The World of Web Design

Not to be overly dramatic, but the World Wide Web is one of modern society’s sterling achievements.
It’s everywhere — from the home to the classroom. We use it to communicate at work or to waste some hours playing at night. The World Wide Web’s something that’s always there — accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The World Wide Web never sleeps.
The beginnings of this technological marvel are humbling. A group of bookish and serious engineers, wishing to exchange information more effectively, designed the World Wide Web in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The concerns of these early engineers were about function — not necessarily form. On occasion, one of them might add a horizontal bar to separate sections of a document. However, these engineers mostly stuck with simple white or gray web pages that used black text.
Want an idea of how far we’ve come? Check out an early HTML document from The Simple Times newsletter, pictured in figure below. It dates from 1992.

Eventually, more and more users came to use the World Wide Web. Creative types and designers wanted more control over the format of web pages. In a response to these demands, the web transformed from a stale message board to a flowering communication entity unimagined by those first architects.

To design for the web effectively, you must bring to the table both creative flair and technical savvy. You must know how to make a page appealing without distracting from its message. You must know how to provide images that are interesting, and yet won’t take minutes to view.

Take a look at figure below to see how far we’ve come in the past decade.

In this tutorial:

1. The World of Web Design
2. Information Every Web Designer Should Know 
3. Exploring Digital Images
4. Types of 2D Graphics

Creating Custom Shapes

This time, we're going to create several separate shapes, Combine them together and save it off as a custom shape. This shape would be very difficult to create in any other way (aside from using Illustrator) so it is a perfect technique to learn in Photoshop.

Step 1: Create a new 500 x 500 canvas. Be sure your rulers are showing (Ctrl/Cmd + R). Also turn on Snap View > Snap). Now drag two guides out and position them at the halfway points both vertically and horizontally.

Step 2: Select the Polygon shape tool. Be sure the Shape Layer option is selected in the option bar. Also, set the number of sides to 6 in the options bar. Now draw a small rectangle and position it at the top of the canvas with a the vertical guide going straight through the center.

Step 3: Not hit Ctrl/Cmd + T to bring up the Free Transform bounding box. Drag the center point of the bounding box down to the center of the canvas where the two guides intersect. However, do not accept the transformation yet.

Step 4: Now position your cursor slightly outside the bounding box and notice the rotating arrow cursor that appears. Rotate your polygon around to the right while holding the shift key to constrain the rotation. Alternative, you can type 30 into the options bar for the angle setting. Hit enter to accept the settings.

Step 5: Now the cool part. We're going to let Photoshop do the rest of the work for us. Press Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + Alt/Option + T 11 times and notice how Photoshop creates a duplicate of the polygon while rotating it 30 degrees each time. Pretty cool huh?

Step 6: Now, select the ellipse shape tool. First be sure the "Add To Shape Area" button is selected in the top options bar. Then, Position your cursor in the center of the canvas. Hold down the Alt/Option + Shift keys and drag a circle out from the center.

Step 7: Now select the Subtract from Shape Area button in the same place as the button in step 6 and drag another circle out from the center to produce a cutout shape within the gear.

Step 8: Lastly, convert this to a custom shape by choosing Edit > Define Custom Shape. Now your shape is there to use whenever you want it in your Custom Shapes palette.
You can even apply layer styles to it as well. Below is a nice chrome style as well as another idea for creating custom shapes. You're not limited to just a gear. You could just as easily use this technique to create a flower shape too.

Chrome Layer Style

I am going to share one chrome effect with you that looks so cool and is just so easy.

Step 1: Open a new document. Mine is about 300 x 300 pixels in size. Then create an element that you wish to chromize (is that even a word?). The one "gotcha" with layer styles is that they can look very different on various shapes. A style that looks good on text may look horrible on a solid shape like a circle. For this effect I've found that thick text or a logo shaped similar to mine here works best. So go ahead and create whatever shape you choose on a new layer by itself. You can always download my final PSD file from my website and use my shape.

Step 2: Now apply the following layer styles that I have in the screenshots below. Take note of any color swatch changes in the inner glow and satin layer styles as well as any contour changes that I have done. They all ship with Photoshop 7 - you just need to pick it from the list.

Step 3: OK, now you should have something like this.

Step 4: You're probably thinking that this doesn't look very good. Well here is the last tip. I've also found that many of the default blend modes used in the layer styles really hinder us. Sometimes I let them fool me into thinking that the default is the way that the layer style should look best. But often, the real power of layer styles shows through when you change these defaults as is the case with this effect. So with nofurther ado... simply go to the Satin layer style that you created and change the default blending mode of multiply to screen. Then sit back and watch magical things happen (hopefully).