From time to time, I get questions about how I start designing websites, and how I build custom WordPress themes for my clients. I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to streamline the process of designing and launching a blog theme. The problem that I have is I tend to get a little carried away with trying to be perfect. Like most designers I start out with the basic tools…pencil and paper. I draw out the layout and figure out the basic positioning of all of the necessary elements before I even think about putting anything down in Photoshop. That drawing stays with me until the very end of the project, and sometimes even after just for reference.

How Does GrandmasterB Layout a Site for WordPress?

Recently, Forest from The Random Forest and Frugal Zeitgeist hit me up on Google Chat to ask me how I build a Wordpress theme and how I go from Photoshop layout to coding everything for Wordpress. Well, I know that I’m not the only designer/developer that works this way, but I build a simple HTML/CSS file that will serve as a template for the coding of the WordPress theme. In my opinion, there’s no reason to mess with all of the WordPress options and variables unless you have already solidified the design in it’s simplest form. I break down the design into the most simplest elements first:

1. Header
2. Content Area
   1. Left Column
   2. Right Column
   3. Any other Columns
3. Footer

In my experience, 99.95% of the websites you visit will be comprised of those elements. I have built a basic HTML layout and copied it over to a Clip in Coda that I can use for every new site and add or subtract items as needed. If you don’t use Coda, you can still make a template file to copy and paste whenever you need. Below is the basic structure of the file that I use…minus the standard HTML code.

Basic HTML Layout

<div id="wrapper"> <!-- wraps everything into one div tag -->
<div id="header"></div>

<div id="content-area"> <!-- houses the columns -->
<div id="left-column"></div>
<div id="right-column"></div>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</div>

I know it looks simple, but that’s the idea…and it is simple! If you were to populate your divs with some content they will all just be stacked on top of each other. All of the detail like column heights, widths and position are determined by CSS. I had contemplated writing my own HTML/CSS layout tutorial, but that has been done a hundred times and there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel. One of the better tutorials that I have found was written by Steve Dennis on Subcide.com. It’s a very good tutorial, easy to follow and has great graphic examples to follow along with.

If you have any questions that you would like GrandmasterB to field hit me up via email or on Twitter.

~ GrandmasterB

This is my first tutorial in what I’m hoping will become a series of easy Mac Tricks. I’m all about customization, and especially when it comes to my Mac and my workspace. When I got my new Mac Pro for work, I spent a good portion of the morning customizing the look from the icons, to the wallpapers and even the Dock. If you’re a fellow design or even a casual Mac user; I’m sure you have a fair amount of launch icons in your Dock. I wanted to find a way to add separators to the Dock, so that I could easily sort applications and make it easier to locate them without hunting.

Well, if you have tried to do the same thing you probably noticed that there’s no way to add dock separators built into OS X. So, how do you solve the problem? Well, with a little research I have found the solution. First let’s take a look at my existing dock:

As you can see, it’s quite a mess of icons and there’s really no rhyme or reason to how they’re laid out. With the addition of a separator between the icons, it would be easier to find the right application rather than scrolling through them all. So, how do you add a separator? As I mentioned there’s no clear cut way to add them from the OS, so you have to do a little tweaking in the Terminal. So if you don’t have the Terminal App in your dock, you can find it under: Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

With the Terminal App open, enter the following code to add a single separator to the Dock (copy and paste the first line to make it easier):

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{ "tile-type" = "spacer-tile"; }'

hit return

Your Dock will disappear and when it returns (a few seconds) there will be a separator towards the end of the Dock…it’s invisible, but it’s there. Now to position it, just click and drag it to where you want. If you want more than one separator, you just need to enter the first line of code again for as many separators as you want. That’s it…pretty easy! Here’s what my Dock looks like after the addition of separators.

Now all of my icons in the Dock are organized by application type. I have created six groups of icons (some you can’t see).

• Browsers, Twitter and IM
• Graphics Programs
• Development Programs
• Administrative Programs
• System Apps
• Games

If you like this tutorial let me know, or if you have tips you’d like to share I’d love to hear them. Until next time…

~ GrandmasterB

It’s been quite awhile since I have put together a tutorial using Adobe Illustrator. I’ve been working with Illustrator a lot more recently and decided to share an easy tutorial that will give your text some depth and make it pop off the page/screen a little more. I’ve used a few of these techniques before in my tutorial “Feature Post Logo” that I wrote last Spring. In that tutorial the finishing touches showed how to use the pen tool to add some shading to the text. This tutorial shows you another technique to achieve a shadow on your text.

STEP SIX – Time to Add a Little Bit of Color

With the top text layer still selected we’re going to copy and paste in front of the last layer.

After you have pasted the text in place, go ahead and change the color and the stroke. Change the stroke weight to 2pt…and you’re done with this step.

