Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

There is a terrific list of freeware software for Web designers over at TechnoTarget. There are descriptions and screen captures of each application. Smashing Magazine has links to 100 Excellent WordPress Free Themes including a screen capture for each theme. You should definitely bookmark this site since we discussed WordPress yesterday and will work with it more over the next [...]

Tom asked about making the Google logo. Here is a tutorial for making the plain Google logo using bevel and emboss techniques: Your Own Google Logo from LOGOogle You can view all of the different Google Doodles at Google’s Web site. Happy holidays to all! See you in Antioch in 2007!!!!

Gradients are used a lot on Web sites to create the illusion of 3D or depth. Here are some tutorials for creating gradients in both Photoshop. A Gradient Tutorial from the 9rules.com Blog – Simple method for creating a realistic looking gradient. Note: If you print this article, please print only pages 1-5 since the rest of the pages are [...]

Today we will work on creating simple vertical, horizontal, and diagonal striped background images in Photoshop. These background images can be used as backgrounds for pages, paragraphs, headings, and other elements. Creating horizontal stripes In Photoshop click File > New Set the Width of the image to 1 pixel Set the Height of the image to 4 pixels (the height [...]

Lynda.com is offering free access to this new Photoshop CS3 tutorial @ http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=327. You can actually download Photoshop CS3 beta @ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs3/. Note: In order to run this software for more than two days you must have a copy of Photoshop CS2, Creative Suite 2, Production Studio, Adobe Web Bundle, or Adobe Video Bundle. We have ordered Creative Suite 2 [...]

After our discussion on Pixelated Color Palettes in Photoshop yesterday, Nina showed me another method of picking colors for a web site from a photo. Open Photoshop Click File > Open and navigate to the file that you want to use as a starting point for a web site color palette. Double click the file to open it Click File [...]

CSS Font and Text Style Wizard – a wizard to experiment with font and text styles and generate sample CSS style source code. You may also like the HTML and CSS Table Border Style Wizard. Both of these wizards will generate CSS and HTML code for your web pages. 5 Great Background Masking Techniques in Photoshop – this article/tutorial outlines [...]

Mani Sheriar, a former student and successful designer, has started a blog to accompany her beautiful site. Mani offers CSS and XHTML tips and discussion on her site designs. This is definately a site that you want to watch, I’m sure she’ll be a constant source of amazement for all of you! For you Scott Kelby fans there is now [...]

Dustin Diaz has put together a very nice CSS Shorthand Guide. What’s nice about this guide is that it includes the default value for the property values so you don’t have to guess at what will display if you don’t include a value in your shorthand. CSS Selectors, Part 3 is now available at 456 Berea Street! Here are the [...]

Yesterday I mentioned that Rachel Andrew has a new book available at SitePoint titled Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8. I just wanted to let you all know that you can download a sample chapter of this book at SitePoint, it’s 130+ pages. Please don’t print this in class; if you would like to read this in [...]