The basic trouble arises in design costing due to the nature of this business. Costing for one’s products is not at all a big deal, however, when it comes to costing for your services, people often find themselves in an acute dilemma.  Same happens when a designer does a very good and fulfilling project, but when the client asks for the costing, he totally shuts down and finds himself looking around and asking the fellow designers as what do they charge and how to go about this process. Creating designs for tri-fold brochures will cost clients a different amount than designing printed postcards.

Not every friend of yours is sincere to you and especially when he or she is also your striking competitor. So as a result, such a designer ends up under-charging and disappointing himself or over-charging and disappointing his client. If you are on a tight budget, you can check some inexpensive web hosting packages online that will also give you a good service.

When such an issue came into my observation, I couldn’t help but jot down some points and map out an article dedicated to design costing. Following are some facts about pricing your design services:

First Rule, That There is No Rule

If, for any reason, you expect this article to provide you with rules and regulations and set guidelines, then you are seriously mistaken. The very first thing you need to learn about design costing is that there is not hard and fast rule for it. There are no books or guidelines that may help you actually make good costing. The basic reason is that designing is an extremely variable process. Some designs may look simple and easy, yet only the designer might know how much effort and research he has put into making it.

Therefore my suggestion is that every designer needs to develop his or her own method for pricing, and even if you do make your own rules, you probably won’t be able to follow the same rule on every project. It is better to not only have your own formulas of costing but these should also be extremely flexible, highly variable and according to the project.

Costing – A Necessary Evil

Like all other creative professionals of the world, designers usually like to focus on their work more than any other aspect of their business. Although their business is totally commercial and aimed at money-making, still, they are not very comfortable with pricing their services. However, while working on a design project, they should be aware that they will have to face the costing aspect sooner or later. Even more, they cannot hire anyone for this job or leave it to a friend to charge their services, as they are the only ones who know how much time and effort has been put into a certain project and how it should be valued in terms of money.
Especially and particularly, for freelance designers, costing is a necessary evil. One should understand that freelancers wear a lot of hats, and design costing is just one of them. Therefore, it is important to get comfortable with it as earlier as possible and save yourself from many long-term issues.

Charging Less is Inevitable for Starters

There is an important thing that all the design newbies should understand, i.e. no matter how good you design or how skillful you are with your work, there is something that will always keep you from costing your work at higher prices and that is the sole fact that you are new. As soon as you enter the market, as a freelance designer, you will find that you need to prove yourself to the market and establish a name. Charging less is the only way you can beat the raging competition and get your share of goodies from the market.

Hourly Costing Vs Project-based Costing

There are two basic formats on which designer around the world charge their clients i.e. hourly costing or project-based costing. Different designers opt for any of these two formats owing to their routine, work pattern and market trend. It all depends on you as how would you like to take it across and on which format your clients are comfortable paying you. However, in general, project-based costing is more common than hourly rates, but it is better that you explore the pros and cons of both formats and then make a decision.

Learning through Trial and Error

Wherever there is fluctuation in the value for your services, freelancers and even the bigger organizations opt for the most comfortable, yet risky method of costing, i.e. trial and error. Although there is very little margin to experiment whenever there is money involved, however, for starters, trial and error method gives you long-term benefits.

If you have made a mistake in design costing (under-charged and client and lost a big chunk of money or over-charged a client and lost him for being too expensive), always remember that it is normal and you should learn from it. The more you learn from your experiences, the trial and error method will automatically diminish.

Your Prices Speak for Your Work

Design costing is a very tricky business. You need to strike a balance between your high and low prices as this can lead to your reputation. How? Well, pricing is one of the most solid and common way of judging the abilities of a designer (sometimes even more than his or her portfolio). When people usually meet a low-pricing designer,(no matter how well you have designed their brochures, flyers, post cards or business cards) the first thing that comes in their mind is that he or she must not be very skilled or experienced. Your prices impact your impression on your potential clients.
Your prices also impact; rather speak for your own idea about your services and abilities. By costing your services very low you will eventually convince yourself that you are not worth more. Then again, if you cost your services too high, you will indulge in feelings of over-confidence and will not be able to land many clients.  So it is always good to keep a balanced costing habit that should benefit you more.

It’s OK to be Uncertain

As I have mentioned repeatedly earlier, design costing is a very vague and fluctuating process. Especially the freelance designers, no matter how experienced they are in their business they do feel slight uncertainly while costing their design projects every time. So either you are a starter or a veteran freelance designer, it is OK to be uncertain about design costing. The majority freelancers struggle with design costing and are often very uncertain, so being uncertain doesn’t mean that you are inferior or lack talent. Take the time to educate yourself through learning and experience.

Sometimes it is Good to Lose a Project

This a fact especially addressed to the designers who are new in freelancing. When you start a business, there is a special hunger for more and more work coming in. This is totally understandable and quite acceptable, however, as soon as you start getting regular work, you need to wash this lusty attitude away and become choosy about your clients and projects.

All of us have a limited amount of time available for work in a day, and taking a job that does not pay what you need to make it to a good livelihood, isn’t going to be ideal. If you see that the client is very annoying, negatively critical or paying less, your freelancing gives you all the rights to drop that project and focus on more positive ones. Once you have dropped a project then there is no need to worry about it, because, after all, only a freelance design can enjoy this privilege!

Designing is one skill which can help you a lot as it is something which can be done in a big company or even on your own without having to invest too much. Not everyone is lucky enough to get to work as a freelancer because of their degrees. Take a look at MBAs or Engineers, starting their own business may require a lot of effort. However, as a designer, with a lot of effort and dedication, you can achieve a lot.