As we move along, these steps are going to seem repetitive but be sure you follow along so you don’t miss something.

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted anything new under the Question and Answers with GrandmasterB category, but today I received a great question in my inbox that I had to share with you all. The email was from my good pal Mike Cusden (you all know him as Cuzzy) from Cuzoogle. He had run his site through the Markup Validation script at http://validator.w3.org/ and it came back with quite a few errors and warnings, his question follows:

Hey GrandmasterB, I ran my site through the Markup Validator and it came back with a ton of errors. Are any of these errors fixable? And is it something that’s relatively easy to fix?

My first reaction was one of surprise, because every theme that I design and develop is run through to make sure that the code is 100% XHTML compliant before turning it over to the client. After taking a look at the output from the validator I could see exactly what the issue was and what needed to be fixed. For reference, I have pasted a copy of the report link here for you to follow along.

The problem that Cuzzy is having is that his theme code isn’t the problem, it’s the advertising code that he’s placed on the site. If you look at the errors that appear on the Markup Validation page, you’ll notice that the first error states the following:

Line 15, Column 107: cannot generate system identifier for general entity “MarketPlace”.
…om/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822/US/cuzoogle- 

There are a couple of things to look at here to determine the error. First you’ll notice next to the warning icon the words “Line 15, Column 107″. This is where the line of code is found if you view the source code in a text editor like DreamWeaver or BBEdit. Since this error is found on Line 15, it is going to be found in the header.php file of the WordPress theme. You see the capital ‘M‘ is highlighted in red? That’s where the error is, if you read the description of the error it tells you that the ampersand before the letter ‘M‘ is uncoded. What that means is it doesn’t have the proper code tag. Instead of using just the symbol you would use this code: &

By fixing that one mistake with the ampersand, Cuzzy will be able to get rid of approximately 27 warnings/errors on his Markup Validation! Pretty cool and extremely easy to do. 

How Do I Validate Markup?

I like to pull up my source code in Firefox and then copy and paste it into Coda (or your favorite text editor). I do that so I can see the line count and determine where the error is. I then open the file that contains that piece of code, in this case the header.php file. I don’t edit it though…what I do is “save as” and call it header.php.old and close it. I don’t like to edit working code, in case I have to revert back to the original. Open the header.php file again, make the change and then upload the file to your server. NOTE: If you’re using Coda, you can do all of this to your files that are on the server remotely and don’t have to worry about uploading files via FTP. After you make the change, go back to the HTML Markup Validator and click “revalidate”. The code will then be revalidated and you should see all of the errors for Line 15 disappear.

Markup Validation Tools

There are many tools available for validating your markup, but the good thing is that most of them are free! If you use Firefox, I highly recommend downloading Web Developer Add-on by Chris Pederick. Under the ‘Tools’ menu on Web Developer it has links that will run your site through the Markup Validator as well as a CSS Validator. For editing code, I use Coda (as mentioned before), but you can use whatever text editor you choose. I highly recommend an editor which has a line count display. If you do a Google Search for “Free HTML Editors” you’ll find all kinds of stuff.

Well, that’s it for this edition of Q&A with GrandmasterB. I hope that you all learned a little bit from this post. If anything it should shed a little light on markup validation and show you that it’s really something that you shouldn’t be afraid of. If you have any questions about markup validation or anything else related to web design or development, please shoot me an email. I would be happy to answer your questions…now, I’m off to make double sure my code is all up to par.

~ GrandmasterB

I have included a resources file at the end of the tutorial for you to download if you like. Included in the resources file are a few of the textures that I use along with a few brush sets used in the tutorial. The font used for the tutorial was purchased by me and I cannot share it with anyone, as it would be against the usage policy. With all of the fine details out of the way…let’s get started.

STEP ONE: Setup Your Document

Start with an 800×800 canvas. Position guides at 400×400 and reset the center point at the cross. From there drag out guides to +/- 350px on the x-axis and +/- 150px on the y-axis. Reset your fill colors to Black and White (hit D on your keyboard). I realize that setting up all of these guides may seem like overkill, but I feel that it allows me to visualize the size of the final product and make sure everything fits properly.

STEP TWO: Draw Your Base Shape

With the rounded-rectangle tool selected set the option to ’shape layers’ and the corner radius to 15px. Draw out your shape to fit within the outer guides. Right now, the color of the shape isn’t a big deal, we are going to be working on that soon. We will use this base layer as a building block for the remainder of the tutorial. Once you’re done rename the layer “Base Shape”…and now might be a good time to save your progress. You should have something similar to the screenshot provided after this step is completed.

