In this tutorial we are going to create a textured tag that you can use in your website designs. Adding textured elements to modern web designs is a current trend. Learn how to create your own texture and then apply it to your design element.

Step 1

Create a new document 500px wide by 200px height. Then set up our main background colors. Have these backgrounds we are about to create stretch the full document width. Create a new layer and give the top 10px a dark brown color. Also create a lighter brown 1px highlight below that. Then create a new layer from there down to the 75px mark. Make that a mid range brown. Then create another new layer and make a light gray to a lighter gray linear gradient from their down to the 110px mark. Place a 1px white highlight below the 75px mark and a darker gray 1px highlight just below the 110px mark. Make the rest of the document background at the bottom white. This gives us a web style layout with a color range similar to PSDTUTS.

Step 2

Open up Illustrator. Create a new document. In step 2a make a rectangle that is 240px wide by 100px height. In step 2b use the Add Anchor Point Tool and add a couple anchor points where you want to make the shape of your tag. Use a guide to keep things lined up. Then pull your corners in 20px on the top left and bottom left corners. In step 2c draw what will become our cut out hole in our tag. Again use guides so its centered.

Step 3

Then use the Divide tool in the Pathfinder Palette to cut out the hole in the tag.

Step 4

Next use the Rotate tool (R) and rotate the tag a negative 30 degrees.

Step 5

Copy our tag and paste it into Photoshop. Choose Paste as: Path.

Step 6

Create a new Photoshop document that is a double the size of our tag at 580px wide by 200px height. We’ll use this to make our background texture. Give it a Linear Gradient from from a mid range tan to a slightly darker tan. Draw the gradient line from the top left hand corner down to the bottom right hand corner.

Step 7

Turn that gradient into some texture using the settings below.

Step 8

Copy our texture into our main document and rotate it so that it is set at the same angle as our tag.

Step 9

Then go to the Paths palette and make a selection of that path. Copy the selction. Delte the layer. Then paste our tag in place. Give our tag the layer styles below to give it some depth.

Step 10

Back in Illustrator for part 10a create a red Box 170px wide by 70px height. Put the text PSDTUTS inside. Then with the text selected go to Type > Create Outlines. Then rotate the red box with the text selected a negative 30 degrees, see 10b below. Now we select the text and the box and in the Pathfinder palette choose Divide. Then select each letter and delete it. So we have a red box with the letters cut out of it, see 10c below. Copy that box and head back over to our Photoshop Document.

Step 11

Paste the copied text and set the layer style to Multiply.

Step 12

Grab the eraser tool and add some texture by erasing some of our red text box. You can see the erasers I used below as well as the effect on the tag.

Step 13

You may be happy with the results we have so far and want to stop apply effects to the tag. That would be fine. I’m going to go ahead and add some additional depth though. Go to Edit > Transform > Perspective and drag the left bottom handle up a little bit.

Step 14

The transform pixelated our tag a little so to clean that up go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. Use the settings below.

Step 15

To match the angle of our transform and to add a little bit more depth grab the Blur Tool and apply it to the bottom right hand corner of the tag.

Step 16

Grab the Pen tool and draw a line that will form our cord to hold our tag in place.

Step 17

Flip over to the Brush tool and set the brush at 3px with a Hardness of 100 percent. Make sure we have our Foreground color set to black. Switch back to the Pen tool and either right click or control click and then select Stroke Path. Then get in there with a small Eraser and carefully remove the lower left part of the cord that overlaps the tag. This will make it look like the cord goes through the hole in the tag.

Step 18

Right now the background behind the cord going through the hole is really dark. We want to be able to see that. So lets add some lighting. Copy our mid range brown background. Go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects and use the settings below.

Step 19

I set this copy of the background to Lighten and then moved it with the tag into the center of our document. Our final tag is shown below.

Conclusion

Creating texture is a lot of fun. It makes design elements that you create unique. Let me know if you find a cool use for your own tag design.

The Parrots came on to a few snigger’s but as soon as they started playing the snigger’s disappeared. They were rather impressive. I’ve seen a few British Beatles tribute bands that haven’t hit the mark, but these guys really did and they looked to have real fun on what has to be their biggest crowed ever. All in all it was a great way to kick of the gig.

Amy Winehouse came with a blazing set. I must say I really enjoyed the set even thou she lost me a fiver for turning up but still. She belated out tracks from both her albums ‘Frank’ and ‘Back To Black’. The full set list was:

• Addicted
• Just Friends
• Tears
• He Can Only Hold Her
• Back To Black
• Wale Up Alone
• Losing Game
• Hey Little Rich Girl
• You’re Wondering Now
• Rehab
• Me And Mr Jones
• I’m No Good
• Monkey Man
• Valerie

The Coral are one of those bands that you don’t realise how many of their songs you know till you see them live and then you keep repeating the same phrase every time they play their next song “oh i remember this one”. It was around this point that the ground really started to fill up. The full set list was:

• Spanish Main
• Goodbye
• Who’s Gonna Find Me
• Jacqueline
• She Sings In The Mourning
• Pass It On
• Will She Remember Me?
• Dreaming Of You
• Don’t Think Your The First
• In The Morning
• In The Rain
• I Remember When
• She’s Got A Reason