Designing is not just about making brochures, flyers, postcards or business cards, neither does it limits to making call-to-action graphic designs. One thing that you have to keep in mind is that just because you are a good designer, does not mean you are a good ‘design business man’ as well. Handling a few designing tasks is completely different from handling an entire design business. The whole idea of being your own boss might sound very interesting; however, it is not easy at all.

Yes, you will have your advantages such as working from home, having no one to report to, being able to spend much time with family; however, with all this you will have additional responsibilities and loads of multi-tasking. Carry your awesome and creative business cards with you all the time. They can be a great tool for selling your services.

Therefore, in order to develop and maintain a successful design business, you will have to consider a few elements before you jump into the world of design business. Let us take a quick look at these few elements:

Getting Formal Business Education

Attending a designing school can help you a lot in understanding the basics of designing but it won’t necessarily make you a good designer. To be honest, schools are not considered or expected to produce best designers as designing is one field where practice will make you perfect. Schools can give you an idea of how things work in designing but designing schools are not going to train you on how to handle a design business. Jumping in to something without having a good knowledge of it is not a very good idea. So, before starting a business, you should get some business training as well.

Apart from that you can get some formal education on courses other than designing as well, such as economics, public relations, business communication, calculus and business management etc. In order to run a successful design business, you will have to deal with legal matters as well, so it is important to learn more on handling legal contracts. Since you will have to market your business in order to gain clients, you will have to know basics of marketing and business development also in order to be successful at it. Courses such as PR will help you in client dealing and customer services.

From Outsourcing to Human Resources

Even if you are own your boss, you still have to take care of a lot of things and a lot of people as well. As a design business man, you are no longer handling the responsibility of designing and will be wearing multiple hats. Initially, you will be handling almost every department on your own. Take for instance, marketing, customer support, accountant etc. However, with the passage of time, your design business will get stronger and wider and there you might need some human resource or professional outsourcing.Obviously, you won’t be hiring a lot of people in the beginning but later on you will have to hire so you need to be good with your hiring skills.

If you cannot afford a full time position, you can hire a freelancer or can outsource a helper in contractual basis, who can take care of things for you. You would eventually need someone to handle your payrolls, taxes and other important financial matters. You can also outsource human resources. This way you will not have to pay them for a full time job and you can get the benefits as well. In order to be a successful Businessman in designing you have to think things through so that nothing goes wrong.

Advertise your Business

Whenever it comes to advertising, people have this point of view that they will have to spend a lot of money in the beginning to get their business noticed. This is no longer the case as the down economy as opened a lot of new doors of advertising. You can now advertise your business without even spending a single penny.

Social networking websites is one of the best ways to reach out to a large number of audiences. You can simple put your business details on facebook or twitter and ask your friends to help you in promoting your business. All you need to do is sound professional instead of sounding way too formal. Make sure that your writing gives a good impression of yours.

Professional Networking

These days’ people go for recommendations instead of wasting their time on looking for someone they don’t even know. Instead of focusing more on promoting your business through yellow pages, you should concentrate more on getting personal referrals. So, in order to be a successful business man you need to be really good with networking.

The more people you know, the better it is for your business. Always keep your business card with you and make sure that you follow up with the people you have met as well. You never know who can bring a long a good opportunity. Good networking can really help you a lot with your new business.

Self Discipline

You will never become a successful designer if you are not well organized. A person who is working on his own has a lot more to handle and an unorganized person cannot handle things. Always keep in mind that as a business man you have additional responsibilities and disciplinary acts can take you a long way.

You must decide your working hours and act professional. A person can start acting a little careless when he has no one to report to but this way your business will suffer so even if you are your own, in order to be successful, act professional even if you are working from home.

The Final Thoughts

One of the major reasons why people are opting for starting their own business is the not so reliable economic conditions. Companies are laying-off employees because of unstable economic conditions. Job security has become a major issue these days so starting your own business is a great idea. If only you take the right steps you can be a successful design businessman. Always remember that being your own boss is the most difficult thing. Apart of designing brochures, logos, flyers, postcards or business cards, a designer needs to master the business development and business management skills as well.

No matter how successful is your design’s communication and call-to-action, at the end of the day you have to handle and you do not have anyone to blame as well. So, you have to be very careful in order to be a successful design businessman. Be prepared to make sacrifices. You will have to stay focused and be consistent. You will also have to understand the amount of risks involved. Starting a business will be challenging but it will also be rewarding. However, you won’t achieve your goals overnight so staying focused and consistent will take you a long way.

You might get tutorials in games and websites in order to learn how to start things but in real life, you will have to learn with the passage of time and with the advices of your seniors. A lot of newbies won’t be really good at handling difficult situations or people. Also, they will need a proper guidance on how to progress in order to become a successful web designer. If you are a newbie and you find yourself struggling all by yourself, don’t be surprised as this is the best way to learn in any field. You may be an expert at designing print material such as postcards. With these tips you’ll be able to transition to web design easily.

The only person who can help you is yourself. You need to learn things the hard way but do not consider yourself all alone in this journey. In professional field, you might learn a lot but initially you need some really good tips and advices to learn the tricks of the trade as a beginner. This post is based on some valuable tips from the professionals of web designer’s community.

Web design community’s advice is one of the best things you can go for as you can learn a lot. If you really want to be a successful designer and actually produce call-to-action websites, then you need to work on a few important things as a beginner and you are all set to enter the fields of professionals where you will have to face some really tough competition.

