Interested in growing your web design skills? Here are a few choice recommendations.

Learn (X)HTML and CSS

1. HTML Dog Tutorials
2. W3 Schools

Recommended FREE code editors:

• PSpad (Windows)
• TextWrangler (Mac OS X)

Work on your Design Skills

1. Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch – Nettuts+
2. 8 Great Web Design Tutorials – Powerusers

Convert your Design into a XHTML/CSS Website

1. How to Convert a PSD to XHTML – Screencast – Jeffrey Way @ Nettuts+
2. Converting a Design From PSD to HTML – Screencast – Jeffrey Way @ Nettuts+

Turn it into a WordPress Theme

This step enables you to integrate your design with the powerful WordPress content management system. It’s a bit more complicated, and so the best resources tend to cost a few bucks. But here are two good options, well worth the price:

1. How to Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer – Downloadable PDF Book – $29
2. The Best PSD to HTML to WordPress Video Series Available – Nettuts+ “Plus” Tutorial – $9/month subscription

Looking for a free option? Try this:

• Designing for WordPress: Part One – CSS Tricks
• Part Two
• Part Three

What if I get Stuck, Frustrated, or Confused?

1. Drop me a line. (Use the form below!)
2. Sign up for my Introduction to Web Design course this fall at Oklahoma Wesleyan, where we’ll tackle these things and more.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

In this article David Airey provides the five elements that can be seen in every iconic logo. When designing a logo, these are key. Neat!

Logo Design and Branding Trends 2009

Looking for inspiration as well as things not to do? This article covers all the fads, good and bad, of 2009 and explains them. What more could you look for? Overall not a great resource for designing a logo, but useful in that it offers places to start. Again, the comments provide an interesting counter-point to the article, and should definitely be considered.

Seven Ingredients of Good Corporate Design

Another astounding resource from our friends at Smashing Magazine, this article outlines all the basic ingredients that need to go into the corporate design of a company, including the logo design. While not specifically about logos, this article provides the broader view that directly effects logo design.

In this tutorial, they explain how to create an illustrated poster and how to set up your own crop marks in a few easy steps. This tutorial is aimed at the beginning Adobe Illustrator user. Creating this poster is relatively easy, so let’s get started!

Illustrator Quicktips: Live Trace

Here’s a basic explanation of the Live Trace function in Adobe Illustrator. Using Illustrator’s Live Trace function, bitmap and rasterized images can quickly and easily be converted to highly malleable vector objects. Zoom In Online Pro Producer Matthew Hendershot demonstrates the Live Trace workflow, outlining all of the options available for creating traces. This movie doesn’t give a specific tutorial, rather it includes the principles and foundations of the function. Neat!

7 Things You Didn’t Know Illustrator Could do.

Have you ever just started playing with Adobe Illustrator and wondered just what this program could do? Here’s a good place to start, with 7 interesting features of Illustrator featured on the Attitude Design Blog. Interestingly enough this was posted way back in June 2007 and since then they’ve also added another article like this: 7 More Things You Didn’t Know About Adobe Illustrator. So really, you get two great articles in one. When you get to the bottom of the first article click on the next! Enjoy!

This tutorial will show you how to use type along paths, and inside of Shapes. Using these techniques, type can morph to take shapes that would ordinarily be very difficult to create and modify.

How to Make a Photoshop Brush

A quick, deceptively simple walk through to making your own photoshop brushes. For the next time that you make an image that you think you’d like to use again, here’s how to save it.

Photoshop’s Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide

I don’t know about you but I found this pretty exciting. Brought to you by the wonderful people at psdtuts (a sterling resource for web design as well as graphic design) this article includes such tasteful nuggets as Functions, Keyboard Shortcuts, and an Exercise File that will allow you to practice all you’ve learned. Neat!

Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch

A fantastic tutorial, with lots of carryover value. Design an entire site with elegance, simplicity, and beauty.

Web 2.0 Design Kit

How to create those little 2.0 touches: gradients, badges, and reflections.

Creating Web 2.0 Effects With Photoshop

Another look at creating Web2.0 design touches, including textured background gradients.

Color Blender

Dial in a color, and it generates a scheme of corresponding colors, complete with RGB and Hex values for plugging into your designs. Color Blender

Ever need to edit a whole folder of photos in exactly the same way? Resize them for the Web, for example?

Here is a helpful and easy-to-follow video tutorial on creating your own custom actions to repeat processes in Photoshop.

There are roughly 50 bazillion other handy tools to help with such processes. About.com has put together an entire page of links with short descriptions for some of these free and cheap tools, for Windows and for Mac.

If you like playing with Photoshop, you should consider playing with brushes. There are tons of places to get free brushes and some sweet brushes at that. Brusheezy is one of my favorites, but there are others as well.

Free Brushes

• Brusheezy.com
• PSbrushes.net
• 100 Awesome High-Res Photoshop Brushes

And should you ever feel the urge to create your own brushes, these sites are for you:

Photoshop Brush-Making Tutorials

• How to Make a Photoshop Brush (bittbox.com)
• Create Custom Brushes (freetimefoto.com)
• Make Photoshop Brushes (hypergurl.com)
• Create Photoshop Brushes from a Photo (photoshopbrushes.com)

Smashing Magazine has recently published a set of online tutorials for Adobe Illustrator. Making illustrations from a hand-drawn sketch, creating logos, vintage T-shirt designs, comic book style creations, and 3-D effects … If you are somewhat artistic, these tutorials are for you.

Also, for the fun of it, here is another post, where they have put together a collection of sweet flash tutorials.

I’m collecting a list of useful articles on the topic of portfolio building (including for beginning designers) and business startup tips.

Here are direct links to those I’ve collected as of today:

• What Goes In Graphic Design Portfolios
• What Goes in a *Beginner’s* Design Portfolio
• The Benefits of a Graphic Design Blog
• Tips for a Graphic Design Business
• Using Word-of-Mouth to Grow Your Graphic Design Business

You’ll find the live and growing list at del.icio.us/ingcreative.

Also, see these links I’m collecting on portolio-building tips and portfolio examples. (There is some overlap between these two lists.)

But DON’T MISS these two very nice online portfolios:

• David Airey :: Graphic and Logo Designer
• Justin Bird, Web & Flash Designer