STEP THREE: Layout the Inside White Stripe

Change your fill color to white…if you have left your colors reset from step one, just hit X on the keyboard. Otherwise, hit D to reset the colors and X to swap to white. Drag new guides to +/- 340px x-axis and +/-140px y-axis. Then grab your rounded-rectangle tool again and set your corner radius to 10px and draw out your shape to the new guides. ReName this layer “Stripe”.

Now setup another set of guides at +/-335px x-axis and +/-135px y-axis. I know this seems like a lot of guides, but trust me they help out when you’re trying to position the line precisely. Grab your rounded-rectangle shape tool again and this time set the corner radius to 7px and set it to ’subtract from shape layer’ (see screenshot). Drag out your shape inside the new guides. When you’re done you will have a thick rounded corner stripe instead of a white box. This is our entire base shape. From here we will change everything to make it whatever color we want. I’m going with blue to match the sample image

SIDE NOTE!

I don’t like to work on my shape layers, so I generally just use them as guides for the other layers and creating masks for textures. I find that by using them as a base (or template) I can do more on new layers and group them together than trying to build onto the shape layer. If you follow this method you can resize your base layers, and apply a new layer mask to the other layers…and you don’t have to edit the entire document. So you can hide the base images and keep them separate put them into a group and rename them “Base Layers”. Select both layers (hold shift and click) then drag them to the bottom of the layers palette to the folder icon (screenshot).

STEP FOUR: Time for Some Color

From here create a new layer above the folder labeled “Base Layers”. I’m going to choose a light blue color and a darker blue and make a radial gradient for the base color. I will just choose the colors from the sample image.

• Light Blue: #0066ff
• Dark Blue: #0e2d8a

Grab your gradient tool (G), set it to foreground to background and set the mode to radial gradient. From just inside the upper left set of guides drag out the gradient tool up and to the right (just outside the top guides).

STEP FIVE: Start Adding in Some Texture

This is a favorite technique of mine, because it’s simple and does an excellent job of creating a really cool weathered look. We don’t want our final artwork to be an exact duplicate of the sample, so I’m going to use some other textures to create an original piece. I’m going to start by adding in a texture from some leaking rust. Open the file in Photoshop and get rid of the color by using Desaturate (CMD/CTRL-Shift-U or Image > Adjustments > Desaturate). Then fix the levels and contrast by doing Auto Levels (CMD/CTRL-Shift-L) and Auto Contrast (CMD/CTRL-Alt-Shift-L). After you’ve made your adjustments drag the texture over to your canvas. Resize (CMD/CTRL-T) as needed, I made mine 70% of the original image and moved it just to the top of the guides. After you’re happy with the placement change the blend mode to Overlay and leave the Opacity at 50%.

Next I’m going to take a grungy paper texture (vintage-grunge-textures: #2) and do the same thing as the rusty leak, but this time when you resize it rotate it 90 degrees. After you have it in position modify the brightness/contrast (Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast) to Brightness: -71 / Contrast: +31. Change the blend mode to Overlay and leave the Opacity at 35%.

Duplicate the paper texture layer and change the blend mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 35%. By the time you’re finished you should have something relatively similar to this image.

STEP SIX: Add in Some Shading

From here we have put together a pretty good looking texture for the sign. There are paint blots, the paint dripping from weather and numerous scratches from flying debris. Now we need to work on adding in some shading and making the outside portion of the sign a little darker to add some contrast. Pick out some of the grunge brushes supplied in the resources.zip file and start dropping in some black around the edges. I find it’s best to just stamp in color (one-click).

I don’t ever drag them out (or paint in strokes), because it doesn’t look right to me. This is the part of the tutorial where you can experiment as much as you want. Change brushes around as you go, so you don’t end up with the same shape all over, and try to overlap them. After you’ve got a decent border built up change the blend mode to Multiply and the Opacity to 65%.

It’s still a little too bright for my taste in the center area. From here make a new layer directly above the gradient layer. With your brushes set on a grunge brush and the foreground still set to black make a few clicks over the light portion of the canvas. Then set your blend mode on that layer to Color Burn and the Opacity to 45%.

STEP SEVEN: Adding in Highlights

Highlights are tricky and you have to follow the old “Less is More” rule. If you put too many highlights into the image it will look like garbage, not enough and it doesn’t look right. You need to use your judgement, but try not to over do it. Create a new layer and using the eyedropper tool (I) select a lighter blue (or light version of the color you chose) from your canvas.

Then using some of the Angry Blue brushes (included) position some spatters around the palette within the guides. After you have something you are happy with set the blend mode to Color Dodge and the Opacity to 28%.

STEP EIGHT: Adding in Text

If you look at the reference image the texture from the wear and tear is on top of the text, so we’re going to set our text up the same way. Highlight the gradient layer and then grab your text tool. The font we are using is the standard for all street signs called Interstate by FontBureau. I’m going to use Interstate Bold for the main text and the Regular weight for the other text.