The Tips

Following are a few advises which are going to help you, a beginner, in learning. Also, the seasoned veterans can learn it from all over again and give their career a new turn:

Never say NO to Learning

It doesn’t matter if you have been a topper throughout your life or if you have stood first in your designing degree, you should never think that “You Know it All”. A person and especially a beginner should never stop learning. If you will think that you don’t need any lessons from the existing players in the game, then you won’t be able to survive. Learning is a very important thing and it continues for the rest of our lives. So, apart from your dedication, show your keen interest in learning new things. There is always something new in the market when it comes to designing field. So, make sure that you stay up to date.

Don’t be afraid of experimenting as well. You can always find good lessons online or you can find a lot of books available in the market which can help you in improve your skills, so go for them and learn something new. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes as it is the best way to learn. Yes, do avoid making the same mistake again and again. Learning from your mistakes is way too important. If you are really passionate about your work and you want to learn something, you would keep your pride aside. Always remember that blogs, forums can prove to be your best teacher. Also, only reading things will not help you. Put some efforts into practicing everything you read.

Accept Criticism – It is for Your Own Good

If someone tells you that you should accept criticism, that someone is giving you one of the best advices for all fields of your life. Criticism can be good, bad or even really harsh. You need be really positive and try your level best to find something positive even in a harsh comment. Try to gain and learn from the criticism. Yes, there can be a lot of lame comments and if they have no merit, instead of replying to them and wasting your time, you can simply let them go. Keep your focus on improving yourself and accepting criticism is one of the best ways to do that.

Also, keep the professional criticism to the work place only. Do not let it affect your personality or other parts of your life. Remember, feedback will always help you in improving so instead of losing your confidence after reading a bad criticism, you should accept it and work harder to improve things.

Have Patience

Developing patience in yourself can take you a long way. Always keep in mind that nothing happens overnight. You cannot learn everything in one go, you can complete a project in one night so having patience is very important. In order to achieve something, you will have to put in efforts. Remember, that in order to reach your destination, you have to go a long way and that way can have a lot of hurdles. If you are unable to learn something or if you are unable to come up with a new design, give yourself some time, relax and then try. Getting to where you want to be will require a lot of patience, time and effort.

While learning, take your time to understand the first step and then move to another level. If you will try to hurry things up, you won’t get the desired results and eventually you will end up being a frustrated person which can affect your creativity a lot. You will have competitors as well and if you want to succeed, you will have to be nice to them as well. Patience will help you in such situations. Also, clients can be very demanding at times so no matter how dumb your client sounds, you need to give yourself some time before replying to them. There are good ways to tell them that they are talking nonsense.

Love it or Leave it

Designing is something you can do only if you love it and you have a passion for it. If you do not leave, it is probably not the right field for you. Web designing and web developing field always have something new to teach you or will always have a challenge for you. You should be either ready to take it and if you are not, you should better leave it. This can be more difficult for freelancers as they are not only handling designing or developing, they are handling it all. You cannot fake your passion so become a designer only if you love it. This is the only way you can become successful because you will have an urge to learn. If you do not love it, the best option for you is to leave it.

Believe in Yourself

You will find hundreds of people in the professional field to bring you down or to make you feel bad about yourself. They will even try to make you think that you are not worth the position or your work is not up to mark. In such cases, it is very important for you to believe in yourself and be yourself. Do not go out of the way and make compromises while finding your way. Also, you should never try to imitate the successful ones. Make sure that you believe in yourself and you always stay what you were at the time when you started. The only thing that should change and grow is your knowledge.

An Overview

Web designing is quite different from other types of designing, in which you are required to make websites and web solutions instead of designing print advertisements, brochures, flyers, post cards or business cards. Web designing requires strategy, effective communication and in-depth knowledge of user experience on the Internet. The tips mentioned above can be of a great help to everyone who has just entered the field of designing. The good thing about these advices is that they can be implemented in professional and personal life in order to be successful.

However, good design blog has the tendency to bring to you back on loving it. Bloggers are clamoring about greater traffic every other day. More traffic means higher page ranking and higher page ranking automatically leads to making more money with the ads. Such is called a call-to-action blog design which has a few unique elements when compared to the design of a traditional website. Following are some tips to consider while designing a blog that is ideal for maximum traffic:

Suitable Content

Blog is often considered as something where you can publish anything, yes, you can as long as you do not have desire to make it productive for others and profitable for yourself. However, in order to design a blog which is aimed to have good traffic, and immaculate in design one should always focus on the content as blog is nothing without its content. The content should be appropriate in order to keep your visitors focused on it and it should be the focal point of the design.

It is essential not to distract your readers with excessive images and extra items because it can be counterproductive. In the light of given tips, it is in your best interest to keep your blog simple. It is not bad to go for simplicity as it is common for blogs that want to emphasize the content.

Ease to Steer

It is been witnessed that some designers emphasized on pictorial blogs and in an effort to make it unique. Certainly, it is not bad to use pictures as they are helpful in holding your readers but somehow putting a lot of pictures make it difficult to navigate the site. Readers usually come to your blog from secondary sources like RSS feeds, social media sites, etc.

A small percentage of your readers will enter your blog through the front page which makes navigation even more important. In such scenario to make the navigation easy you can use sidebar which typically includes the majority of the navigational links to categories, recent posts, and sometimes popular posts. Menu below the header and footers are sometimes also used to enhance the navigation on the site.

