graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

Photoshop has to be one of the hardest of the graphic design programs to get a grip of. I remember thinking I would never understand it when I first started. There are just lots of different ways to accomplish the same thing with photoshop, I know personally I have only scratched the surface of what it is capable of. Jennifer over at Laughing Lion Design has created some video photoshop tutorials which are worth taking a look at to improve your photoshop knowledge.

There are loads of other photoshop tutorials out there if you need them too, take a look at Tutorialized which lists 9082 photoshop tutorials, that should keep you busy for a while .

Adobe also have their own video tutorials in all their products including photoshop at www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

I bought Illustrator CS3 a while ago but hadn’t really looked into all the new features. I found a flash video from Adobe Illustrator Techniques showing the new colour features that Illustrator CS3 offers which look like they could be really useful. The first is the ability to easily change all the colours in your illustrator document using a palette showing all the colours you have you have used. These colours can easily be tweaked to try out different colour variations, you even have the option to convert a full colour job to a two colour one at the click of a button.

Another great new feature is the colour guide which lets you explore different colour combinations by providing you with various complementary colour swatches based on one of the colours you have used. This could be ideal for experimenting with colours for logo designs.

Take a look at the video for a tutorial on how to use these features.

I have read several articles about how you could set Wordpress up to run locally on your Mac but it always sounded really complicated so I had avoided it and just set up an online test site. I wanted to start creating myself a new website in Wordpress so I gritted my teeth ready for problems, but it worked really easily. I know Macs have built in Apache (required for Wordpress) but I had read that the application MAMP made setting things up much easier as in one go it installs Apache, PHP and MySQL, everything you need to run Wordpress.

I downloaded MAMP and it installed easily (into my Applications folder), then downloaded Wordpress and installed inside the MAMP folder in a folder called htdocs (its already there ready) within that I create the folder called Wordpress which Wordpress was installed into.

Start MAMP (click the application and then start servers) then click phpMyAdmin and create a new database I called mine “wordpressrd” but you can call yours whatever you want (you can then close this window). Then from within your Wordpress folder open wp-config-sample.php and you need to input some info. All the info should be the same as below apart from you need to change your database name to whatever you called it.

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpressrd’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘root’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost:8888′); // 99% chance you won’t need to

Save this file back into your Wordpress file as wp-config.php

Now you need to open your browser window at http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php where you will be given a user name and password to take note of. You should then be able to see Wordpress local at http://localhost:8888/wordpress/. To login to the admin panel just go o http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-login.php and insert the user name and password you were just given.

You can then start to add themes/plugins etc into the themes folder just as you normally would if Wordpress was online. It means you can tweak your design to your hearts content without anyone else being able to see it.