose to use a large soft­ware GNU image manip­u­la­tion, if you guessed right, we talk­ing about GIMP, a free soft­ware raster graph­ics editor.

Below, you’ll find some of the Best Gimp Tuto­ri­als and Resources Around for your Image edit­ing & photo enhance­ment related needs which might help you to get inspired and learned a tip or two by the end of this pre­sen­ta­tion.

For those, who don’t know what is GIMP? And what it can do? Then fol­low the link below for detail introduction.

• GIMP | gimp​.org
• GIMP | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Short, GIMP (The GNU Image Manip­u­la­tion Pro­gram) is a free soft­ware raster graph­ics edi­tor. It is pri­mar­ily employed as an image retouch­ing and edit­ing tool, in addi­tion to offer­ing freeform draw­ing and retouch­ing tools, the GIMP can accom­plish essen­tial image work­flow steps such as resiz­ing, edit­ing, and crop­ping pho­tos, com­bin­ing mul­ti­ple images, and con­vert­ing between dif­fer­ent image for­mats. GIMP can also be used to cre­ate basic ani­mated images in the GIF format.

The next gen­er­a­tion, rep­re­sent­ing two decades of excel­lence. This appli­ca­tion con­tains every­thing you need to cre­ate high-​​end images and graph­ics. For those artists whose work demands more than the basic appli­ca­tion, There is a GIMP avail­able freely to sat­isfy their every needs that uti­lizes Image edit­ing & photo manipulation.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing tuto­ri­als related arti­cles as well.

• 145 Ulti­mate Round-​​Up Of Pho­to­shop Tuto­ri­als and Resources
• 65+ Smok­ing Pho­to­shop Text Effect Tutorials
• 125+ Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of Illus­tra­tor Tutorials
• 77 Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of Adobe After Effects Tutorials
• 115+ Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of 3D Stu­dio Max Tutorials
• 45+ Incred­i­ble Maya Tuto­ri­als Around

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to more tuto­ri­als that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Graphic Design, Photoshop, Tutorials, Web Design | Comments Off

Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development

Most peo­ple who have designed web­sites or apps in Pho­to­shop will, at one point or another, have had issues try­ing to match col­ors in images to col­ors gen­er­ated by HTML, CSS or code. This arti­cle aims to solve those prob­lems once and for all.

Color Man­age­ment to Match Col­ors Across Mul­ti­ple Devices

In the print world, color man­age­ment typ­i­cally involves cal­i­brat­ing your entire work­flow, from scan­ner or dig­i­tal cam­era to com­puter dis­play to hard proofs to the final press out­put. This can be quite a tall order, espe­cially when the devices use dif­fer­ent color spaces — match­ing RGB and CMYK devices is noto­ri­ously hard.

When design­ing or edit­ing for TV, cal­i­brat­ing the main edit­ing dis­play and using a broad­cast mon­i­tor are com­mon; these show real-​​time proof of how the image will look on a typ­i­cal TV in a viewer’s home. In such a sce­nario, color man­age­ment offers many ben­e­fits and is highly recommended.

When build­ing Web and appli­ca­tion inter­faces, the sit­u­a­tion is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. The final out­put is the same device that you’re using to cre­ate the art­work: a com­puter dis­play (putting aside for now dif­fer­ences in gamma between Win­dows, Mac OS X prior to 10.6 and the iPhone, which we’ll cover later.)

There is a catch, though. Even though you’re cre­at­ing the Web or app inter­face on the same device that the final prod­uct will be shown on, the col­ors will have var­i­ous sources: images (typ­i­cally PNG, GIF and JPEG), style markup (CSS) and code (JavaScript, HTML, Objective-​​C, etc). Get­ting them all to match can be tricky.

The Goal

When design­ing web­sites or app inter­faces, we want to per­fectly match the col­ors that are dis­played on screen in Pho­to­shop and that are saved in files with what’s dis­played in other appli­ca­tions, includ­ing Fire­fox, Safari and the iPhone Sim­u­la­tor. Not only do we want the col­ors to look the same, but we want the actual val­ues saved in the files to per­fectly match the col­ors we have defined in Pho­to­shop. Col­ors should not shift or appear to shift in any way, under any circumstance.

Why Is This So Difficult?