Quick Loading

Broadband Internet and cable net has brought revolution to Internet users and made browsing easier than ever, however, it does not mean to start making websites which take ages to load. Majority of your visitors will have a very short attention span and in order to immediately catch their attention and avoid having them click off of your site, your pages should load quickly.

It becomes much more important when you intend touse social media to generate traffic. There are blogs that are weighed down by excessive widgets that really hurt the page load speed. It is your responsibility to keep your blog clean and free of unnecessary items if you really want to cut down on the time it takes to load.

Content Placement

I may sound more self-opinionated toward this but I believe that more of your visitors will pay attention to your articles if they start higher on the page. The visitor definitely is going to see in the form of your content whatever you have to offer. The visitors will pay frequent visits if they get what they want in first glimpse.

It is highly advisable to make it as easy as you can for readers to get started with your posts because it is highly probable that they then will be more prone to scroll down for the rest. It will also give an edge in order to get more traffic from social media sites. In order to make it easy for search engine to crawl down its web it would prove beneficial to have keywords at the top of the page.

Design a Memorable Blog

Running a blog does not require huge investment, however, some basic amount required in buying domain and application of themes. The number of blogs has now gone off in millions whereas themes available for blogs are limited in number but growing. In this scenario, it is important to note that most blog readers visit a number of blogs each day, and many of them will feature the same themes. It becomes designers’ responsibility to make it easy for his visitors to remember his blog and standout from all of the free themes by customizing a theme yourself, or by having a blog theme professionally designed.

Greed is a Menace

Having a blog site does earn you significant amount of money and become business for those who take it seriously. However, some blogs go way beyond the limit and let the advertisements take over the blog. In this case visitors usually digest it and consider you more prone toward ads as compare to the quality of content. In order to save yourself from greed and attraction of money try to have a striking balance between ads and content because by the end of the day it’s the content that help in you in having those ads.

Compatibility

It has often witnessed that there are some blogs that do not really open in the same manner on different browsers i-e, either their design rips off or text runs all over the design. Moreover, you cannot restrict your blog site for one browser because you don’t know which browser your visitor is using.

The site should not be incompatible with browser because if your blog is not functioning well in all of them you could be losing readers. The key thing to note is that fortunately, 90% of your visitors will probably be using the leading 3 or 4 browsers. So if you want to keep things in order then you can run tests on the leading browsers.

Use Vibrant Colors

There is absolutely no harm in making your blog more vibrant and lively especially using colors sanely. The best designs always make effective use of colors in order to improve their appearance. Coloring your blog can be done in number of ways, and sometimes it’s even a subtle aspect of design.

The color combination’s don’t really need to feel bad to visitors and make it difficult to read by disturbing the visual ability of blog as a whole. The effective use of colors is the only solution, and for that you need to visit successful blogs and their usage of vibrant colors to get better understanding.

Readability

Readability deals with content in particular and it’s formatting in general. The content should be formatted in way to cognate it with blog theme. It is important to note that most readers will be skimming your posts rather than reading them. Try to use headlines, sub-headlines in the text to keep visitor interested, bold text to make your point in discussion.

Position Allocation

The main goal for every designer is to let readers read the most important text in their post. It can be done through effective design because flawless design will draw the attention of readers to important items, such as subscription information. In order to make the best use of available space put most important links, images, etc. generally on above the fold so that visitors will see them right away. Do not forget to get rid of unnecessary items it will also help readers to focus on what’s important.

End Note

The above mentioned tips are practiced and highly effective in achieving good numbers of traffic. It also helps to attract other designers and bloggers to refer your sites and enlist you in their friend’s list. It is important aspect of SEO and ultimately effective tool to gain traffic.

There are few things which can either make or break your website. The utmost importance is obviously given to the designing of the website or the content of the website. The thing that most of the designers tend to ignore is the color scheme of their website or the one they are producing for their client. Color scheme is one of the most important things in a website. The color scheme is sure to reflect your brand’s identity and not only that a perfect color scheme will make your visitor stay and a mismatch color will make your visitor leave.

It happens all the time that you visit a website and it consists of a perfect content and design but still there is something which is not quite right. That something is the color scheme of the website. A designer should always be very careful while selecting colors for the website because if you get a vibe that color scheme is a bit off, you should change it as soon as you can. If you can get it, your visitor too can get it. Remember, your color scheme will make or break the impression of your website.

Selecting a perfect color scheme can be very frustrating at times. You have to spend hours and hours to come up with the perfect tone of red or blue or hues of green and white. The biggest worry of every designer is whether they have selected the right color combination or not. You have to focus on other elements as well while selecting the colors and later on you have to adjust, correct and balance the colors to bring out the best of your color scheme. This procedure requires a lot of attention and in the end if you do no get it right it gets more frustrating.

Following are a few points that might help you with understanding colors and coming up with right color schemes:

Harmony

The most important thing about colors is that they should be pleasing to the eye. You should not close your eyes right after opening a website because the brightness was too much for your eyes. Just like the musical chords, everything needs to be in sync when it comes to color schemes.

A color symbolizes various things and everyone related something to some color. For instance, white colors is symbolized as peace, blue color is for sad, green is for envy and obviously red represents anger. Understanding the color psychology is very important. While designing a website you need to keep in mind the color of your product and the color scheme should represent your product.

• Non-harmonious colors:

There are many colors which will never compliment each other. For instance if you make a combination of blue, green and red, you have created a disastrous color scheme.

