Adobe Photoshop is fast becoming a household name. What used to be a name familiar only to professional photographers, designers, graphic artists, advertisers, illustrators and web developers have branched out from that select niche into the whole world. Nowadays, more and more people are using and becoming familiar with the program—from students, to amateur digital artists, even people who are not really into photo-editing or photo-manipulation, only wanting to try the product out casually. It’s been used as a reference, in some cases incorporated into jokes, and mentioned in some advertisements that it can be safely said that Photoshop is a cultural icon of modern times.

An abrupt expansion of users means more updates and upgrades in the race to fashion Photoshop to perfection. Before, only Adobe was working on making Photoshop the best photo editing program; presently, however, new tools and options have enabled the end-users themselves to create filters, plug-ins, brushes, actions, almost any type of resource material for other Photoshop users. Photoshop customers are sustaining themselves and others, and this, in turn, have contributed to the rapid growth and development of the market, the product, the users as well as the knowledge, techniques and avenues of opportunities associated with the program.

Now on its CS4 version, Photoshop has come a very long way. Even though its core functions remain essentially the same, how, when, where, and for what people use them have rapidly evolved from solely being used to creating print ads and digital graphics, into a wide range of capability to create or edit vexels (which looks a lot like a vector), movies (with extended versions), flash and animation (with the PSD2FLA plug-in, etc.), book illustrations, magazine layouts (hand-in-hand with InDesign), website layouts (with SiteGrinder, and other programs).

With the above-mentioned added capabilities, that means that Photoshop has been tuned up to cater to purposes other than photo-manipulation. Now it can be a powerful web designing & web development tool, an animation program, and an even better canvas for them digital painters. People rely on Photoshop to make the web portals project the right image, thereby affection their own online business stores.

That is one of the greatest breakthroughs of Photoshop in the mainstream aspect—it being a helpful and at times indispensable tool to the online entrepreneur in the virtual Internet. With the current global crisis ravaging the entire world, more and more people are turning to self-employment as a means of keeping their respective boats afloat. One of the popular options is to start an online business store. With the Internet having a wide reach, and space, bandwidth and .com names affordable to most people, it’s easy to see why a lot of people are taking advantage of the current situation.

Now we can say that Photoshop is the Multimedia Artist’s best friend. It’s not just for 2D images, but for 3D, and it can even create animations. The only thing lacking, perhaps, is the ability to incorporate sound or music. Still, it is a powerful tool, even without that feature. With Photoshop as your tool, your imagination, literally, is the limit.

In this modern age, you can’t be caught dead not using a computer. With these technological wonders of the 21st century slowly and surely taking over every aspect of our lives—government systems used to be made up of gazillion filing cabinets are now being replaced by more efficient machines; different working industries are incorporating computers to cut-back on some tasks and be more efficient; even some schools are altogether getting rid of pens, papers, books, and are opting for digital notebooks, libraries and other teaching aids—we humans have to be geared up for this inevitable invasion.

Time will come (or perhaps we are already living it) that these mean machines will be at the bottom of Maslow’s infamous pyramid—that is, computers will soon be an indispensable necessity in our lives. As such, afflicted people should start getting rid of their technophobia, and embrace the new computer age, if they wish to survive in the long run. For the younger generation, this isn’t a problem as they take to these new technologies as easily as they take to breathing. Teens easily catch up to trends and anything new that pops up suddenly. Yuppies and the general working class have no problem either, as computers have become an integral part of their working environment. For the older lot or those whose career doesn’t involve the use of these evolved abacuses, however, it’s a different story.

So if you’re one of the unequipped to face the rapidly modernizing world, here’s a list of the following skills you should learn now, in order not to be left behind and get classified as ‘ancient’.

Familiarize yourself with Microsoft platform, including its programs. Basic things like typing, copy & pasting, and other simple commands (keyboard and otherwise) are a must. Viewing pictures, watching movies, and basic troubleshooting should also be in your list.

