Working on my mad design skills

I haven’t touched anything web design related in quite some time. I have always had someone around to handle the photoshop and CSS (usually Jayme). I am working on a rails side project and instead of paying someone to do the design (like I did for windevpowertools and visualstudiohacks) I figured I would give it a shot. It’s not really the best use of my time, but I think it’s valuable refresh myself with some of this stuff for the future. It’s also a refreshing change of pace from middle-tier mumbo jumbo and bug fixing.

I spent plenty of time writing lots of CSS, I had forgotten how nice it is working with CSS vs. the old ways of doing design with tables and various HTML tags that I learned way back in the day. I have been using just TextMate but I keep meaning to play around with CSSEdit. I use Photoshop quite a bit to work with photos, usually tweaking levels/colors or cloning out the odd tree branch, but I was never very good at putting together buttons or other site graphics. Thankfully I ran across a couple of killer resources at deziner folio, a collection of 130 gradients and 131 layer styles. Basically you can grab these and import them into photoshop which makes it fairly easy to put together nice looking buttons and bars.

I also came across this nice run-down of CSS-Based form design. (also check out my old post on label placement)

-James