• Harmonious Colors

If you combine blue, pink and green you can come up with a very good color scheme. Make sure you try to come up with a new color scheme every time. Do not use that typical red, yellow and blue color scheme. People have seen too much of it.

What Color Schemes To Choose?

Well, no one can ever actually explain what sort of color schemes should be selected for all websites. Obviously, every website is representing a different thing. In such cases, designers need to use their common sense. For instance, if you are designing a children’s website, you need to use bright colors so that it looks fresh and welcoming.

Understanding Color and Their Connotations

Before coming up with any color scheme, you need to understand colors and their connotations so that you can actually use the right color. You need to understand which color represents what and this help you in getting the right color combination for sure.

Do Not Get Frustrated

Choosing a color scheme is a time taking procedure and we all have our good days and bad days. People with excellent color combination skills are unable to come up with perfect combination’s so it’s okay if you are unable to come up with something even after trying for a very long time. You need to take a break, clear your mind and then start working on the color scheme with a fresh mind. You can also visit different websites in such cases. There are various websites which implements great color schemes so you can always get a hint.

Website Color Scheme Tools

Internet and software have made our lives quite easier haven’t they? If you are having a bad day and you are simply unable to come up with a harmonious color scheme, you can download various softwares which are specially meant for this purpose. These softwares have features for increasing and decreasing light and saturation values and you can eventually come up with a perfect color combination with the help of these softwares.

Designer’s Intuition

As a designer, we all have our intuitions. While designing a website, a designer can think of colors to use a website without making a special effort. It is quite natural fro designers to come up with color schemes which will work perfect for a website. You can use dull colors for a pre school website and you cannot use extreme bright colors for a website designed for NGO. So, sometimes choose a color scheme by trusting your intuition and you will come up with something excellent for sure.

Emphasizing Important Sections of a Website

As a designer, it is your duty to select colors in a way so that you can direct visitor’s attention towards the important aspects of a website. So, while selecting a color scheme, use eye catching colors for the important parts of the website and subtle colors for the rest of the website. For instance, use the exciting red color for any call-to-action you use in the web. If the color scheme is not pleasing to your eye, it’s probably not pleasing to the visitor’s eye too. Never compromise on color schemes until you think they look perfect.

Background Color and Text Color

The color of the background of the website and the text color are very important. Make sure that the text color is good enough to have a good combination with the color in the background. It should be easy for the readers to read it and if they have to put in a little effort to read it, you have probably not come up with a good color scheme.

Consistency of Colors on Entire Website

Consistency of colors is very important. Using different color schemes on every page of a website is a Big NO. A user needs to realize that he is on the same website and with constant changing colors; you will confuse your visitor which is not a very good sign. A consistency and harmonized look will keep the visitor stay.

Understand the Basics of the Color Theory

Color theory is a set of principles and if followed you can never go wrong with color combination’s. If you take a look at the color wheel, always remember that two colors opposite of each other are perfectly harmonious. You need to be aware of other basic principle in order to come up with good color combination’s.

Selecting color scheme is always fun and pretty difficult at the same time. As we are surrounded by colors all the time and as a designer and creative person, you can find great color combination’s in the natures around you and get inspired!

Preview

Before move on, let’s take a look at the design that we’re going create here. Click on the image to see it in full size.

Step 1: Create Main Background

Create new file with size: 1100 x 1600 px.

Step 2

Before we move see I’d like to start by creating groups. Putting every layer in appropiate groups will help us works effectively and help the programmer to easily code the final psd .

Step 3

Fill background with color #656565.

Step 4

In this step, we’ll change the background color. Click Add adjustment layer icon and choose Hue/Saturation. Activate Colorize option and move three sliders available until we find color that we like.

At this point, you might ask “Why using Hue/Saturation. Why not shoose the color in step 3″. The reason is with this technique you can easily change the color. All you have to do is just open the Hue/Saturation and move the silder to change the color.

Step 5

We’ll add stripe to our background. You can create stripe pattern in Photoshop but I’ve found a free tool to create stripe. Go to stripegenerator.com. Change the settings available. After you find nice stripe pattern on the preview image, click download button. You’ll have the pattern in png file type.

Step 6

Open the png pattern file in Photoshop. Click Edit > Define Pattern. Name the stripe pattern if you want then click OK.

Step 7

Return to our blog design file. Create new layer. Click Edit > Fill. Choose Pattern for its content. Click small down arrow to open available pattern and choose stripe pattern we have just created. Click OK to start fill layer with stripe.

Step 8

Set Layer’s Blend Mode to Overlay and change Opacity to 8%.

Step 9: Page Background

Activate rounded rectangle tool. Set radius to 10 px and foreground color to #7f7f7f. In the middle of the image, drag to create a rounded rectangle. Put this shape inside base group.

Step 10

Add these layer styles to give it a 3D look.

Step 11: Create Main Menu Button

Create a rounded rectangle on top. Put it inside top menu group. Add page title inside the button. Add these layer styles to the button.

Step 12

Create new layer above the button. Create an elliptical selection and fill it with black. Deselect (Ctrl + D). Add Gaussian Blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur). Change layer’s opacity to 30%. This subtle shadow add more depth to the button and gives 3D impressions.

Step 13

Use a pencil tool to draw 1 px white line on top of the button. Erase both ends with eraser tool.

Step 14

This 1 px line is very small. You may not notice it but it does give more depth to button’s 3D appearance. You can the difference in this animated gif.

Step 15

Draw another 1 px white line. This time on top of the content’s base. Erase both ends with eraser tool.

