Productivity Tips for Web Designers

This series of tips helps web designers streamline their workflows, enhance their designs, improve their software skills, and strengthen their general freelance business skills.

Introduction

• Welcome

1. Typography Tips

• Making blog headlines pop, with typography
• Exploring the secrets of effective block quotes
• Going big with type
• Pairing fonts for the web
• Styling your web links
• Improving font readability

2. Illustrator Tips

• Improving your layout efficiency with rulers, grids, and guides
• Adding killer shadow effects
• Creating customized type for logos and graphics
• Configuring the workspace for web design
• Saving time using Illustrator symbols
• Formatting text for the web
• Graphic styles for the web
• Two fantastic texture techniques
• Zen and the art of rounded corners
• Saving time using text wrap as padding

3. Photoshop Tips

• Grabbing measurements to speed up your workflow
• Editing nondestructively with Smart Filters
• Using content-aware scaling for photos on the web
• Advanced tips for sampling colors
• Best practices for image resizing
• Tinting images using one or two tones
• Tricks for quick teeth whitening
• Balancing color and tone using levels
• Choosing the right file format when optimizing web images
• Creating animated GIFs for memes and banner ads
• Pulling the text from images with OCR
• Making oddly sized images work in your layout

4. HTML and CSS Tips

• Using Google font effects
• Commenting code for better clarity
• Utilizing master CSS files to speed up design
• Adding pizzazz with CSS shadow effects
• Incorporating multiple background images
• A two-minute trick for rotating objects
• Creating stitched borders with CSS
• Dropping in CSS drop caps
• Coding special characters dependably with entities
• Rounding square images using CSS
• Customizing your text-selection color with CSS
• Tinting images with CSS for cool hover effects

5. Dreamweaver Tips

• Managing sites to harness the power of Dreamweaver
• Externalizing CSS and JavaScript for better efficiency
• Publishing using Dreamweaver's integrated FTP
• Cleaning up redundant and unnecessary code
• Using Find and Replace for rapid search and editing
• Validating your code to W3 standards
• Using the Link Checker to find broken links and orphans
• Building code snippets to save time
• Creating pop-up windows without writing JavaScript
• Hiding and showing elements to create a simple image gallery
• Understanding links and paths to write better code
• Organic and ethical SEO coding tips