Design Tutorials & Ideas
Heather's got a "sort of" tutorial posted today on how she created the most recent masthead on her site.
When I first started blogging and fiddling with site design, I created some basic headers using Photoshop Elements. And then I discovered Dooce.com and spent some time poking around... I've found Heather's site (as well as her husband Jon's) to be a fantastic (if not extensive) source of information and ideas for me. I've picked up tips here and there. For instance, I learned about the wonders of Gaussian Blur from Heather's site; another post she wrote also pointed me to Jason Gaylor's amazing sets of brushes for Photoshop. There's also a mini-tutorial here that I just stumbled upon while looking for the earlier post about the Photoshop brushes.
For those of you interested in creating a header design, any good HTML book will give you the bare-bones basics on creating images for the web. A good image editing program is critical... for most folks, Photoshop Elements is sufficient. (I had Elements before I went back to school and had to buy the full version of Photoshop and aside from a few command differences I don't notice much difference. If I went the other way I'm sure I'd notice but for most people who are tinkering around with web design and whatnot, Photoshop Elements should be more than enough...) Get yourself a good digital image manipulation book (like this one, for Elements) to go along with it and start looking at what others are doing on their headers... everything else is just experimentation. My only suggestion is to take screenshots of your designs before you remove them; I didn't do this and now I'm wishing I had... I could recreate them, sure, but who has time for that? :o)
