Over the last five years, more designers than ever before have picked up a copy of Photoshop and started building their own websites without any formal experience. Although some would suggest it’s a bad thing that many ‘unqualified’ designers are getting into the industry, I think it’s it could be the opposite. With more designers comes more creativity - creativity that can build great websites.
However, it’s a little disappointing to see that a lot of new web designers, particularly those that are part of the latest wave, aren’t picking up all the creative options that are available to them. We’re in a golden age of web development, with applications and entire sites now easier to produce than ever before, yet designers are still sticking within the restrictions of yesteryear, rarely changing anything.
One of the most impressive and accessible ways to make your website designs more unique, more remarkable, and much more effective is through the use of free Photoshop brushes. Considered a staple of effective digital design since its early days, Photoshop brushes are sorely underused by modern web designers. In fact, I’d go as far to say that few designers nowadays employ many at brushes at all.
It’s time to change that. As nice as Web2.0 rounded corners and shiny buttons can be, there’s a clear flair that comes from using brushes and grungy textures. Here are ten great ways to use Photoshop’s brushes, both in your online or offline work. Ignore them at your own peril, as doing so might leave you as ‘just another designer’ in a sea of great looking, fairly uninspired modern website designs.
1. Grunge-ify Your Backgrounds
Grunge backgrounds are as old as any online design trend can be, but they’re still used on thousands of high-traffic websites. Why? Because they’re both visually interesting and great for users, dividing the page into background and foreground content perfectly. Large areas of single-color space aren’t exactly nice to look at, and adding some grunge to your site’s background can really improve it.
This style looks particularly good on design or photography-related blogs, particularly those with an ‘insider’ kind of edge. While it’s definitely not the ideal style for a super clean Web2.0 style website, the oh-so-grungy style certainly isn’t going to go out of fashion on smaller personal and art blogs.
2. Add Details to a Landing Page
Brushes aren’t just about decorations and aesthetics - as part of an online marketing landing page, they can even result in increased profits. By using arrow and icon brushes on your pages, you can quickly and easily add arrows for quick call-to-actions, page dividers and text breaks for dividing up your sales copy, and even play and pause icons for videos that fit into your page’s design.
If you’re in need of a quick button for use in an email capture form, for example, a symbol brush can be a good idea. Striped brushes and flag-style brushes also work amazingly for marketing an online product or service - simply add a regional touch to your product’s page and it can increase your sales in a particular area.
3. Create Amateur-Style Icons & Buttons
If you’re using video as part of your website, you’ll know the importance of styling your video to suit your page’s layout. From color filters to cool blurs and overlay graphics, most designers have adapted well to video’s new presence on the web.
But few have completely adapted video into their designs. By using brushes to create unique icons for your video player - ‘play’ and ‘pause’ buttons, for instance - you can make your on-page videos much more involved and engaging for visitors. Most jQuery or Flash video players allow changes to these icons relatively easily - create your own in Photoshop then import them into your player.
4. Create Laser-Style Background Lines
Want to create a science fiction background? Simulating the effects of lasers and other sci-fi images is simple with brushes. Set your colors light and your background dark and saturated, then drag thin lines across it with your brushes. This can create a cool space-style look for modern websites.
Or, if you’d like something less Space Age and more art-deco, consider using the same brush to create neon-style writing and post headers. Using a good light brush it’s easy to create a bright, powerful neon texture. This technique is great for adding style and contrast to banner ad designs.
5. Give Your Posts a Dated Paper Look
Want your posts to look dated, classic, and like an old journal entry? Instead of using the boring white text backgrounds that come standard with WordPress, create your own using light brushes, faded page edges, and sepia tones.
The best brushes for this type of texturing are paint and wood-style brushes, as they give paper a dated tone without completely soaking it and making text hard to read. Set your color to a lighter brown and your brush strength low, then start painting away until you reach your desired effect.
6. Add Style and Realism to Metal and Wood
Themed websites aren’t ‘out of fashion,’ nor are they an outdated remnant of the old web. By adding a wood or metal theme to your website’s background and navigation textures, you can brand it with your own unique touch, standing out from the sea of other websites and producing a unique edge.
There are a couple of ways to do this. The first is to use a wood or metal texture pack, which doesn’t always produce the desired effects. A much more effective way to produce good wood textures is to draw your own in photoshop using rough grunge brushes, combined with brown and black colors.
7. Create Designs that Celebrate a Special Occasion
Need to design a Christmas-themed website? Use a set of holiday brushes to create a tree-themed background, complete with stockings and hanging decorations. E-commerce websites know how valuable Christmas can be, and they prepare accordingly by tweaking and theming their websites.
Get in touch early and offer the full Christmas treatment for your web design clients with Christmas brushes and background textures. By using pre-made brushes you can drastically cut down on time, particularly for backgrounds and other items that would otherwise require vector-based icons.
8. Make Crafty Personal Holiday Gift Tags
Are you short on gift tags? Instead of buying a set of boring, generic gift tags from the store, make your own using Photoshop’s gift tag brushes. These brushes can be adjusted by size to create slick, professional looking gift tags. You can even adjust the color scheme to suit your wrapping paper.
Photoshop users that want something a little more special could look at these gift tag brushes, all of which include cool decorations and background textures. There’s nothing like a printed gift tag on a thick card stock - don’t go generic this festive season, instead use your own homemade gift tags.
9. Build Cartoon-Style Silhouette Icons
Add personality to your headers, sidebar advertisements, or backgrounds with silhouette brushes for Photoshop. Some designs benefit from a human touch that doesn’t need much detail. By using brush styles that are just human figures, it’s possible to add this without using faces or other details.
These brushes are ideal for business websites, where it pays to have a silhouette of a team or service system to reassure customers. They’re also great for adding style to photographs - find a nice sunset and add a human touch to it by yourself, instead of searching endlessly for a different photo.
10. Add Flags & Other Details to Images
Here’s a great design trick for display advertisers - by using flag brushes for your banners, you can more effectively reach users in different countries. It’s also a good way to localize your website for international users - add their flag texture to your background and your website becomes familiar.
Most flag brush sets include a range of generic flags, many of which can be customized by using a different set of colors, and individual country flags. Employ these when designing your marketing materials and websites, as they can often be a major factor in building trust with website visitors.