Pho­to­shop applies its color man­age­ment to images dis­played within its win­dows and to the files it saves. This is a bad thing if you’re work­ing exclu­sively with RGB images for Web or on-​​screen user inter­faces. With the default Pho­to­shop set­tings, #FF0000 will actu­ally dis­play as #FB0018, and #BB95FF will dis­play as #BA98FD. The dif­fer­ences are sub­tle but def­i­nitely there.

How Does Pho­to­shop Dif­fer From OS X And Windows?

OS X’s color man­age­ment is applied to the entire dis­play at the very end of the pro­cess­ing chain, after the main buffer in video ram. This means that although color man­age­ment is applied, the soft­ware util­i­ties that mea­sure color on screen (like /​Utilities/​DigitalColor Meter) will report the same val­ues that you have saved in the file or entered as your code. I believe the color man­age­ment in Win­dows Vista and Win­dows 7 (Win­dows Color Sys­tem) works in a sim­i­lar fashion.

Photoshop’s color man­age­ment is applied only to the image por­tion of its win­dows and to the files it saves. This color cor­rec­tion hap­pens as Pho­to­shop draws the image on screen, so soft­ware util­i­ties that mea­sure color on screen often report dif­fer­ent col­ors from the ones you have spec­i­fied. It’s worth not­ing that OS X’s color man­age­ment is applied on top of Photoshop’s.

The best solu­tion I’ve found is to dis­able Photoshop’s color man­age­ment for RGB doc­u­ments as much as pos­si­ble. Doing so forces the RGB col­ors that are on screen and saved to the file to match the actual color value. If you need to cal­i­brate your mon­i­tor for Web and app design work, then you would best be served by chang­ing it at the OS level.

Dis­abling color man­age­ment used to be quite easy in Pho­to­shop CS2 and all ver­sions prior, but it now requires a lit­tle more skill.

Dis­abling Photoshop’s RGB Color Management

These instruc­tions are for Pho­to­shop CS4 on Mac and Win­dows. Set­ting up CS3 is very similar.

Step 1: Go to Edit → Color Set­tings and set the work­ing space for RGB to Mon­i­tor RGB.

Step 2: Open a doc­u­ment and go to Edit → Assign Pro­file, then set it to Work­ing RGB. This must be done for every sin­gle doc­u­ment you work on.

Step 3: Ensure View → Proof Col­ors is turned off.

Step 4: When sav­ing files with Save for Web & Devices, ensure that Con­vert to sRGB is turned off. If you’re sav­ing a JPEG file, then also turn off Embed Color Pro­file (you may want this turned on for cer­tain pho­tos, but chances are you’ll want it off for inter­face ele­ments and icons).

Dif­fer­ence Between “Assign Pro­file” And “Con­vert To Profile”

Now would be a good time to men­tion the dif­fer­ence between Assign Pro­file and Con­vert to Pro­file, so that you know which to use when.

Each Pho­to­shop doc­u­ment con­tains a color pro­file that’s sep­a­rate from the actual color data stored for each pixel. Assign Pro­file sim­ply changes the pro­file in the doc­u­ment, with­out affect­ing any of the color data. It’s a non-​​destructive action: you can assign a new color pro­file to your doc­u­ments as often as you like with­out doing any dam­age. Assign­ing a new pro­file may change the way your doc­u­ment appears on screen, but the data con­tained in the file will remain unaltered.

Con­vert to Pro­file is quite dif­fer­ent. Not only does it assign a color pro­file to the doc­u­ment, but it tries to keep your image look­ing the same on screen. It does this by pro­cess­ing the color data con­tained in the file for each pixel. Con­vert­ing to a new pro­file will more likely pre­serve a document’s color on screen, but the data con­tained in the file will be per­ma­nently altered. Use with caution.

If you’re copy­ing lay­ers from one Pho­to­shop doc­u­ment to another, you will want to ensure that the doc­u­ments have been assigned the same color profile.

Illus­tra­tor Is The Same As Photoshop

If you would like images saved in Illus­tra­tor or imported from Illus­tra­tor to Pho­to­shop to match as well, then fol­low the steps below. These instruc­tions are for Illus­tra­tor CS4 on Mac and Win­dows. Set­ting up Illus­tra­tor CS3 is very similar.