Reset your colors (D) and Change your fill color to white (X) and type out your first word (for the larger text I set my type at 80pts). Once you setup your first piece of text you’re going to want to adjust the tracking and bring the characters closer together. To do this open your Character Palette and adjust the tracking to around -25 to -50. See this screenshot for reference.

Add in text as you see fit. I’m just making something similar to the sample image and changing up the information. After I’ve setup the heading text and the sub-text I’ve readjusted everything to be centered in the frame.

STEP NINE: Where’s the White Stripe?

You thought I forgot didn’t you? Well, to be honest…I almost did. Let’s start by creating a new layer just above the gradient layer. Remember when we saved the stripe layer in the folder? Good! Expand the folder and we’re going to make a selection of that stripe layer. Hold down Command (Mac) or Control (PC) and click the vector mask on the stripe layer.

You’ll now see the selection on your canvas. We want to fill this with white. If your fill color is not set to white, reset the colors (D) and swap to white (X). Now fill it! You can either do the quick key command (alt-delete/backspace) or Edit > Fill. It’s up to you…both methods work exactly the same. Now it looks like we have something decent on screen, but it’s a tad bit messy…let’s clean it up.

STEP TEN: Create a Layer Mask and Finish Up

Now that we have the sign almost complete all we need to do is cutout the color and texture on the outside of the guides. To do this it is very simple. Select all of your layers and drag them to the folder icon to create a new group. Then just as we made the layer selection of the stripe we will make a selection of the “Base” layer.

After you’ve made your selection click the “add layer mask icon” in the layers palette (two left from the group icon). After you’re done with the layer mask, you can crop down the image and save it for the web or any other application you need. Obviously, this image is fairly large for most uses, but if you want to shrink it down you can. Remember the shape layers we created? By using the direct selection tool (hit A on the keyboard or select the white-arrow tool just below the text tool on your toolbar. It’s best to select one side of the shape and either shrink or enlarge it. then you can do the other sides.

That’s it for this tutorial! I have included a zipped file for the resources and a copy of the final Photoshop file for your reference. Remember, the key to creating great artwork is experimenting…you don’t always have to follow the rules. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

~ GrandmasterB

RESOURCE FILES
Photoshop File: grunge_sign.psd (3.7 MB)
Resource File – Includes Textures and Grunge Brushes: grunge_sign_resources.zip (8.3 MB)

Check out my other Tutorials as well!

My boy Cuzzy (Cuzoogle.com) wrote me an email the other day asking me the following question:

I have recently started a new blog and want to set up a google site map. I downloaded the plugin and activated it but I am still having trouble getting my site map to work. It says I need to make sure the file is writeable and this was where I got lost. Can you help?

Cuzzy, this is actually a very common problem with installing plug-ins that need to be able to “write” to a given file on your server. In regards to your question the first thing you need to do is create the file for the sitemap. In order to do this you can use any text editor, I suggest using Notepad or if you have it Dreamweaver or another HTML editor. You don’t have to add any code to it, just save it as sitemap.xml and then upload it to the root directory of your site (wherever your index.php file is for WordPress).

If you don’t have an FTP client to upload your files I highly recommend installing FireFTP for Firefox. You should be able to download, install and setup the FTP client in record time; it is very user friendly. The only information that you will need to enter is your host (aka URL), username and password; once you have that hit connect and you should see the directory of your website in the right hand column. From here you will need to upload the sitemap.xml file to the home directory. Once it is uploaded right click it and choose “properties” (see image).

Once you have clicked on properties, it will bring up a window for you showing you the file permissions. Each checkbox has a numeric value, and for this case we need that number to add up to 0777. What you’ll need to do is make sure that you check Read, Write and Execute under each column and then click OKAY (see image). You’ve now changed the file permissions for sitemap.xml.

After you have changed the file properties, go back to your WordPress Admin Panel and click on settings and then access the XML-Sitemap settings. Under the top section labeled “Status” you may still see a warning that the file isn’t writeable, that is okay. It doesn’t automatically check the files if you’ve made a change. Simply click on the “rebuild sitemap manually” link and it should write the sitemap and create a new compressed file as well. One thing to note is that under the Location of the Sitemap File you should check automatically; that will save you time in the long run.

That’s pretty much it for the XML-Sitemap plugin settings though. Once you have everything setup, you should begin to see more activity from the search engines crawling your content. If you haven’t done so already I highly recommend installing the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin; with that plugin installed you can see when the top three search engines (GoogleBot, Yahoo! and MSN) are crawling your site and how often.

