WebDesign&Such

If you’re a webdesigner you most likely use Photoshop to create mockups of webpage designs for your clients. One technique I use in a lot of my website designs is dotted borders. They add a lot more visual interest than a regular underline, and work great to break-up sections of content.

So it’s easy enough to create a dotted line with CSS for the web, but how do you create a dotted line in Photoshop for your mockups? It’s actually rather simple; (as anything is when you know how I suppose).

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The other day I was cutting and coding a website for a bank. One feature that was in the header was the current date, which would update daily (duh). I know in a previous project I had done this with Javascipt, so I back-tracked and got the code I used before. Here is the code, which will print the date on your web page in the following format:
July 18, 2009

The first step is to link your XHTML page to the external Javascript page, which has the code which will make it all happen. Paste the code below in the Head of your page.

Link to external Javascript File

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/date.js"></script>

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Apple is known for their clean designs, both in their products, and the way they display these products. One of the effects they have used a lot is displaying their images with a reflection of the product below it. When used correctly, this is a very simple, clean way to display products.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways to create this, but I’ll show you the way I do it.

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Digital cameras are so inexpensive now that there is no reason to not be taking photos at high resolutions. But what good is having these large photos when you need to make them tiny anyway to put them online?

I’ll show you a method of taking a collection of large photos and turning them into a panorama. Once you have a large panorama put together, there is still the problem of being able to put it online for others to use. You don’t want to have to make it 900px wide.. because obviously you will lose all the quality. Uploading it as a huge image file and having a scroll bar is no good, who is going to wait for that to load? I’ll show you the perfect solution to this problem.

Step 1 – Take Photos

Well you’re going to need photos to make a panorama! You can use a tripod with a camera, and take multiple photos as you turn the camera around until you reach the original position. Make sure to overlap the photos as you take them so there will be somewhere to blend. If you don’t care about them being perfect, or you don’t have a tripod on you, just hold it as still as you can, and turn in a circle as you take pictures. That’s the method I used when I took all these photos in St. Maarten last year. I actually like the effect it gives not having the top and bottom edges lined up, (you’ll see what I mean soon).

Step 2 – Creating the Panorama

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