PS Workshop Blog

With the advent of the World Wide Web, the designing of websites and web applications has emerged as a lucrative new profession. Typically, the web design process occurs in three basic stages. 

-The web designer sketches the layout of the website using Adobe Photoshop;

-The designer then uses Adobe ImageReady, which allows him/her to “slice” the layout into performing various functions on the website;

-The programmer then implements the design into html code, and the site goes online.

The web designer must strive to find the perfect balance between aesthetics and accessibility. A lot of web designers are coming at the field from a background in graphic design. The result is that they oftentimes obsess over how a page looks, without taking into consideration how a surfer is going to find the page.

Then there are SEOs – search engine optimizers – who are obsessed with the opposite – that is, getting as much traffic to a particular website as possible. Their focus is on how the sites works, and often care little for what the site looks like. In fact, SEOs and web designers often come into conflict over this very issue. The SEO will demand a lot of “ugly” features that they feel will bring more traffic to the site. These common features include bullet lists, text links, and lots of keywords. A collaborative solution must often be sought in order to strike a harmonious balance between function and appearance.

What this means is that it is vital for a web designer to have a strong background in visual communication. Graphics can be employed to serve business and communication purposes, and a designer well versed in this language will be more likely to build a successful website.

What’s more, by loading up a page with tons of graphics, designers often times anger and alienate surfers. The more graphically complex a web page, the longer it will take to load. Of course, this is less of a problem nowadays, since nearly everyone uses a high-speed Internet connection. In fact, designers are aware of this, and thus use increased bandwidth as an excuse for more artful webpage’s.

When designing a website, the most important issues to keep in mind are the purpose of the site, the audience, and the content. By deciding on all this at the outset, it becomes easier to set and meet goals of both a short- and long-term nature.

There are thousands of different text styles one can get with Photoshop. They are available in several variations and combinations. These texts and styles are essential and useful for graphic designing work. With better understanding about text styles we can build scores of designs.

Texts for Photoshop are as good as special object for graphics. One can easily change its color, opacity and layer styles. We can adjust text alignment properties in texts easily. In a way, we can choose a text string of our own and its color and choose text of our own variation.

Take for example dark colors imply negative emotions like anger, sadness, confusion, difficulties etc. Where as bright colors imply positive energies like love, hope etc. With Photoshop, the basic form of text we can create is with sample colors containing a string of characters. We must note that different colors are associated with different moods. The better we use them, shows a sense of beauty.

Another text style with Photoshop is text with patterns. Here we can use an image or several tiles of images as text. So here we can use images in the place of solid colors in text. This style is preferred for those who need small number of high quality fonts, or for those who like small typefaces. With this style we can create different designs in a single typeface. This style looks great if text is used with plain background.

Another style of text we can get is text with border. It emphasizes contours of typeface. Text with border makes words attractive and legible irrespective of its background. But we must make sure border color of text is not identical with that of background color! Usually Photoshop can create text with border as thin as one pixel. Here text border can either be main feature or just decoration. With Photoshop we have ease keeping the border opacity intact. So, this gives more design possibilities.

With Photoshop we can have text with drop shadows also. They separate background from that of text object adding exposure as well as attraction to our text design. By moving the shadow from the object we can increase or decrease depth in illusory effect. By using additional filters we can create different designs of our choice, for example blue hues to the drop shadow with respect to surrounding text color. Depending on sharpness of shadow, we can create illusion whether object is near or far.

Another text style with Photoshop is text with gradients. They are a blend of multiple colors in words. Particularly Photoshop version 7 supports five different styles of gradients like linear, radial, angle etc. Here gradients are used as the color of the text surface or as a background also.

So, these are some important text styles we can get with Photoshop.