Use the Internet. Being able to utilize the World Wide Web without fear will emancipate you in more ways than one. Chat, join forums, social networking sites, and blog away.

Get to know the hardware as well, so that you can be your own technician when the PC breaks down and needs some TLC.

Take it a step further and learn HTML, CSS and PHP. You never know when it might come in handy. They’re pretty basic languages so learning them will be a cinch. You might also try using Adobe Photoshop, and when you do take the web designing/developing business seriously, download the SiteGrinder plug-in for Photoshop as well.

For those who aspire to be Digital artists, learning how to Vector using Illustrator would definitely add to your knowledge. Study InDesign as well, and read up on Flash if you’ve got the time. Coincidentally, if you’re using Photoshop and Flash, it’s a good idea to get the PSD2FLA plug-in—it’ll make your life easier.

Once you’ve mastered the above suggested skills, well, congratulations. Now, that one achievement you’ve accomplished. You can choose to this further, maybe learn new computer languages, and even create a program by yourself. The possibilities, as proven before, are definitely endless.

With current global crisis seemingly hanging over everyone’s heads like the proverbial Damocles’ Sword, businesses are cutting corners and the ones who are affected most are their employees. As unemployment rate rockets and the prices continue to soar high, relying on some Chinese philosophy might help ease the everyday burden.

It will only require one employee (you), your strengths, your persistence and a lot of hard work and brainstorming for brilliant ideas. This is the public secret that all the rich and famous share: start your own business.

Nothing’s better than being your own boss, working for yourself and keeping all the profits. But with the present situation today, it’s not exactly a walk in the park to shell out a significant amount of cash just to get your enterprise rolling. The general rule is that the amount of capital you spend on start-up is usually proportional to the profits you’ll get back in return. So what do you do when the cash you have on hand for an investment can only probably afford you a well-equipped lemonade stand?

Traditionally, due to lack of other options, you’d have to settle for a kiddie lemonade stand, unless you’re blessed with extreme wit and creativity. Lucky for us, we live in the 21st century, which is plagued by technical, medical, modern advances in terms of almost everything on a daily basis. What better avenue to turn to than the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is a smorgasbord of opportunities, and a lot of people have taken advantage of that. The Internet, being cheap (to access & to utilize), wider and far-reaching than the farthest space probes from Earth, interactive, and possibly home for anything—is the perfect place to carve a corner for your business, especially if this is your first time venturing onto the real of self-employment.

The first step would be to assess yourself. This would include your skills, your strengths and weaknesses, your interests. Once you’ve determined which product or service you’re going to market online, it’s time to make a plan. Flesh out your ideas, make general steps of what you are planning to execute. Under each step, write out the details: the nitty-gritty, specifics like time, date, place, person, or other extra information that might help. Once you’ve mapped all of this out, it’s time to start building your website.

If you’re a newbie to all the web design jazz, it’s better to stick to free programs and service, however be guided that you or your site would be blasted with advertisements left and right. If you’re ready to take things a notch higher, get yourself a website builder like SiteGrinder, design your site in Photoshop and let the whole virtual world know that you’re in the house.

If you really want to make an impressive and professional impact, jazz your website up with interactive, multimedia content—get yourself a PSD2FLA plug-in and you’re well on your way to becoming a Flash expert. Dare to open your virtual business today with a very loud and unforgettable bang!

If you’re maintaining, or even just assigned to manage, a website with a large network, and receiving heavy traffic, it would be wise and practical to create a template for your site. While a strong and long-running layout may create a sense of stability and prolonged viability of the said website, people do need change every now and then.

However, since it is receiving heavy traffic, you can’t just pull the site down just for a layout revamp. Causing a temporary disruption would inconvenience a lot of people, and may reflect much more damage to your site traffic than it would seem.

What could be a solution for this problem? One way to merge design without compromising the site operation would be to create a template. This template will be the one that you will use through the whole site, and for a long period of time.