Step 1: Go to Edit → Color Set­tings, and set the work­ing space for RGB to Mon­i­tor RGB.

Step 2: Open the doc­u­ment and go to Edit → Assign Pro­file. Then set it to Work­ing RGB. This must be done for every sin­gle doc­u­ment you work on.

Step 3: Ensure that View → Proof Col­ors is turned off.

Step 4: When sav­ing files with Save for Web & Devices, ensure that Con­vert to sRGB is turned off. If you’re sav­ing a JPEG file, then also turn off Embed Color Pro­file (again, you may want this turned on for cer­tain pho­tos, but chances are you’ll want it off for inter­face ele­ments and icons).

Gamma Dif­fer­ences

Win­dows has used a gamma of 2.2 since its intro­duc­tion. Mac OS X has used a gamma of 1.8 for all ver­sions except Snow Leop­ard (the lat­est release), which uses 2.2. What does this mean? Prior to Snow Leop­ard, Web pages looked darker on Win­dows. Thank­fully, both oper­at­ing sys­tems are now in sync, so a Web page should look very sim­i­lar on a Mac and PC that use the same monitor.

Infor­ma­tion about the iPhone’s gamma is a lit­tle hard to come by; I couldn’t ascer­tain whether it is 1.8 or 2.2. This is another rea­son to test your inter­face on an iPhone.

Final Check For iPhone UI

Your iPhone or iPod’s screen and cal­i­bra­tion will likely be dif­fer­ent from your Mac or PC’s screen and cal­i­bra­tion. I often import full-​​screen images of the UI into iPhoto and sync them with an iPhone to see exactly how the final inter­face will look on the device (on Win­dows, you can sync pho­tos using iTunes). This gives you another chance to make adjust­ments before slic­ing up images or com­mit­ting any­thing to code.

This arti­cle explains how to han­dle the prob­lem that while test­ing some land­scape iPhone app inter­face mocks, they seem blur­rier than they appear in Photoshop.

Please note: For some bizarre rea­son, the Pho­tos app on the iPhone doesn’t dis­play land­scape images at 1:1. Instead, it scales them slightly or shifts them to a sub-​​pixel posi­tion, mak­ing the images blur­rier than they should be. To avoid any issues, always save images in por­trait mode (320 pix­els wide by 480 pix­els high) to test your user inter­face mock­ups (read more about this issue).

On Mac, mov­ing col­ors between Pho­to­shop and code can be made eas­ier with Devel­oper Picker, Hex Color Picker and Col­ors (all free).

Con­clu­sion

Now, you’re able to move bitmap and vec­tor images between Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor with­out any color shifts at all, and using any method. You’re also able to grab a color using the color picker in Pho­to­shop, and then use the same HEX color value in your CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Flash or Objective-​​C code, and it will match your images per­fectly. I hope this arti­cle has helped. If you have any ques­tions, feel free to ask in the com­ments below.

Related posts

You may be inter­est­ing in the fol­low­ing related posts:

• 20 Time-​​Saving Tips to Improve Designer’s Workflow
• Clever PNG Opti­miza­tion Techniques
• PNG Opti­miza­tion Guide: More Clever Techniques
• Clever JPEG Opti­miza­tion Techniques

About the Author

Marc Edwards (@marcedwards) is the Direc­tor and Lead Designer at Bjango (@bjango), an iPhone app devel­oper. Marc has been using Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor for over 12 years, design­ing for print, Web, desk­top appli­ca­tions and iPhone.

(al)

© Marc Edwards for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. |
Perma­link |
11 com­ments |
Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Magazine

Post tags: cmyk, pho­to­shop, rgb, work­flow

Posted in Graphic Design, Photoshop | Comments Off

70+ Photo Manipulations Art That Will Blow You Away

Through­out his­tory, great design­ers always found new ways to show their cre­ativ­ity to express them­selves and cre­ate new trends and tech­niques to remark their work apart from the rest of the crowd. Photo manip­u­la­tion is an art in itself, that requires a skill and pre­ci­sion as we know, it is one of the most cre­ative art­forms to come out of the dig­i­tal age.

