Something that would be hugely useful to me (a code monkey who knows good design when he sees it but is incapable of producing anything that looks nice himself) is a chapter that covers a few essential skills in Photoshop or Fireworks.
Basic nuts and bolts stuff like:
- how to use a few simple effects and filters to blend images in to backgrounds or do a cutout or colorize an image to match the sites colour palette
- useful tips or tricks for designing the chrome of the site (e.g. how to make a menu bar with rounded edges and a gradient effect, how to make nice looking buttons, how to make a textured background, how to blend edges etc.
- how to use transparency and/or layers effectively
Why would this be useful?
Like lots of coders (I assume!), my approach to design is to surf around the web for hours and bookmark sites that I think look good or have ideas I can use. I then spend ages kack-handedly trying to bash bits of screen shots together and introduce new elements (buttons, stock photography etc.) until I have ended up with a design that looks vaguely appealing. If I had a quick cheat-sheet for Photoshop or Fireworks that aided this process it would be a god send!
Great suggestion. Learning design software, at least basics, can be productive.
Some designers will disagree on this point—many are moving away from Photoshop altogether. However it's more difficult to try color variations for a gradient by typing in hex colors, for example. Including up some basic techniques would make sense. (Every professional designer has a few go-to tricks.)
I'm thinking about providing some free design files with the book. Just basic elements, like buttons, styles, etc than can be adaptable. (And easy to translate into CSS.) Would that be helpful for you?
Some basic skeleton elements would definitely be useful - even better if the chapter showing how to use basic tools within photoshop made use of these bundled elements e.g. it showed how to take the button and then apply different effects e.g. change its colour or give it a gradient
Basic nuts and bolts stuff like:
- how to use a few simple effects and filters to blend images in to backgrounds or do a cutout or colorize an image to match the sites colour palette
- useful tips or tricks for designing the chrome of the site (e.g. how to make a menu bar with rounded edges and a gradient effect, how to make nice looking buttons, how to make a textured background, how to blend edges etc.
- how to use transparency and/or layers effectively
Why would this be useful?
Like lots of coders (I assume!), my approach to design is to surf around the web for hours and bookmark sites that I think look good or have ideas I can use. I then spend ages kack-handedly trying to bash bits of screen shots together and introduce new elements (buttons, stock photography etc.) until I have ended up with a design that looks vaguely appealing. If I had a quick cheat-sheet for Photoshop or Fireworks that aided this process it would be a god send!