What the template can do for you is to create a long-term image that you want to establish as perception of the people towards the site. However, you have to leave room for it to be editable in some way, in a small way, in which cause minimal interference to the website operation.

For example, Yahoo! And Google are two kinds of sites with a simple website template, but they can still customize their headers/banner to fit current seasons, holidays or themes. This could work for your website as well.

Headers are not the only thing you could customize; themes can be presented through the use of relevant colors, and maybe a bit of background change. Little, subtle alterations sometimes make the most impact.

Other cases, however, might call for more dynamic and complex add-ons. You could arrange the layout in a way that would provide ample space maybe for a small flash movie, or maybe add a flash introduction at the welcome page of website (of course, don’t omit the “skip” button for the convenience of regular visitors). This could be arranged by making use of a plug-in called SiteGrinder, which easily converts layouts or templates you’ve designed in Photoshop into HTML and CSS files. Add to this, another plug-in called PSD2FLA, which allows Flash files to be opened and edited in Photoshop. With these two tools, you won’t have a problem designing, editing and revamping an interactive template.

You could use one, two, or a combination of the tips above to make a versatile website template that would be sure to stand the test of time. Remember to also look for guidance and inspiration from other, established web portals. Never pass up the opportunity to look through portfolios or online galleries of professional artists and graphic designers; you can pick up techniques and styles you normally wouldn’t see anywhere else.

As always, keen observation of the current styles and trends, and self-studying the designs that capture your attention would be the best way to go. Learn, and apply it to every design and template that you’ll make. When you’ve become well-versed in the language of design, and with the help of the tools above, you probably wouldn’t even need a template anymore.

In this era of Web 2.0, it’s inexcusable for seasoned web-owners to simply have a site consisting of text and images. Unless you want your website to wither away in some forgotten, cobweb-covered corner of the Internet, it needs to be interactive and have multimedia content.

Why do you need to be interactive? The answer is simple. With the capability of almost anyone to create and upload websites, images, contents, and many types of other information, the World Wide Web has become jam-packed with too much data—too much that they’re being produced much faster than people can view and take in this sudden influx of data.

Almost every popular website nowadays includes content that enables its users to interact with the owner, with each other, and form a community. That is the genius behind social-networking sites, and why so many people flock to each and every one of them no matter how many similar sites with similar themes and benefits crop up almost on a daily basis.

But not all websites need to rely so much on people making online relationships in their portals. It’s unnecessary in most cases, especially if your website was not made for that purpose. However, it doesn’t mean that user interaction would be minimized. There are hundreds of other ways on how your web visitors will enjoy and keep coming back to your website.

If you own a website about your company, one way to make it interactive is to present your products or services in a way that people can explore more about them. Create games, online movies, animations for your product. Create an interesting interface for your portfolio or gallery. Make sure to address to each of the five senses to be able to present an all-around experience, and maximize the visitor’s satisfaction. Apply video, music and sound—if the images you portray are convincing enough, a virtual sense of taste and feel will follow. For this, you would definitely need to make use of Flash. Invest in Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop, and maybe get a PSD2FLA plug-in as well, they’re useful tools not only for web designing purposes but also for creating various multimedia content.

Speaking of tools, SiteGrinder is another which will absolutely make your life easier, especially if you’re hard-pressed for time and have a million things to create, upload, check and tweak; at least the layout designing process will be a breeze. SiteGrinder converts into coded HTML and CSS the web layout you designed in Photoshop, saving you the time and effort that you would normally expend should you decide to encode everything manually.

Not only corporate or commercial sites can benefit from being interactive by using the tools above, even personal, non-profit and for-fun sites can make use of them too, and maybe help increase traffic and such. If anything, adding multimedia content will positively give your website an edge, and will make every visitor feel that each minute they spend on your site is well-worth it.

