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Design Tools For Creating Pretty Drupal Sites
I've been playing around with Photoshop, Illustrator and most other tools used to design websites for about 12 years now. While good design comes from years of practice, attention to detail, etc, there are many tools I've learned to utilize that make designing beautiful websites much easier and much, much faster. And while there are many great articles out there, I thought I would share a few of my tools.
Adobe Photoshop Brushes and Patterns
I always wondered how good designers got many of the small details into a website and assumed they created most effects by pure talent. Then I discovered free brushes and patterns which are pre-built stencils used by many designers to achieve great effects. I recommend using them sparingly and as accents, but they can definitely add that little extra something that takes a design from boring to interesting.
Moodboards
Kevin Flahaut introduced moodboards to me when he worked at LevelTen. Moodboards are art boards used to convey tone before the concepts are created. Colors, imagery, patterns, typography and page elements are all presented in a moodboard. It's amazing how much time can be saved during the design process if you can get stakeholders to agree on a moodboard.
Typetester
Typetester lets you compare up to three fonts side by side. You can select any font from your own computer or use fonts from their menu of common system fonts and web-safe fonts. It also allows you to change the color, leading, tracking, size, and other style options.
It’s a great tool when trying to decide which fonts to use for different elements or even for compiling your own font stacks (since it lets you compare numerous fonts side-by-side).
Lorem Ipsum
We all know how much time can be taken waiting for clients/copy writers to provide content. Well know your problem is solved. Use lorem ipsum text as filler content when creating website concepts, or when your building the website, but haven't received content. It is an excellent placeholder and allows you to visualize white space and layout without having the real content.
Istockphoto.com
Istockphoto.com has very high-quality images for around $5-$15 dollars per image. I recommend taking your time when choosing images to ensure the images convey your message accurately. The quality of images can really make or break a design.
Science brings NC Wyeth painting out of hiding
I had dinner the other night with a 21-year-old and his boss. The kid had worked for the company for two summers and was trying to decide between going back to college in September or taking a year off to get more work experience.The boss said that one advantage of going back to school was
http://www.pecar.info
The apartment life
Of the many things I noticed last week at the MySQL Conference, one of the most notable was how many companies have not upgraded from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 yet. Craigslist is in that camp and it seems that we're joined by the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and about half a dozen other companies that use MySQL heavily. Come to think of it, SmugMug are the only folks I've talked with who've made the jump (video). So it's not...
Another cool CSS preview tool
Be sure to also check out this resource:
http://www.fonttester.com/
It allows you to see a live preview of how your CSS will affect text. So easy to select a font and change the line height, weight, letter spacing and everything right there as you click the settings and then save the CSS that generates it. Very quick and handy to see how something will look.
Great article and thanks for sharing some of the tools you use.