That is all for this week’s Q&A with GrandmasterB. Thank you again, to Cuzzy for his question and your 100 EntreCard Credits are being emailed to you now. Don’t forget if there’s something you’d like to know about hit me up with a question and you too can get a linkback and 100 EntreCard credits if I answer your question on the Q&A.

~ GrandmasterB

Question From: Jamie
In one of your tutorials it says to place a guide at 400x and 400y. How is this done??? Please help.

Answer:
In order to drag guides onto the canvas you need to make sure your rulers are visible. There are two ways to do it. You can either go under the menu bar to View > Rulers or the key command (Apple: cmd-r / Windows: ctrl-r). Once your rulers are visible move the cursor to the top ruler, click and drag down for horizonal guides and the left ruler will drag out vertical rulers. One thing to note is that the rulers can display multiple types of measurements:

• inches
• centimeters
• millimeters
• pixels
• picas
• points
• percentages

To change the measurement type right click on the ruler and it will give you a menu. For this particular tutorial (and all tutorials that I write) I use pixels. If you create the 800 pixel x 800 pixel canvas you will see a 400 mark on the ruler. Simply click and drag to get the guide to where it needs to go. For more precise placement you can use the ‘INFO’ window by going under Window > Info or pressing F8. I’ve attached an image to this email to show you exactly where to locate the X and Y coordinates of the guides and cursor. I hope my answer to your question helps you out.

If you have any questions for me that you would like featured on Q&A with GrandmasterB please send me an email via my Contact page. In your email if you’re following along with a tutorial, please let me know which one and on which step you’re having issues with. Also, If you’d like a linkback to your site include your site in the email. If I publish your question, I will send you 100 EntreCard credits for participating. Stay tuned for future Q&A posts via my RSS Feed…you won’t want to miss it.

~ GrandmasterB

Recently, Cuzzy from Cuzoogle.com contacted me about creating a new banner image for his blogroll post dubbed “Rolling a Blog Joint”. Since the overall premise is a play on the word joint, I thought something with a textured paper background and perhaps a pot leaf image would do the trick. Amazingly, enough there is a company named ‘Pot Leaf’ and their logo was available on BrandsoftheWorld.com, so that will save me a step of recreating the leaf in illustrator. The paper texture for the background will be a combination of a number of paper artwork that I found on Bittbox; which is a great resource for this type of stuff. So, that should be enough background on this project…let’s get ‘rolling‘.

STEP ONE: SETTING UP THE DOCUMENT

The finished size of this image will be 450p wide x 150p high, but I’m going to start with a bigger canvas size. The reason being is that I want to be able to adjust the textured background to fit, and later I will crop it out. So, let’s start out by creating a new document that’s 600×600. From there drag guides to the center at 300x and 300y and then recenter the rulers to make that point 0. After that drag out horizontal guides to +/- 75px and vertical guides to +/-225px. These outer guides will be our bounding box…all of the content will go inside this area. Anything outside the bounding box will be cutoff in the final step, so make double sure everything is inside that box.

STEP TWO: CREATING THE BACKGROUND

I want to make the background a different color from the text and leaf image, so I thought a light shade of brown would be a good contrast and it will make the paper more realistic. I’ll use a light shade (b79573) and a darker shade (7a5f43) and create a radial gradient; which will be the base of the background. Create a new layer and drag out a radial gradient starting a bit above the top guide and down towards the right corner (light to dark). We create a new layer, because I want to have a base layer that’s transparent…this layer will come into play later on in the tutorial. After you’ve made your gradient, rename the layer to ‘Base‘.

STEP THREE: ADD TEXTURE TO THE BACKGROUND

For this step it isn’t necessary, but I’m using three different textures to give the background more depth. For your reference they are: paper2, paper3 and paper4. Take your first texture and drag it above the gradient layer. You’re going to want to resize it, so the quickest way is free transform. In the options window change the x and y points to 0, the scale to 20 x 20 and angle to 90°. After you’ve scaled the texture you’ll want to desaturate it (cmd/ctrl+shift+u). Then change the Layer Blend Mode to Overlay and the Opacity to about 60%. Rename the layer ‘Texture1‘. You should have something like what I do…I hope. If you would like to experiment with other types of textures; I suggest checking out CGTextures.

STEP FOUR: MORE TEXTURE

This step is an exact repeat of the end of step three. I’m going to take two more textures and repeat the free transform, desaturate and change the blend mode. The only difference is you’re going to reduce the opacity on each layer by a little bit. I’m doing 50% and 20%…but feel free to experiment. If you really want to change it up try changing the Blend Mode to something like Color Dodge or Color Burn. Rename these layers to ‘Texture2‘ and ‘Texture3‘. If you find any other textures that you think will work with the image, go ahead and add them in…you never know what you’ll get when you start experimenting with Photoshop.