So you’re a recently-graduated artist or writer, and now you need a job. But that diploma in your hand isn’t enough; sure, it’s a physical and legal proof that you’ve been sufficiently taught and geared-up for the field you’ve chosen and for the real working world. But what your diploma fails to showcase are the actual skills and capabilities you possess which differentiate you from the other, new grads in your industry who carry more-or-less the same diploma that you have now.

Or perhaps you’re a veteran art director or journalist, but due to circumstances, you suddenly find yourself out of employment. It’s not easy, but at least the years of experience you’ve got tucked under your belt makes the whole job-hunting experience less hard. But aside from experience, you need something else—some proof that it’s the company’s loss if they don’t hire you.

I’m pretty sure you’ve guessed it: yes, a portfolio. It is, sometimes, a prerequisite prior to graduation. Or perhaps an experienced friend in the same career path as you are gave you that friendly tip early on. I’m guessing, however, that the type of portfolio you currently process is the traditional type which you lug around, bring with you during job interviews, and create copies to send to potential employers. A portfolio is a given, being a visual or literary artist, you simply need one. It is a necessity. And you certainly can expand the number of people who will get to know your strengths and what you are capable of doing through your portfolio.

The most efficient medium to use, in terms of costs, time and effort would of course be the World Wide Web. What with its fast & easy accessibility, coverage and infinite number of possibilities—use the Internet to your advantage. There are actually a number of useful sites that would help you kick-start your online gallery: DeviantArt and CarbonMade are just two of them. They’re free, user-friendly and even people who are not inclined towards art visit those sites occasionally. For those starting to carve out a niche in the online world, these places would be the best ones to start.

However as you gain more experience and skills, free sites are not enough. The next step is to create your own—that would definitely give you a feel of seriousness and professionalism, sort of saying “I really know what I’m doing” in a confident manner. Aside from that, you could also add web designing to your already growing list of capabilities, with your own website as testament to what you can do.

Now for the design-savvy, but not at all into coding technical web language, invest in at least Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and add to that the useful plug-in called SiteGrinder. It’ll save you precious time of manual coding; time which you could use to further hone your personal art. What it does is to take the layout you’ve made in Photoshop, and convert it to HTML and CSS, making your life easier.

If you’ve got your whole site up, and you feel like you’ve mastered the art of web designing, take things a notch higher and incorporate multimedia content t your site. Videos, music, an interactive interface, special effects and animations will definitely make your portfolio more substantial. Get yourself Dreamweaver, and PSD2FLA plug-in, which will make your Flash files openable and editable in Photoshop. You need to learn only the basics of Flash, and you can pretty much manipulate it in Photoshop afterwards.

Even if you feel that you have no need for an online portfolio, creating and keeping one would be a wise decision. At least, in that way, you would have a digital back-up of all your works, and you can view your progress throughout the years much easier rather than pulling up old canvasses, boards, books, papers, etc. just to compare them with your recent works.

Gone are the days when websites were just a clump of text sprinkled with minimal, if any at all, formatting and images. A website was considered cutting-edge if it had a background image, moving graphics, and other elements of a website which, in today’s times, have become a necessity for increased publicity and page views. If today’s modern-day surfers were to see what the websites of several large companies like Lego or Pepsi were back in ’96, without Flash or JavaScript to prettify their websites, there’s a good chance that they would’ve just capped it off as some fake website made by a 9-year-old just learning how to make a one from geocities, whose free time was limited to only 30 minutes a day, right before bedtime.

Times have definitely changed. Internet speed has greatly improved, before it would take a page about 20 minutes just to load, whereas today that same page would just take about a good 5 seconds to do so. The same can be said for web content: website developers now have lots of choices on what and what not to put on their website. Because of that, there has been an increase in web-surfers’ demand for added pizzazz, sparkle, or bling on websites; plain text and images just won’t keep them happy anymore. So what do web designers do to cope with that demand? Of course; they feed it!

