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This web design tutorial will show you the process of developing a PSD mockup of a clean and simple
blog layout. We will be creating the design of the front page of the blog. The next part of this tutorial
will walk you through coding the PSD to HTML/CSS.
Final Result
Click on the image below to see the work in full scale.
Create a New Photoshop Document
1 Lets get straight to work. First, open Adobe Photoshop (quite obviously). Im using CS4, but other
CS versions will work just fine. Begin by creating a new document (Ctrl/Cmd + N); make the
document 1046px by 1630px with a white background.
Create the Background
2 The default Background layer of your new Photoshop document will be locked and un-editable; we
need to do something about that. Double-click on the Background layers thumbnail in the Layers
Panel; this will open the New Layer dialog window, just press the OK button to make the layer
editable.
3 Now Ctrl/Cmd + click on the Background layers thumbnail (by default, Photoshop renames it to
Layer 0) in the Layers Panel to place a selection around the canvas.
4 Set your Background color in the Tools panel to a blue color (#45a0ac) and press Ctrl/Cmd +
Backspace, which is the keyboard shortcut for filling a selection with the Background color.
5 Your background layer should now be a dark shade of blue. Choose Filter > Noise > Add Noise
while the Background layer is still selected. Change the Amount to 2% and then apply the filter.
Set Some Initial Photoshop Guides
6 To help keep our work aligned, set three vertical guides (View > New Guide) at the following
locations: 60.5px, 505px and 955px.
Tip: Toggle the visibility of your Photoshop guides on and off by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + ;.
7 Also set a horizontal guide at 40px.
23 Ctrl/Cmd + click on the thumbnail of the arrow layer in the Layers Panel to place a selection around
the arrow, switch to the "linkbg" layer, and then press Backspace or Delete to delete the area below the
arrow selection.
After this, you dont need the arrow layer anymore, so you can delete the layer.
24 Now what you should have is the background for the active navigation menu link, which looks sort
of like a bookmark. Let us style this layer to match the look and feel of our logo by applying an Inner
Glow, Color Overlay, and Stroke layer style.
The inner glow color should be a dark gray (#2e2e2e2).
The color overlay should be our dark gray again (#252525). You dont necessarily need this layer style
since we already filled it with this color earlier on.
The stroke color should be black (#000000).
This is how our "bookmark" active link indicator should look like now:
32 Align the rectangle to the left and the top guide using the Move Tool (V).
33 Duplicate the layer and move it right below the original rectangle. Rename the layer to
"dividerbottom".
34 Give it a light blue Color Overlay layer style (#4fbaca).
Link the "dividertop" and "dividerbottom" layers by selecting them simultaneously in the Layers Panel,
right-clicking on one of them, and then choosing Link Layers from the contextual menu that shows up.
This will keep them together so that if we need to move them, both layers will move together.
43 Still on the "datebg" layer, add a noise filter via Filter > Noise > Add Noise; use 2% for the Amount
option.
52 Add a vertical guide at 165px. Align the text with the guide you just created and the date.
Add the Blog Post Lead-In Image
53 Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), create a 480x150px rectangle (the height depends on the
image size you will use, but our max width is 480px for this template).
54 Fill your selection with any color on a new layer and then apply a Stroke layer style that will
represent our images border. The color of the border is a dark gray (#1b1b1b).
58 Add a new horizontal guide at 450px. Align the text with the left guide and the new guide.
59 Select all the blog post layers in the Layers Panel ("datebg", "shadow", "date", the blog post title
text, metadata text, the background of the image, the image, and the blog post text) and group them
together by going to Layer > Group Layers (Ctrl/Cmd + G), which will place all of the layers in a
folder. Name the layer group "Post 1".
Add an Inset Horizontal Divider at the Bottom of the Blog Post Entry
60 Add another horizontal guide at 700px. Duplicate the divider we created before and rename the
layer to "dividerpost".
61 Resize the width of the divider with Free Transform so that its the same as the lead-in images
width. Then move the divider using the Move Tool (V) so that it is placed on the horizontal guide we
just created.
89 Zoom in really close so you can see you work (using the Zoom Tool).
90 Color the first pixel (top) black (#000000) using the Rectangular Marquee Tool and Edit > Fill.
91 Select around the canvas (Ctrl/Cmd + A) and then choose Edit > Define Pattern. Name your pattern
something logical like "Vertical Dots".