Chapter 3
General Concept Design
Now that you have gotten through the first two chapters and explored the importance of design and what types of considerations any SharePoint designer should take into account before actually designing their projects, it's time to start laying down code. Sort of.
In this chapter, you will get a crash course in general concept design techniques and tips. While you won't be writing any actual code per se, you will be generating the files needed for the remaining chapters of this book and will see how to take graphic design concepts and put them into practice. Specifically, you will see how to take an abstract idea and begin making it more tangible through your graphics program of choice. In this chapter, you will see these concepts materialized through Adobe Photoshop CS3. While there are certainly many other programs ranging in price (some even free through open source code philosophies), Photoshop is generally considered the standard for graphic design among many Web developers. And, as that product has matured over the years, it has become possible to create almost identical projects on a Windows-based PC as with any Macintosh counterpart. With that in mind, any keyboard shortcut in this chapter will be given both the Windows and Mac versions.
The scope of this chapter is to get familiar with a standard graphic design application and, with that, learn some tricks that can be reused in other projects. You will also get an understanding of some ...