CSS, Flash, JavaScript, and HTML are some of the best-known and most-used web-building languages used for decorating websites. Once learned, they can help you in making your site a more attractive corner of the internet. Of course, to be able to utilize these languages, you need tools in which to input your commands. One of the simplest and easiest tools to use is the Notepad application, which allows you to code basic CSS and HTML along with other kinds of language. MS FrontPage, found on computers under Microsoft operating systems, may also be used to achieve certain things in HTML/XHTML/CSS that can’t be done on Notepad. There are also more complex applications which may require purchase, but are well worth it considering the things that you will be able to do with them. A good example of this is Adobe Photoshop. You need to pay for the serial code in order to use the application for an indefinite period of time, but with enough knowledge of how this program works, you can use it to create digital graphics that can be used for your website. Other programs that fall into this category are Adobe Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, and many more.

But what about for those who want to make websites, but don’t know any web-building language? The best thing to do would be to get somebody else to design your website for you, or to learn the language before making your site. If you lack resources and/or time to do so, there are also several programs that can aid you in your dilemma. Add-ons for other programs, such as Sitegrinder Photoshop, help the user by allowing him/her to do things on Photoshop that s/he would not be able to do if there was no plug-in. SiteGrinder makes use of your knowledge on Photoshop to create web pages without coding anything.

PSD2FLA, another plug-in, allows you to save your Photoshop projects in .fla file – making them openable in and editable in flash, and thus, saving you of the hassle of “cropping, export, import, repositioning, renaming, and teeth grinding for every single graphic”, as from the site proper.

Be it CSS or Flash, web designing has reached a new level. New methods are employed, new techniques are used. Are you ready to design for today’s websites, set at Web 2.0?

You thought your current layout was really awesome the last time you logged in to your blog, personal site, MySpace, what have you. But as you check your site again, you realize something’s off— it’s becoming old and terribly familiar. Ah, you’ve outgrown your layout.

A change of scenery is needed by everyone now and then.

Lucky for you, if you’re using blog publishing systems, or social networking sites that have their own HTML editors, perhaps even a WYSIWYG program, changing the design of your website is a mere matter of copy & pasting the right codes in the right places. Since these sites have their own set templates, the more graphic-savvy users of the site usually make their own designs, and at most times even share it with others, as long as they are credited back.

But what if the design you want is one that features a very, very obscure underground band which you are a big fan of? What if you want a layout that would proclaim your pet’s cuteness? Well, if what the Internet offers doesn’t satisfy you, you could always make your own. Especially if you’re the type to build up and manage web pages from scratch.

You could always hire a web or graphic designer to do the dirty work for you—but why miss out on the learning experience? HTML, CSS, JavaScript and designing tutorials are very much available in the World Wide Web. The Internet is a pretty big library of self-help books; it’s a matter of finding the time to read all of it.

The basic languages of web design are pretty easy to understand and utilize. A few self-study sessions will reward you with a web page made entirely in Notepad. Spend a few more hours on it and your well on your way to having a layout revamp every time you want. Pretty soon you’ll discover programs like Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Photoshop, you’ll learn soon, is crucial in making your website look like a million dollars.

If you’re the lazy or no-time-to-spare type, however, there are certain tools to help you on your web designing crusade. An example of this would be SiteGrinder, a Photoshop plug-in which enables you to convert your creations into fully coded pages. This is immensely helpful for designers who enjoy the layout-creation process, but have a hard time when it comes to translating the layout into the web language. Other plug-ins and support programs offer different kinds of aids to make the layout-changing process easier and more efficient, some examples of which include: psd2fla, photocaster, etc. (Check those out when you’ve leveled-up in terms of design knowledge.)

Once you’ve graduated from HTML, CSS. XHTML, JavaScript, PHP and all that jazz, you can now move on to adding multimedia content to your site. This includes, but is not limited to, music, nifty mini-games, animated galleries, movies—whatever you want! The only thing that could probably limit you is your webhost space and bandwidth limit. Probably.