It’s no secret that we love textures and patterns here at WDL. They’re great for easily adding lots of interest and depth to a design, whether it be a huge background pattern or just some subtle textures here and there. So to continue our “Best of 2010? series, this week we’re covering textures and patterns. We’ve seen a lot of them this year, but some really stood out. So here’s our picks for best textures and patterns of 2010. We picked our favorites, but tried to include a mixture of styles.
The Web Design Ledger is a publication by web designers for web designers. We cover a wide range of topics such as Photoshop, web design, photography, programming, and more.
"Tron: Legacy" is a high-tech 3D adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn , the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the digital world of Tron more »where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin's loyal confidant Quorra, father and son embark on a life-and-death journey of escape across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.
The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs.
A little over two years ago, I started reflecting on the web as a design medium. Coming from a print design background, most of what I knew about design was still applicable; but the things that weren’t made a huge difference. What came of this was a presentation I gave at a few conferences (the abbreviated 10-minute version of which you can see on Vimeo). The discussions that followed prompted me to look closely at how the creative process—and the tools we use—affect designing for the screen.
The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design.
I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow.
Why use Photoshop?
It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app.
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