This pre­sen­ta­tion shows an incred­i­ble col­lec­tion of photo manip­u­la­tion art related to nature, pho­tog­ra­phy, objects, illus­tra­tions, HDR as well as some abstract and fantasy-​​related con­cepts. Hope­fully, every­body will find some­thing inter­est­ing to ignite their cre­ativ­ity.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing related arti­cles as well.

• Excel­lent Exam­ples of Photo Manip­u­la­tion Art — Part I, Part II
• Amaz­ing Wall­pa­pers To Spice Up Your Desk­top — Part I, Part II, Part III
• Enjoy Moments Of Reflec­tive Pho­tog­ra­phy — Part I, Part II
• Rain­bow Col­ors Inspired Pho­tos and Pic­tures — Part I, Part II
• Motion and Blur Pho­tog­ra­phy for Inspi­ra­tion — Part I, Part II
• Strange and Fan­tas­tic Build­ings Archi­tec­ture — Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to other photo manip­u­la­tion art that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Web Design | Comments Off

70+ Photo Manipulations Art That Will Blow You Away

Through­out his­tory, great design­ers always found new ways to show their cre­ativ­ity to express them­selves and cre­ate new trends and tech­niques to remark their work apart from the rest of the crowd. Photo manip­u­la­tion is an art in itself, that requires a skill and pre­ci­sion as we know, it is one of the most cre­ative art­forms to come out of the dig­i­tal age.

This pre­sen­ta­tion shows an incred­i­ble col­lec­tion of photo manip­u­la­tion art related to nature, pho­tog­ra­phy, objects, illus­tra­tions, HDR as well as some abstract and fantasy-​​related con­cepts. Hope­fully, every­body will find some­thing inter­est­ing to ignite their cre­ativ­ity.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing related arti­cles as well.

• Excel­lent Exam­ples of Photo Manip­u­la­tion Art — Part I, Part II
• Amaz­ing Wall­pa­pers To Spice Up Your Desk­top — Part I, Part II, Part III
• Enjoy Moments Of Reflec­tive Pho­tog­ra­phy — Part I, Part II
• Rain­bow Col­ors Inspired Pho­tos and Pic­tures — Part I, Part II
• Motion and Blur Pho­tog­ra­phy for Inspi­ra­tion — Part I, Part II
• Strange and Fan­tas­tic Build­ings Archi­tec­ture — Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to other photo manip­u­la­tion art that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Web Design | Comments Off

Music Inspiration Behind a Web Design Work

When I start a new web design project I try to find inspi­ra­tion tak­ing a look on the best gal­leries saved in the book­marks of my browser. Gen­er­ally this oper­a­tion have a good impact in my design process, often I find excel­lent web­sites, made by great web designer, that inspire me. It isn’t a trite thing, in fact scrolling many gal­leries we can find use­ful infor­ma­tions about the last trends in web design, good design solu­tions and par­tic­u­lar lay­outs, dis­cov­er­ing new CSS and JavaScript tech­niques too.

Dur­ing my research I select and book­mark some good web­sites which impress me. After I sketch a gen­eral wire­frame, focal­ized on the res­o­lu­tion of my par­tic­u­lar prob­lem (such us the strange requests of crazy clients), and then it can begin the work with Pho­to­shop. This is, gen­er­ally, the incep­tive rou­tine.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing design inspi­ra­tion related arti­cles as well.

• Sin­gle Page Web­site Designs For Design Inspiration
• 60+ Amaz­ing Exam­ples Of Illus­tra­tive Web Designs
• How to Cre­ate A Bet­ter Online Portfolio
• 55 Sexy Our Work Page Designs
• 50+ Beau­ti­ful Web­site Designs Using Office Stationery
• Grid Style In Mod­ern Web Design: Show­case and Resources
• 80+ Per­fect End­ing of Mod­ern Web­site Design– Footers!

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to other design inspi­ra­tion trends that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

Music Inspi­ra­tion Behind a Web Design Work

A my dear friend, in one of our dis­cus­sions about web design, sug­gests me “try to use off-​​line inspi­ra­tion, lis­ten­ing music for exam­ple. You could build pretty orig­i­nal web design.”
I ini­tially am wary. Then a client asks me a web­site for a Blues Band. So I say to myself “We can try!”