STEP FIVE: ADD SOME GRAPHIC ELEMENTS

For this step I’m going to dive into the Go Media Arsenal to pick out some cool elements that will give us some depth. I’m going to really pile on the use of the Arsenal today; to show you just what you can do if you use them wisely. Remember the old adage “less is more”, you don’t want to go overboard. Here are the packs that are used in this tutorial.

I am going to use the following elements from these packs to design this banner. I will cover each of them in detail as I add them to the document.

Step 5.1 – Add the abstract halftone

The first thing I’m going to do is add the abstract halftone element to the background to give it more texture by pasting it into photoshop as pixels (Photoshop will ask you what to do…I choose pixels, but you can do whatever is easiest for you). I enlarge it by going into Free Transform (cmd/ctrl-t) and then rotate it 45 degrees to the left. After that we want to duplicate that layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer or hold down alt and drag…either way will work). After you’ve duplicated the layer you will flip it both horizontally and vertically (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal/Vertical). Then move it into position and center both layers. When you’re done merge those two layers by selecting both in the layers pallete, right-click and choose ‘merge layers’. After you’ve done that, change the blend mode to Multiply and opacity to 50%. Rename this layer to ‘Abstract1′.

Step 5.2 – Duplicate the halftone and twist

Duplicate the halftone layer, rotate it another 45 degrees to the left and stretch it out a bit. After you’re happy with the shape and size change the opacity to 35%. Rename this layer to ‘Abstract2′ and you should have something similar to what I have. Please note, you don’t have to be exact you can mess around with the positioning to achieve the desired effect. If you want you could even duplicate the first layer a second time and change some of the blend mode effects to grunge it up just a little bit more.

Step 5.3 – Add the radial element

Again, same as step 5.1 paste in the element as pixels and resize as needed, rename to ‘Radial’. After resizing it change the fill on the layer to 0% and add the following layer styles (Layer > Add Layer Styles):

Gradient Overlay
Stroke

Step 5.4 – Add a little spatter

This time I will use two separate elements to get achieve a more random looking effect. I’m going to paste in the spatter elements into Photoshop as ‘Vector Smart Objects’ this time, because I will want to position them and transform them a few times on different layers. You can move them and transform them to the desired pattern you’re looking for. Make a new layer (above the radial), then make a selection of both layers by cmd/ctrl-clicking the first layer and then hold shift and select the second layer, and fill with black. Change the blend mode to Overlay and opacity to 60%, and rename the layer to ‘black.spatter’. You can then create another layer above this one, and resize the spatters again and rename to ‘white.spatter’. This time fill it with white, change the blend mode to soft light and the opacity to 80%.

Step 5.5 – Some flourishes and a little more color

Since the background is looking a bit monotone, it’s time to add some other elements and some color. With the last layer selected (the white spatter), create a new layer and name it ‘flourish1′. I’m going to drag in one of the flourishes from Arsenal Set 8 and place it in photoshop as ‘pixels’. I’ve rotated to the right and enlarged it, then once I was happy with it, pushed it up against the center guide and nudged it left 10px (shift-right arrow). The next step is to duplicate the layer and flip it horizontally (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal), once you’ve done that move it so the right side touches the center guide and nudge it to the left 10px (shift-left arrow). Merge the two layers together and change the fill to 0%. Go into your layer styles and add the following styles (Layers > Layer Styles):

Color Overlay (#345c34)
Gradient Overlay (#345c34 to White)
Stroke

Step 5.6 – Another set of flourishes

Paste in a different flourish and rename the layer to ‘flourish2′. Go ahead and resize it to fit your image. I’m fitting mine inside the bounding box, with the right side touching the guide and the left going over the center.  The idea is to make the flourishes appear as though they are coming out of the center of the radial pattern. Duplicate it, flip it horizontally and move it to the left, then merge the two layers. Change the fill to 0% and add the following layer styles:

Color Overlay
Outer Glow

STEP SIX: BUILD OUT THE LOGO (Where’s the Leaf?)

I snagged the ‘pot leaf’ logo from Brands of the World and pasted it into Photoshop as a ‘Vector Smart Object’, resized it to fit and rotated it a bit off center. The original color of the logo is a very bright green and I’m not a big fan of the bright green so I’m going to change it to something darker. By adding the following layer styles I will be able to lift the logo off the background and give it some dimension:

Drop Shadow
Inner Glow
Color Overlay
Stroke

STEP SEVEN: ADD THE TEXT

With the pot leaf layer selected grab your text tool and click in the center of the document and change the alignment to centered. After that type out your title, in this case “Rolling a Blog Joint”, leave the type black and change the Blend Mode to “Soft Light”. For this I’m using a grungy script font called Hawaii Killer; which carriest over the grunge feel, but there was a problem. I found that the “B” in Blog was unreadable, so I changed the font to another free font called Porcelain. I don’t normally recommend swapping out fonts, but in this case it worked out for the better.

