Here is a pretty decent list of online tools that are useful to the web design crowd.

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I am doing a small series of free mini site templates. Feel free to use them as you will. Please leave the credit intact, and a link to my website. Click on the image below to see it full size and download.

Interesting write up on creating a typographic wallpaper. Click below for the original article.

Create A Great Typographic Wallpaper In Photoshop

This is a very useful collection. Click below for the source article.

12 Extremely Handy Online Tools for Web designers and Developers

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to build a Web 2.0 style button. This technique creates the glossy buttons that are becoming more widely used.

I am going to start with a 400px by 150px canvas.

Use the rounded rectangle tool, with a radius between 10 and 20. I am using 20 in this example.

Draw your rectangle, taking up most of the canvas. Color does not matter at this point.

This will give you a shape layer. Rasterize the shape layer.

Now, on the layer that your rectangle is on, go to blending options.

Choose Inner Shadow. Here I set the angle to 130 degrees, opacity to 45%, distance to 5 and size to 6.

Also in blending options, choose gradient overlay. This is where you are going to lay the color on to your button. Here I used the defaults, except the color.

Now use your magic wand tool to highlight the rounded rectangle you created.

Go to Select>Modify and choose Contract. Choose between 4 and 6 pixels, I am using 6 for this example.

Now create a new layer, and add a white to transparent gradient to your selected area.

Choose your Elliptical Marquee Tool.

Holding alt, drag your elliptical over the top half of the selected area.

Now, delete the remaining selected area of this layer.

At this point you can play with the opacity slider some to get a blend that looks good. I am going to leave this one along however, as it looks pretty close.

Lastly, after adding a font and resizing you have:

I stumbled on to this cool tiled background builder. Pretty flexible, and fun to play with. Click below to use.

Tiled Background Builder

Digital photographs are a little soft by nature. Most require at least one pass of sharpening, and often require more than one to look their best on the web. In this tutorial, I am going to show you the Adamus sharpen technique. This is a more drastic sharpen, particularly with landscapes, but is only useful for web quality pictures.

3. Adamus Sharpen
From your full size image, re-size your image to somewhere between 1000 and 1500 pixels on the long end. Try to keep it at double the size of the image that you intend to finish with. Go to Image > Image Size.

For this example I want to end up with a 750px image, so I am starting with 1500px. Make sure you re-sample as Bicubic, not Bicubic Sharper.

If you have done any editing to your image on multiple layers, before this next step you will need to flatten the image.

Duplicate your your layer and label it sharpen1.

Then go to Filter > Sharpen and run sharpen.

Duplicate the sharpen1 layer and label it sharpen2. Then go to Filter > Sharpen and run sharpen again. This will give two passes of sharpen on this layer.

Now duplicate the sharpen2 layer and label it sharpen3. Then go to Filter > Sharpen and run sharpen again. This will give three passes of sharpen on this layer. This will give it a highly over sharpened look, but don’t be alarmed. It will not stay that way.

Now re-size the image to the web size that you intended, in this case 750px. Make sure you re-sample as Bicubic, not Bicubic Sharper.

You will end up now with three sharpen choices. Simply choose which layer gives you the best result and then save for the web. Below is the before and the three sharpens. Click on the image for a larger view.

Digital photographs are a little soft by nature. Most require at least one pass of sharpening, and often require more than one to look their best on the web. In this tutorial I am going to use my favorite and most often used technique. It’s called Luko USM. This technique I find invaluable for portraits, but it works well for most things.

2. Luko USM

Start with your image already sized for the web.
Duplicate your image layer and name it Luko

Highlight your Luko layer, go to Filters > Sharpen and pick Unsharp Mask.

Adjust the sliders to Amount 18%, Radius 40 pixels, Threshold 0 levels.

Again, go to Filters > Sharpen and pick Unsharp Mask.

Adjust the sliders to Amount 150%, Radius 0.3 pixels, Threshold 0 levels.

Next, go to Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask

Choose Opacity 100%, Mode Darken.

Again, go to Filters > Sharpen and pick Unsharp Mask.

Adjust the sliders to Amount 150%, Radius 0.3 pixels, Threshold 0 levels.

Again, go to Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask

Choose Opacity 100%, Mode Lighten.

The finished product becomes this before and after picture. (click for a larger image):

Digital photographs are a little soft by nature. Most require at least one pass of sharpening, and often require more than one to look their best on the web. In this series of tutorials, I am going to demonstrate some of the techniques I have learned to help get your images tack sharp (please note, some of these techniques will not translate to print well).

1. High Pass Sharpen
This sharpen technique is subtle, and I often use it in conjunction with other sharpens.

After opening your image, in the layers menu duplicate the background image and name it high pass.

Next, change the layer mode on the high pass layer to Overlay.

Then in Filter, go to Other and chose High Pass.

Next, you will adjust the high pass slider. This usually takes a little playing with, but stick to the lower end. I rarely go over 1.8. For this example, I used 1.6.

Lastly, you may or may not want to adjust the layer opacity. I find that it sometimes helps blend the sharpen, especially if there is any over sharpened areas. In this example I have the opacity set to 92%.

The finished product becomes this before and after picture. (click for a larger image):

I found this article to be helpful as I’m delving in to Drupal, though I would caution not to get too carried away with modules. Read the original article below.

The 11 most important things to do after you install Drupal.