Photoshop is the industry standard tool for doing the grphics work in web design. The first step would be to learn the fundamentals of this tool so that you can draw out your website design.
As with any software tool, Photoshop is best learned by doing. Hence books and tutorials that provides step-by-step approach where you can follow along is best. It also helps if the books and tutorials have a lot of pictures and screen shots.
The book that we recommend is ...
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By the Adobe Creative Team, this book covers the new features of CS3 that some older books may not cover. This includes the new smart filters, zoomify, quick selection, align content, clone source and more.
There are 14 lessons with step-by-step tutorials and review questions and 16 video tutorials. This is a good general book that covers the basics and fundamentals of Photoshop. Perfect if you are a beginner to Photoshop. As you progress futher or have specialized use of Photoshop, see more books in the Photoshop section. |
It helps to learn how to do a complete website layout design from the beginning to end. Some tutorials that we have found that does a good job of showing you this are ...
Creating a Business Layout tutorial
Creating a Hosting Layout tutorial
Then there are tutorials that shows you how to design certain elements of a website such as designing the masthead ...
Designing Masthead for Website tutorial
creating navigation menus ...
Professional Navigation Menu tutorial
Modern Menu tutorial
Dark Vertical Menu
and drawing various style buttons ...
Web 2.0 style buttons
Another Web 2.0 style buttons
Flexible Buttons using Photoshop Shapes and Style
For the title of the website, you may want to apply some graphical text effect treatment so that the title in the masthead is not just plain text. Here are some tutorials for creating text effects...
Glassy Text
Neon Text
Metal Flow
Metallic Text
Gold Text
Spooky Text
Chrome Text
Applying texture to the background of your web page will add extra sophistication. Here are some tutorials to create texture in Photoshop...
Metallic texture
Wood texture
Beveled Metal
To make the background tile properly, try these tutorials...
Seamless Tile in Photoshop