Final Result

I have build a web­site lay­out (Called Vince Vega) using the inspi­ra­tion sim­ply induces from music. Below you can see the final result.

In this arti­cle I want to explain how music has inspired this lay­out. I will describe the design process step-​​by-​​step mak­ing clear which songs I lis­tened for each phase. This kind of work usu­ally requires 60 — 120 min. and the tim­ing of the fol­low­ing track­list cov­ers 70 — 90 min­utes, but dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the design I have heard twice some tracks.

Work­ing on concept

It’s impor­tant to lis­ten some songs of the band for under­stand­ing the genre. Well, they are a blues band with some nuances of jazz, great music in my opin­ion. So, get in the zone.

• B.B. King — The Thrill is Gone
• Sonny Boy Williamson II — Your Funeral and My Trial
• The Dave Brubeck Quar­tet — Take Five
• Ella Fitzger­ald and Louis Arm­strong — Summertime

Hear­ing the first track­list I decide the color, “deep” dark blue, I want a dreamy atmos­phere in a noc­turne sky, using some “grunge” ele­ments, but hold­ing a clean and read­able layout.

The power of music… four songs that inspire good ideas. Fan­tas­tic!

Sketch and wireframe

Now I need energy to start the work. I want rock songs. Sure, it’s strange to pass from trum­pet and voice of Louis Arm­strong to the sound of “mod­ern” rock, but I risk of dream­ing too long, I should work.

• Blur — Song 2
• R.E.M. — Los­ing my Religion
• Dire Straits — Sul­tans of Swing

In my mind the goal is clear, for this rea­son it isn’t dif­fi­cult to draft a sim­ple wire­frame on my block-​​note. I want a sim­ple lay­out that empha­sizes the com­mu­nica­tive power of the blues and of the jazz.

Below it’s pos­si­ble to see the first sketch.

Now I can start the work from scratch in Pho­to­shop, hold­ing in my mind the main guidelines.

The Back­ground, a dreamy atmosphere

In this step I want to cre­ate the basis to recre­ate the noc­turne sky, remem­ber­ing that the main topic of the web­site is the music of a band.
The fol­low­ing track­list help dur­ing this stage.

• Pink Floyd — The Great Gig in The Sky
• Eric Clap­ton — Layla (Unplugged)
• John Miles — Music (was my first love)
• Muse — Showbiz

I use a dark layer of back­ground (#000) and draw a large, round, gra­di­ent (with The Gra­di­ent Tool in Pho­to­shop) from #113567 color to #000 on a new layer.

Over these lay­ers I cre­ate a tex­ture layer, using this pic­ture, and now I can add a photo with a gui­tar. Both the lay­ers need an oppor­tune blend­ing mode and some adjust­ment layers.

Now it’s time to arrange the idea of sky using the Stars_​brush by anaRasha and Clouds II Pho­to­shop Brushes by red­head­stock.

A lit­tle tip. I add a new clip­ping mask layer above the clouds lay­ers that con­tains a photo (I set the blend­ing mode lumi­nos­ity and an oppor­tune opacity).

Mak­ing the header, logo and some grunge elements

Blues is famous for the “blue note” (the “wor­ried” note), a note played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expres­sive pur­poses. It is almost “dis­cor­dant”, but it makes a great emo­tive impact.

I try to repro­duce this con­cept using some grunge ele­ments in the header.

• Dick Dale & The Del Tones — Misirlou
• Pearl Jam — Alive
• Jethro Tull – Liv­ing In The Past
• Frank Zappa – The Cen­tral Scru­ti­nizer and Joe’s Garage

First of all I make a sim­ple logo using a sans serif font and a “grunge” font for the sub­ti­tle. I also apply a par­tic­u­lar style to the text lay­ers using Drop Shadow, Gra­di­ent Over­lay and Stroke.

The right side of the header is per­fect to add the “grunge ele­ments”. I make use of the cut and paste tech­nique to put in Polaroid pic­ture, plec­trums and the tag. I gen­er­ally find the images at Stock​.Xchng​.Hu. The dec­o­ra­tions on the back­ground are cre­ated using Musik Brush by Rozairo.

Adding the menu I have the fol­low­ing result for header.

Down Header, large typog­ra­phy and a nice photo-​​effect

The client has done the explicit request for a direct pro­mo­tional mes­sage includ­ing a large photo of the front man and some other images in the home page. Per­fect, music!

