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Upstart Designer

Good Practice: Organizing Your Photoshop LayersDecember 19 2008

You should always try to organize your Photoshop (or any other layer-driven graphic editor’s) layers. Doing so will result in a number of benefits, such as making it easier to make changes and simplifying the coding (for those who use the crop tool instead of the slice tool - happens more often than you think). 

To organize them, simply create a new ‘group’ (which is just another name for ‘folder’) and drag & drop your layers into it. However, one group won’t be enough. You will have to create several groups for the different parts of your design. For example, you can create a group called ‘Header’ and put the layers that make up the header of your design into that folder. Then, you do the same with the other elements of your design (such as the sidebar, or the footer).

It’s also not a bad idea to create a group inside a group. For instance, going back to our header example, you can create two groups inside ‘Header’ called ‘Logo’ and ‘Search Bar’. You can take it further, but it’s up to you. 

Oh, and remember to name those layers as well! Creating and naming groups is just half the battle. By naming them appropriately, you will also ease the process of customization. In fact, creating groups is not very helpful if you have a ton of unnamed layers inside them. Make sure to pick a descriptive name such as ‘Submit Button’ or ‘Advertising Banner’.

Last but not least, avoid going

Quickstart Your Coding With Deploy*December 18 2008

 

With Deploy, you can quickly create a flexible framework for your coding projects in seconds: you just have to answer a few questions, and voila! You’ve got your own personalized starting point. You can pick what markup you want, if you want it to add a CSS file (blank, or with resets), a jQuery library (minified, packed, or uncompressed), a few plugins such as thickbox, or even throw in an images, includes, flash or php directory.

Oh, and it’s open source too, so you can download it, tweak it, and do whatever you want with it (with a few restrictions, that is).

Visit Project Deploy for more.

5 Important Tools For Web DesignersDecember 6 2008

Designer’s can’t do everything themselves, which is why there is so much demand for tools that make our jobs easier. This means that there are countles of online tools and services out there for designers, but I have selected my favorite 5 of the bunch. These tools perform really well, and have helped me throughout designing and developing websites, and I hope they will make your life easier as well. Let’s get started, shall we?

Note: these are not aranged in any particular order

Kuler

Kuler is easily one of my favorite and most intuitive online tools out there. Simply put, it helps you pick just the perfect color scheme for your design, but more than that, it has a ton of pictures. First, it’s crowdsourced, so it’s very frequently updated. Additionally, you can extract the colors from any pictures or images you have on your computer, or you can search and pick a photograph from Flickr right from your browser. Then, you can save your palette, and make it public for the whole world to see!

What The Font

Welcome to Upstart DesignerNovember 28 2008

Welcome to Upstart Designer. I’m Joel, and I’ll be writing here about web design & development, and everything surrounding it. You’ll find anything from design inspiration to ressources and tutorials - everything an upstart designer might need down the road. 

Since the site it’s pretty new, there isn’t much content yet. However, I plan on writing at least one piece of useful information a week. In fact, the very first post is being crafted right now, so if you happen to be here when it’s done, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed if you like it.

Thanks for visiting!