Tips and tools are useless if you don’t know the basics
Web development and design are two great skills to have because they allow you to work from anywhere and create amazing, beautiful sites and apps. Nonetheless, it can be hard to get started when you don’t know what to do. We can help you out with these ten great tips and tools.
Get Educated- If you’re still struggling with the initial concepts of programming and design,
we’ve got a few lessons that can help you. To get started with web development, our Lifehacker Night School series can teach youHTML and CSS as well as JavaScript, which pretty much covers the basics. We also havePhotoshop lessons which can teach you how to mock up a web site layout. We also have a basic lesson on color theory. To pick up a few more design skills, check out this list of resources. It’ll help you get inspired and discover ways to learn more of the basics. If you want to learn more, check out Code Academy for additional programming lessons. When you’re ready to take your first coding project from start to finish, be sure to read this.
Build Up Your Font Library- Picking the right font can make or break a great design. I mean, just imagine replacing every instance of Helvetica Neue with Comic Sans. Right? Right? Whether you’ve got a font of font knowledge or you don’t know your serifs from your sans-serifs, you can always benefit from a good font collection. My favorite resource is DaFont, but that’s just one of many. FontPark offers over 70,000 free fonts and YourFonts will even let you make your own. For more places to find free typefaces, check out our fonts tag page.
Use Dummy Tools- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Man, I could go on writing that genius material for pages with thisLorem Ipsum text generator. If you’re not familiar, Lorem Ipsum (or Lipsum for short) is what many designers and developers use to generate fake placeholder text for their designs. You don’t necessarily have actual content when you’re creating a design for a web page, magazine, or other layout with lots of text. Lipsum generators supply you with placeholder text designed to fill titles, sentences, and/or paragraphs when you’re lacking. But you don’t have to rely on the standard stuff. There are many varieties of Lipsum generators, such as Cupcake Ipsum. Bear claw sugar plum sweet roll. Sesame snaps gummies gummies sweet roll oat cake chupa chups lollipop lemon drops!
Text is not the only thing you might need to generate for your designs. What if you don’t have images? The Dummy Image Generator is basically the Lipsum equivalent for pictures. You just enter a size and it spits out a placeholder. This is very handy during both the design and development processes.
Pimp Out Photoshop- For most web designers, Photoshop is an essential tool. It’s capable of a whole lot, but you can expand its capabilities by adding new actions, brushes, shapes, and more. Actions are basically macros for Photoshop, allowing you to automate tedious tasks you don’t want to do “by hand.” Here are 100 existing Photoshop actions to expand your collection, but if you need something specific you can always just create your own.
Expanding your shape and brush collections can also provide you with new options. Shapes give you vector images you can use in your designs, and brushes will let you paint with a variety of objects and styles. This ultimate shape collection should give you a good start, but you’ll quickly find that if you perform a web search for “Photoshop shapes” and whatever type of shape you’re looking for (start with silhouettes for a good set of options) you’ll turn up some good choices. You’ll find that Photoshop brushes are in an even greater abundance. Just take this collection of 2,000 for example. Brushes can allow you to paint with shapes, emulate real paintbrushes, or even create interesting effects. It’s also easy to create your own.
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