Customer Street and UFindUs Web Design

About Photoshop Filters

The developers at Adobe have created some amazing photoshop filters to make it easier to design and illustrate one’s own artwork. As you go from strength to strength I believe it to be beneficial to tear yourself away from Photoshop filters and concentrate on mastering layer styles, hand made gradients and shadows. All the tools are there so you can do everything manually, the Photoshop filters however are more like shortcuts.

I know shortcuts are great because there quick and creating your own work by hand can be slow, but once you have worked your way round photoshop you’ll speed up and become more independant. You’ll then find that you don’t need to use the filters that often.

Now, you may think this sounds silly but the only filter i use is “gaussian blur” and thats for shadow uses or motion illustration. I tend to use alot more of my layer styles which are located at the bottom of the layers box. If you use the layer styles and blending options correctly you can get some fantastic results.

Ok, we are going to go back to the drawing board a little. I just wanted to go over a few things. When designing a website i recommend designing round the screen resolution 800 x 600. Your website doesn’t have to be 800 x 600 as long as the site is within 800px range. You can make the page as long as you want to.

The only reason for making sites in an 800×600 resolution is that at this time many people, and many computer companies for that matter, still use old technology making it harder to view anything that surpasses 800 x 600.

How many of you have built websites yourselves but want to go that extra bit further?

I’m going to explain a few things that people don’t understand, basic art terms that will give you more of an understanding when designing your websites or advertisements.

Companies like Dulux® are extremely good at matching colours, What you need to do is put yourself in their shoes and think a little outside the box but be careful not to go of the rails, and trust me speaking from experience it can be easily done.

If you’re using Photoshop or something similar you will have a primary and secondary colour palette. This is a good starting point to try and get some suited colours matched.

Everyone has different styles, when you design a website you have to think about the audience your subjecting it to. A website should be thoroughly planned out in design and structure. Your structure comes first as this will dictate the set amount of buttons or links you need to incorporate in your design.