Step 16

Again, spot the difference with and without that 1 px line in this gif animation.

Step 17

Repeat previous steps to create another buttons.

Step 18: Content and Sidebar Background

Draw smaller rounded rectangle for content background. Use color: #c4c3c3. Add these layer styles.

Step 19

Now, select right side for sidebar.

Step 20

Click Add Adjustment Layer icon and choose Levels. Use setting shown below to make selected area lighter. This will separate it from main content area.

Step 21

Double click Hue/Saturation layer and add Inner Shadow. This will add another depth the main content area and make it seems taller.

Step 22: Create Featured Content

Create a white rounded rectangle and use these Layer Styles.

Step 23

Add picture above shape, convert it to clipping mask by pressing Ctrl + Alt + G.

Step 24

Draw black rectangle shape. Convert it to Clipping Mask (Ctrl + Alt + G). Add post on it.

Step 25

Next, we will add Featured Content banner. Draw a rectangle above the picture. Click its right side to add a point. Select the point using direct selection tool and move it to right. Write FEATURED CONTENT inside the shape. Draw another shape under the banner and use darker color.

Step 26

Ctrl-click banner and fill it with black. Move it few pixels down and add Gaussian Blur. Erase unneeded areas creted from blurring process and change layer’s opacity to 60%.

Step 27

We will add navigation arrow to move to next or previous featured post. Create a black circle with opacity 35%. In its center draw a white rectangle. Rotate it 45 degree and change its opacity to 35%. Duplicate rectangle path, move it few pixels right and select subtract.

Step 28

We have just created navigation arrow for previous post. To create next post, duplicate the arrow by Alt-drag it to the opposite side and rotate it 180 degree.

Step 29: Create Post

Draw a white square shape. Add Layer Style Stroke. This shape will be container for post thumbnail.

Step 30

Add image above square shape. Press Ctrl + Alt +G to convert it to Clipping Mask.

Step 31

Next to the thumbnail, add some text. Add post title, post info (category, author’s name, number of comments). Finally, add short post content.

Step 32

Draw a rounded rectangle under the post. This will be read more button. Add these layer styles.

Step 33

I want to add a subtle 3D effect to the thumbnail image. Create ellips selection under the thumbnail image. Fill it with black. Deselect and add Gaussian Blur. Change fill layer to 20%. Alt-drag this shadow and put it on top side of the thumbnail.

Step 34

Next, we need to add separator between each post. Activate brush tool. Open brush panel, set brush size to 1 px and increase spaing to 955%. Shift-drag to draw thin dotted line under the post.

Step 35

In Layers panel, select all post layers. Right click and choose Convert to Smart Object. This way, our post is now in one layer. Alt-drag to duplicate post and fill the content area.

If you want to change something on the post, maybe make the read more bigger. You can do that easily. Double click post layer to open it in new Window. Create some changes and click File > Save. Once you return to original file, every read more button will also change.

Step 36: Create Separator Between Featured Content and Posts

Now, we’ll create a separator between featured content and post list. Create new layer and draw two 1 px lines. Use color #898888 on top and #d6d5d5 under it. The difference of brightness between these lines will gives a 3D look. You can see the result below.

Step 37

Add layer mask and paint both ends with black to hide them.

Step 38

Above the line create new layer. Create elliptical selection and fill it with white. Deselect and add Gaussian Blur. Select bottom part and press delete. Change layer’s opacity to 30%. This will add another subtle 3D effet on the image.

Step 39: Add Social Media Icon

Search for free social network icon. I suggest iconfinder because it has a friendly interface.

Step 40

Download icons and put it on top of sidebar.

Step 41

Draw a rounded rectangle and add these layer styles.

Step 42

Add another rounded rectangle shape, this time shorter. Add these layer styles. Add text subscribe on this button.

Step 43

Repeat step 38 to add a separator between each sidebar widget.

Step 44: Create Ad Spot

Create a rectangle for ad spot. Use color #d7d7d7 and add Stroke.

Step 45

Draw another smaller rectangle for smaller ad spot.

Step 46: Create Other Sidebar Content

Add another content on the sidebar such as Post List and some text. Don’t forget to put separator between each widget. For the separator you can just duplicate earlier separator by Alt-dragging it.

Step 47: Add Logo

Let’s insert the logo. Grab tutoriallounge’s logo from here. Put it on top right of the image. The logo’s color is unique, dark and light blue. That different gives me an idea to make it looks like a sticker.

Create ellips selection behind the logo. Fill it with black. Deselect (Ctrl + D). Add Gaussian Blur and reduce its opacity.

Step 48

Create selection with shape like shown below. Fill it with black, deselect, and add Gaussian Blur. Reduce its layer opacity.

Step 49

Create new layer above logo. Draw a radial white to transparent gradient and reduce layer’s opacity to 30%. This will add a subtle light source on top of the image.

Step 50: Pagination

Draw a white rectangle under posts list. Add Inner Shadow Layer Styles.

Step 51

Add page list and page number. Between every page draw a thin line to separate them. Higlight active page number with subtle to make it different.

Step 52: Add Search Box

Search for a magnify glass icon and put it on top of the page. Next to it, draw a rounded rectangle. Dont forget to add subtle shadow under the shape and icon. Add these layer styles to the search box.

Final Result

Finally, we’re done. I hope you like the end result and learn some new techniques from this tutorial. Click on the image to see it in full size.