I have to say that I missed most of Supergrass because I was queuing for beer. As the venue reached capacity the two bars failed to cope with the police having to get involved. That’s my only gripe about the whole day. From what I heard of Supergrass they lived up to the hype of being a great live and. They mixed up their old classics with some new material that they’ve just recorded in Germany. The full set list was:

• Diamond Hoo Ha Man
• Strange Ones
• Richard III
• Bad Blood
• Moving
• Grace
• Rough Knuckles
• Caught By The Fuzz
• Sitting Up Straight
• Sun Hits The Sky
• Lenny
• Pumping On your Stereo

Then came the main event with the Sheffield lads walking on stage to the Rocky theme tune. Since Saturday i’ve tried to recall a time when i’ve seen a crowd so pumped up. The Rocky theme tune ended then the burst into Fluorescent Adolescent followed buy I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. The pace didn’t stop after that. Oh until a power cut half way through Balaclava. The encore consisted of a fantastic version of Plastic Tramp and then the gig was finished of neatly with the old classic A Certain Romance.

• Fluorescent Adolescent
• I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor
• Brainstorm
• Still Take You Home
• Dancing Shoes
• From The Ritz To The Rubble
• Fake Tales Of San Francisco
• Balaclava
• Old Yellow Bricks
• You Probably Couldn’t See Me Because For The Lights But You Were Looking Straight At Me
• This House Is Circus
• Teddy Picker
• D Is For Dangerous
• If You Were There Beware
• Mardy Bum
• Do Me A Favour
• The View From The Afternoon
• When The Sun Goes Down
• Leave Before The Lights Come On
• Plastic Tramp
• 505
• A Certain Romance

All in all the gig lived up to all the hype that was thrown at it before hand and The Monkeys have really shown that they are one of Britains live bands.

If the answer to these two questions is yes I have found the Wordpress plug-in to answer your advert prays. Adman gives you a huge amount control over the positions of your ads on your home page and in your posts. With this plug-in you can place your ads in the middle of your of your post content as opposed to stuck out in the cold at the end of your post.

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Wordpress uses template files to control the appearance of the website. The web-page is assembled of several PHP files controlling specific aspects of the site like header, sidebar, main content etc.

To use Dreamweaver to edit these themes you have to combine the different PHP files into one Dreamweaver document so you can view the site as your editing it. An important start of point is to work out which PHP files correspond with which part for example the index.php is the main page and the single.php is the individual post part.

Create a new folder and copy into is the style.css of the theme you are editing and the folder containing the images.

Open Dreamweaverand create a new HTML document then save it in the folder you’ve just created. Switch Dreamweaver so you your viewing it in code view and paste in the lines below:

<!– Header part goes here –> <!– /Header part ends here –> <!– Main content here –> <!– /Main content ends here –> <!– Sidebar content here –> <!– /Sidebar content ends here –> <!– Footer content here –> <!– /Footer content ends here –>

The Lines you have just copied into your HTML document are code comments and will help guide you to put the right PHP file in the right place. If you want a different sort lay out just swap the lines to suit your need.

Now start coping the different codes from the template files: the header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php etc. Once all the code has been copied into the correct location you need to change the location of the style.css file in the header. Wordpress themes point to a CSS style using the line: <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” /> Just change <?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>  Just change: to style.css so that your document can locate the style-sheet.

Once you have successfully linked your style-sheet now you need to change the dynamic calls such as your blog name and sub-title. Most Wordpress themes that display the blog title as text use the following code: <h1><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></a></h1> What this does is display your blog name and link it to the main page. To view how your blog name is rendered simply delete: <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> and type in your blog name. Do the same for your blog tag-line and sub-heading, which is displayed by the code: <?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>.

In the main content, just delete the conditional statments found in index.php and only retain the code that displays the blog posts.

Delete these lines: <?php if (have_posts()) :?> <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();?> <?php endwhile; ?> <?php else : ?> <h2>Not Found</h2> <div class=”entrybody”>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.</div> <?php endif; ?> </div>

Place some dummy headlines and text to preview some changes you might want to make with the style-sheet or the HTML code. The blog post headline is called by <?php the_title(); ?>, just delete this and type in a dummy headline. To enter dummy text for the blog post article body, replace <?php the_content(’Read the rest of this entry »’); ?> with some dummy text. Enter dummy links and headlines in your side bar.

After you enter the dummy text, you now have a mock up design of your Wordpress theme that you can use as a base for your customization. With this you can instantly preview the results of any changes you make to to the CSS or HTML code. When you have finished editing and you have a design that your proud of copy the new codes into the different template files and save the CSS style-sheet.

Go over the codes again and replace the dummy text you placed with the appropriate Wordpress template tags for the blog title, blog post headline and content.

Using this method your templates will look as good as your creative side will allow and as with everything there more you use it the better your templates will get.

As you probably know there’s many free templates that you can find by searching on Google, but if your after are more professional look with a blog that around 10.000 other people around the world haven’t got Monster Template is a great site. Monster Templatesoffers 1000’s of great looking blog templates for very cheap prices. Now you may say I’m not paying for a site template when I can get them for free but if your using your blog for money making purposes you would be amazed at how much a professional looking blog increases sales. It only takes around 2 affiliate sales to cover the cost of the template and will certainly help increase your monthly revenue buy a significant amount.

Take a look at Monster Template here