• Pink Floyd — Money
• The Police — Mes­sage in a Bottle
• The Stran­glers — Golden Brown
• B.B. King & Buddy Guy — I Can’t Quit You Baby

I cre­ate a large box for the direct pro­mo­tional mes­sage in which I can use a large typog­ra­phy and recall some ele­ments of the header, such as Polaroid pic­tures and plectrum.

Now I must add the photo of the singer and sax­o­phon­ist of the band (in our fic­ti­tious exam­ple, Vince Vega). I want an image that is per­fectly immersed in over­all design. I iso­late the man shape from a photo of the sub­ject using the Pen Tool of Pho­to­shop (for the arti­cle I use a sam­ple image from Stock​.Xchng​.Hu). For my aim I cre­ate a first layer, apply­ing an oppor­tune style to cre­ate a glow effect around the musi­cian with a fill of 60–70%, under this I insert a sec­ond layer, in this case I apply the Gauss­ian Blur Fil­ter. At the end add a blue Photo Fil­ter for both the lay­ers.
Below you can see the result.

Main Con­tent and Footer

The hard work is ended, and to con­clude the design I need a cheer­ful tracklist.

• Beach Boys — Come Go With Me
• Beach Boys — Kokomo
• Queen — Crazy Lit­tle Thing Called Love
• Franz Fer­di­nand — Walk Away

In this last step of my design process I add the con­tent in the right side. The choice of plac­ing the con­tent on right is aimed to high­light the pro­mo­tional mes­sage because the updates of con­tents will not be frequent.

I end with a sim­ple footer that futures social media links and online activ­i­ties of the band, to sep­a­rate the sec­tions I use a bevel effect.

Per­sonal Considerations

This was a sim­ple exper­i­ment for improv­ing my expe­ri­ence using a dif­fer­ent kind of inspi­ra­tion. Finally I am sat­is­fied for the result (per­sonal opin­ion). Sure, it is only a first part of a work and dur­ing the other steps, such us the hand-​​coding or the test­ing; prob­a­bly we need max­i­mum con­cen­tra­tion and silence. How­ever I’m really sur­prised of mak­ing a web­site lay­out in Pho­to­shop with­out on-​​line inspi­ra­tion, exclu­sively using the sen­sa­tions induced from the music. It’s a very nice thing.

You can lis­ten to the com­plete playlist on my Blip Account.

You can also down­load the com­plete lay­ered PSD Tem­plate, but you can use the file only to learn more about the Pho­to­shop tips used to build this lay­out. It is a work that I made for a local web agency, so I can allow a per­sonal use of this file, exclu­sively for learn­ing.

Web­site Designs Show­case for Music, Musi­cians and Bands

01. Banda Gozz

Offi­cial Link

02. Kim Richard­son Music

Offi­cial Link

03. Ryan Edgar Music

Offi­cial Link

04. Jared Camp­bell

Offi­cial Link

05. The Bliz­zards

Offi­cial Link

06. Dirty Pretty Things Band

Offi­cial Link

07. Suie Paparude

Offi­cial Link

08. Kid Rock

Offi­cial Link

09. Francesca Bat­tis­telli

Offi­cial Link

10. Darry Lwor­ley

Offi­cial Link

11. Selina Her­rero

Offi­cial Link

12. Rocket Club

Offi­cial Link

13. Carl Car­tee

Offi­cial Link

14. Michale Graves

Offi­cial Link

15. Gary Nock

Offi­cial Link

16. The Trian Woodburns

Offi­cial Link

17. Rem­edy Drive

Offi­cial Link

18. Robert Henry

Offi­cial Link

19. Faust Again

Offi­cial Link

20. Dalek Dead­verse

Offi­cial Link

21. Diego Diaz

Offi­cial Link

22. Trevor Exter

Offi­cial Link

23. Gesine Nowakowski

Offi­cial Link

24. The Cello Stu­dio of Ryan Sweeney

Offi­cial Link

 

Find Some­thing Missing?

While com­pil­ing this list, it’s always a pos­si­bil­ity that we missed some other great resources. Feel free to share it with us.

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Photoshop, Web Design | Comments Off