Create a new layer beneath the type, and make a selection of the type layer (cmd/ctrl-click the layer). Expand the selection by 1px and fill with a light green (almost white), then add the following layer styles:
Drop Shadow
Gradient Overlay
Stroke

Step 7.1 – Add a little more depth to the type

Move the text to center it in the box and that’s it for the text. Once you have the text centered, duplicate the type layer, change the fill color to #345c34, change the Blend Mode to “Color Burn, the opacity to 50%. This will make the type pop off the screen a little bit more, to make it really pop though we’ll add the following layer style to give it some extra kick.

Gradient Overlay (black to 6a6a6a to black)

STEP EIGHT: FINAL TOUCHES

This step is purely optional, but I think it makes a cool effect. Remember that transparent layer we left way back in step one? Here’s where it comes into play…we’re going to fill it with a light shade of green (#94c294) to get a mix of colors. Then with the base layer selected add a layer mask and grab the gradient tool set to: radial and black to transparent. Then start making gradients around the bottom to reveal the green layer underneath. Once you have something you like…that’s it. You can add different colors or gradients to your liking…it’s all up to you.

Once you have something similar to the final image go ahead and crop it down and save it for the web. I hope you’ve enjoyed this original tutorial by GrandmasterB. If you’d like to check out tutorials in the future subscribe to the feed…you won’t be disappointed. Also, I’m going to start a new Question and Answers feature to address all of your burning graphic design questions in the near future…you won’t want to miss it.

~ GrandmasterB

This copyrighted tutorial was originally published at GrandmasterB.com on 07/22/2008

I went over to the local Borders bookstore and after walking around the store for ten minutes (it’s a new store and it’s huge), I finally found the magazine rack. My first impression of the magazine was that it’s designed well and definitely gets the readers attention with the bright cover art. The other thing that caught my attention was the sticker price. Each issue of the magazine runs £6.00, but with the markup and the exchange rate it was $15.50 USD. I immediately thought “this magazine is going back on the rack for the next sucker”, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a free browse in store.

I was definitely impressed by the contents of the magazine and the quality of the articles, but the tutorials are probably some of the best that I’ve ever seen. Each of the tutorials is extremely in-depth and very detailed, so much so that you can understand why the magazine is titled “Advanced Photoshop“. After giving it a once over I noticed that it comes with a CD loaded with all of the necessary files for each tutorial, along with a few bonus items. AHA! This $15 price tag isn’t looking too bad after all, so I figured I’d pick it up. 

I haven’t tried any of the tutorials out yet, because I bought it on my lunch break. I have thumbed through the mag about five times though and read a few of the articles. If time permits, I’ll see if I can work out one of the less intense tutorials and let you all know how it goes. If you’re a Photoshop nut like me, you should definitely pick up the magazine or just give it a look at your local bookstore.

One other quick thing before I close out, you can download the tutorial files from the Advanced Photoshop website without purchasing the magazine, but unfortunately there isn’t a PDF or text file with the instructions for the tutorial. They are great resources to have on hand though…check ‘em out.

~ GrandmasterB

I’m going to show you two ways to make your Feed Icons custom. What you will need for this tutorial:

• Feed Icons Dev Kit
• Adobe Photoshop (of course)

BASIC CUSTOMIZATION

Unzip the Dev Kit and take a look inside, there are multiple sizes of the default orange and white rss feed icon as well as a folder full of grayscale versions. For this part of the tutorial go ahead and open one of the grayscale versions; I have opened the 128 x 128 pixel version (feed-icon-128×128.psd) in Photoshop.

To add some color to this icon and make it your own will take you literally one step. It’s not flashy and is very simple, but it is customized to your liking and that’s what counts.

STEP ONE (and only one) – Add Some Color
Simply go to the layers palette and click on “Add Layer Style” and choose Color Overlay. Change your Blend Mode to “Color” and choose a color to your liking that is “web safe”. Once you’ve got it click OK and you’ve just customized your RSS Feed Icon. Of course when you’ve finished be sure to “Save for Web” in the format of your choice.

As I stated this is very basic customization of the feed icon and doesn’t use a much (if any) creativity. So, how do you make something completely unique similar to the GrandmasterB Feed Icon…lemme show ya.

ADVANCED CUSTOMIZATION – GLASSY ICON

The cool thing about these feed icons is that there are Illustrator versions included in the Dev Kit. I’m not going to dive into using the Illustrator files, but if you want to do some experimenting they are available. For this advanced version of the tutorial, I will use the supplied Photoshop file (link below) that has a few extras enclosed. For those of you that didn’t get the free vector starbursts from the Killer Metallic Text Tutorial; you get a second chance by downloading this Photoshop file.