I’m working as UI Expert (Web Designer) mostly logo designing is a part of our every Project and always deeply think about company identity for more successful business which more important then other design activities in design campaigns where we using different designing tools like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, Logo design is a sophisticated and complex process.

The tricky thing to do is to come up with the concept behind the logo, In most of the designing campaigns Logo’s everywhere – the web, books, magazines, newspapers, television, movies etc, there is some type of logo. Logos have become a symbol of corporations, business, and success.

In this creative article, you’ll find a large collection of logo design tutorials on the topic of designing logos by some of the most well-respected logo designers in the industry.

Creating an Environmentally Friendly Green Type Treatment

Create a black and white logo

Logo Design Project Step by Step Walkthrough

Quick Logos with Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator

Step-by-step logo

Creating a crazy cool logo

Photoshop Logo Jelly Remake

Design a Print-Ready Beer Label in Adobe Illustrator

How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion

Big Bocca – Illustrative Logo

How to Create a Trendy Retro Type Treatment

Logo Design Process and Walkthrough for Vivid Ways

Create a Silhouette Logo

Dache: Logo Design Process

3d Logo in Gimp

Honey Farm Logo

Sikbox Logo Design Process

EURO 2008 Logo design

Logo Design (video Tutorial)

How to Design an Awesome Logo

Logo Presentation

Logo Design Process Tutorial

Umbrella Corporation logo

Making the ATI Logo

Volks Logo Tutorial

Firefox Logo Tutorial

Illustrative Logo: Bow the Knee

Create a Fly Logo Design

Photoshop create crest logo tutorial in Photoshop

Skype-like logo in Pixelmator

Constructing the Perfect Logo

Create an Origami Logo

Windows Vista Desktop Themes

Create a Logo Identity

Create a retro logo

Wooden Text Effect in Photoshop

Virtual DJ Picture

Create a Cool Music Logo on a Grunge Background

Mac OS X

How To Make a Badass WordPress Logo

Professional Logo Design

Good-Tutorials’ Logo

The Amazing Spiderman

How to create the Sony-Ericsson logo

Making a Logo

3D Encide Logo Tutorial (PSD Included)

Modern Green Logo

Creating a Retro Logo

Create a 3D Glossy Box Logo in Photoshop

Designing a Cake Shop Logo

Planet Logo Tutorial

Glowing and sparkling intense light 3d logo

Fitness Logo Photoshop Tutorial

Brainstorm #9 Logo Process

Hello welcome to Complete Website design tutorial. In this Tutorial we’ll be creating a website in Photoshop then later on code it into a 5 page template. We’ll also be addition a nice JQuery slide effect for our featured content section using JFlow.lets get started firstlt create a new document 900 x 1090 pixels with a black background. Select the rectangular marquee tool and create a box at the top. Fill the box with a radial gradient using the colors #202121 and #000000.

At the very bottom of the rectangle create two 1 pixle lines ontop of each other spanning the width of your canvas.

Add a layer mask to your lines layer. With the gradient tool and a reflected gradient start from the middle and drag towards the edge of the canvas. Make sure forground is white and background color is black. The edges of your lines should blend into the background. You should have impressive like this.

In the top left hand corner add your website title and slogan. I’ve selected to add a few layer styles to the 2nd word in my title. The layer styles are as follows.

You should have something like this

On the same level as your website title towards the right hand side add a straightforward navigation using the rounded rectangle to create a hover state. The color of the blue hover is #0096ff.

Beneath the website title add some featured content text with a title. Next to the title make a straightforward little icon/bullet point and place it next to the title.

On the right side of the header create a rounded rectangle, just big enough to fit inside the space provided. Make the rectangle over lap the header at the bottom.

View Complete Tutorial

Source File (PSD)

We offering some listed below Tutorials for newbies and professionals for learn more and enjoy with new techniques of Photoshop tools, effects, filters and some manual work with real passion.

How I Created Raspberry Frog

In this tutorial, I will show my process of how I made my Raspberry Frog entry. I will be going over the main steps but I will not go over layer masking or adjustment layers in depth. This is my first tutorial so please let me know if there’s anything that I missed or that is confusing.

Lighting a Giant Elephant

A technique for matching the lighting between a subject and its background.
Matching the Light

If you’re like me, every now and then you find yourself needing to insert a subject image into a background where the lighting between the two doesn’t quite match. Your subject image may be flatly lit, while your background contains crisp shadows and highlights — and if you don’t correct the problem you run the risk of getting a load of critical comments.

3D Water Scapes from Scratch

The following tutorial will show you how to create stunning 3D water scapes from scratch, using Photoshop or another similar paint program. We will not only be creating a realistic water texture, but will also be creating a convincing illusion of single point perspective.

Bringing a Stone Statue to Life

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to take a stone statue and alter it to look life-like.

Devil’s Eye

Some eyes are just to pretty, but I bet some of you would change that if you could. I am going to try to explain how to make eyes look more sinister, And remember this is coming from a begginer,so bare with me. I used Photoshop CS2 for this tut.

The making of AVALON

This will show how to create the glowing lady of the lake from my image AVALON.

Saving Photographs for Contests

This tutorial describes one of many methods for saving photographs in compressed format for the highest quality browser display within the file-size limits requested by webmasters. Simply put, we’re going to take a 100-pound photograph and place it into a 20-pound bag. Or, maybe you could consider this “freeze-drying” a photograph, with only small quality loss.

How I made In the clouds

How I made a cloud in the shape of a girl.