What you will need for this tutorial:

• Download the GMBfeed-icon-128×128.psd
  
• Adobe Photoshop (of course)

STEP ONE – Getting Started
If you haven’t done so already, download the required Photoshop file and open it. You’ll see that the grayscale version of the Feed Icon is included as well as two other layers which are hidden. To start out go ahead and turn off the visibility on the “feed icon” layer. We won’t need it for this tutorial, but I included it in case you wanted it. Now that we have nothing visible and a blank canvas turn on your guides (cmd-; or ctrl-;). Next with the “feed icon” layer selected create a new layer and name it “base”. Reset your colors to black and white (d)

Now, lets get something on that blank canvas. Grab your “rounded rectangle tool” and set your corner radius to 10px. Starting at the center of the canvas start dragging out your shape; once you see that it’s drawing hold down the Alt+Shift keys to drag the shape out from center and keep it uniform. Stop just short of filling the entire canvas. We will need space outside the shape for the next step. When you’re done you’ll have a shape like above.

STEP TWO – Add Layer Style to Base
This step is going to give the ugly black box we created in STEP ONE some style. Once this step is done, we’ll have the beginnings of a decent looking icon. Everything is built off this layer and you can customize the colors how you like. I’m going with RED, but you can make whatever color you like. With the “base” layer selected choose “add layer style” at the bottom of the layers palette. Add the following settings for each style, remember the color is up to you.

• Outer Glow
• Inner Glow
• Gradient Overlay
• Stroke

STEP THREE – Add Starburst
The “starburst” is one of the included layers within the Photoshop file. Now that we are at this step go ahead and turn on the layer visibility. It’s not very impressive is it? Well, lets change that! Double-click the color selector and change it to a darker version of your chosen color. Since I chose to use red, I’m using a fill color of #390808. Once you have your color chosen, change the layer Blend Mode to Color Dodge and the Opacity to 50%. As you can see the starburst is still visible outside the “base” layer. To fix that small issue we will make a selection of the “base” layer (cmd-click or ctrl-click the layer) and with the starburst layer selected choose “Create Layer Mask”. Now the starburst is contained within the borders of the base layer.

STEP FOUR – RSS Feed Icon Detail
From here we will turn on the last of the included layers “rss.icon.detail”. I’ve included this layer as a “vector smart object”, so that you could resize it without losing any of the details. If this layer were made of pixels (same with the starburst layer) and you resized it multiple times it would distort and look like garbage. Once the “rss.icon.detail” layer is on we’ll add the following layer styles to give it some pop.

• Inner Glow
• Gradient Overlay

I chose to give this layer a metallic feel, but you can change it to appear however you like. It’s all a matter of preference.

STEP FIVE – Add Some Shading
This step and the next will both be built on layers above the “rss.icon.detail” layer, so we’ll start by creating a new layer above it and rename it to “shading”. Make sure your colors are reset to black/white, if not go ahead and reset them now (d). Make a selection of the “base” layer and grab the gradient tool. We’re going to create a linear gradient and set it to “foreground to transparent”. Draw a gradient starting at the top of the icon down to the middle and another starting at the bottom up to the middle. When you’re satisfied with your gradients change the Layer Opacity to 50%. NOTE: Don’t deselect your selection…you’ll need it in STEP SIX.

STEP SIX – Make It Glassy
Create a new layer above “shading” and rename it “glass”. Grab the elliptical marquee tool and starting at the top right corner (outside the canvas); hold down ALT+SHIFT (cross-hair will have an x below it) and drag out a selection. You should have a selection that resembles this image: step6_marquee.png

Grab the gradient tool and flip the colors to white/black (x). Starting at the bottom of the canvas drag the gradient up to the top of the canvas. If done correctly you’ll get a smooth transparent gradient that looks glassy. Deselect and you’re finished!

I hope that you have enjoyed this set of tutorials teaching you how to customize your own RSS Feed Icons. As you have seen there are quick, easy ways to make a custom icon and there are more advanced methods. These two options are just the tip of the iceberg though; I have seen a ton of custom Feed Icons all over the Internet and each one has it’s own unique shape, style and flare. One of my favorites has to be the Bomb Icon that Jason Boom uses for his feed. I’m sure there’s some repository of Feed Icons on display somewhere around the Internet…until you run into it though check out Google Images for ideas. Speaking of Feeds if you enjoyed this tutorial and want to see more in the future; subscribe to get GrandmasterB in your feed reader.

~ GrandmasterB

This copyrighted tutorial was originally published at GrandmasterB.com on 06/14/2008