Using Layer Blending Modes in Colorizing Gingham

In this tutorial, we’ll colorize an image that has a consistent pattern with equal colored parts and white/neutral parts, such as gingham or plaid. Since this is basically a technique that can be applied to a wide variety of images, I’ll just use a plain square of scanned gingham material.

How to turn Tom Cruise into an alien

These are the steps I used in creating my image, “Face-off” for  Alien Nation 3
First things first

A lot of people have asked how I do a lot of my characterizations and weird aliens, so I thought I’d finally sit down and write a tutorial. I thought a fun image to focus on would be my “Face Off” image for the “Alien Nation 3” contest.

How I draw hair in Photoshop

This tutorial lays out the basic methods I use to draw mostly straight or slightly wavy hair in Photoshop.

The Making Of ‘Lust’

In this little tutorial I will show you step-by-step how to create something like this using few simple tools and some basic PS knowledge.

Busted!

This tutorial will show you how to blend bruises, a black eye, a bloody nose and a few more things into Madonna’s face, to make her look all tired and beaten up.

Build a custom studio shooting table for under $80.00

The right equipment is essential for quality photographic results, so spend your limited budget where it counts – great lighting. This tutorial will help you build a custom shooting table for a reasonable price with minimal effort.

Creating Honey-Covered Objects

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to cover an object in honey, or other syrup-like substance.

How I created a cyborgenic leopard

I received a few requests to do this tutorial so here it is. I will go into displacement maps, paths, layers and much more. ENJOY!

Glossy Reflections

A basic tutorial on how to make a reflection as if being cast onto a newly polished floor.
Which images work, which images don’t.

Reflections are usually added to an image that has a plain white background. For this tutorial, we will use this lovely picture of a banana.

How to Chrome Plate your Cherries

Chrome is tough… It doesn’t really have any properties other than reflectiveness, which makes it a real challenge to represent in a photographic image. It’s mostly about the reflections, and I will attempt to show how I got the reflections dialed in for the Chrome Cherry entry. I have divided the process into 7 steps on the following pages. I am not going into great detail about selecting and masking, assuming everyone who reads this is an old pro at that stuff. (Skip to the end if all you want is a screenshot of the layers pallete : )

Photography Illustrated

F-Stops and D.O.F. Inspired following a discussion in chat between a mentor: meerkat and a mentee: Anni

Making Bubbles with your own Custom Brush

Defining a custom brush in Photoshop is a quick and easy way to create many kinds of shapes and textures, especially if they are small and you need them in large quantities.

Food Photography and Styling 101 – Part One

An introduction into the art of food photography, both historically, and practically as an insight into the tools used by professionals to create the illusion of a culinary masterpeice in each frame.

How i Chocolatized a Skull

After receiving a number (two is a number isn’t it?) of comments and requests for a tutorial on this image, I decided to put together a little step-by-step on how i went about chocolizing the skull.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show how, using primarily three tools (Brush, Eraser, Smudge), I turned this image:

How I made Morning Drink

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to take a single shape and using only this source image, create an illustration. Thus, the art of Photigami.

There are unlimited number of ways to approach this type of project. This tutorial will show you one of those ways. Some people prefer using custom brushes, other people have other methods. I prefer placing each shape piece by piece for maximum control in shape distribution.

How I puppetized Charlize!

In this tutorial I am going to attempt to show you how to ‘puppetize’ Charlize from this…

Kristin Kreuk as a real Manga Gal!

My guide to Reality Manga.
In this tutorial I am going to attempt to show you how to make a Reality Manga gal out of Kristin…from this…

Mmmmmotion

I received a couple of requests for a tutorial on making a Mmmmmotion pic so I figured I’d take a stab at it.

Out Of Bounds Shadows-Mini Tut

This is an update of an old mini tut, inspired by the beginning of the then new Out Of Bounds contest format. There were quite a few images using an incorrect or impossible shadow treatment. While there are considerably fewer entries containing this mistake I felt it might be of some help, to beginners particularly, to update it. Essentially this is intended to be of some help to those who are either beginners to graphics programs or new to the OOB concept and would appreciate some very, very basic advice.

How to create rain

A few people wanted to know how I created the rain effect in the “Turrets” contest, so I tried my best to write a tutorial, and here it is!

The Making of a Robotic Frog

Half robot, half frog. In this tutorial, I am going to show how I took a regular frog and opened him up to reveal a mechanical skeleton.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you some of the steps I took in making this image

Linking Worth1000 Tutorials Directly From Photoshop

Photoshop has a customizable help function where you can write your own help function, or link to web pages for help. In this tutorial, we will be linking directly to other tutorials on Worth 1000.

WormHole

Here’s how I created the Wormhole effect for Future Glimpse 6.
Displacement

The effect I used for wormhole is easy to do and has many uses from rippling water to warping the fabric of space-time.

Fur

In response to a request on methods of getting a soft fur edge I’m posting two examples. While the approach is similar in both examples, it depends on what type of fur/hair you need to deal with.

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How to Build a Panoramic Tripod Head for $10

Stitching software and digital cameras make panoramic photos far easier than ever before. However, to get the best results, you need a special tripod head. These can cost hundreds of dollars, but making your own isn’t that hard. Even better, it’s dirt cheap.

There’s some amazing software out there for panoramic photography. Various software packages warp, stitch and blend sequences of photos so that they (ideally) look like one big, high-resolution, panoramic shot. However, getting these shots to turn out perfectly isn’t easy when handholding your camera or using a normal tripod, especially when some parts of the image are fairly close to the lens.