You're Not a Designer, You're a Developer!

Still, there are of course times when you just need to whip up a quick something. Maybe a quick splash page to gauge interest in a product or cough service. Or perhaps a client is really keen on you slapping together a "quick and dirty" design for that new admin section (did you just throw up in your mouth a little, because you should have).

If you absolutely have to design something, here are some tips & tools that might be able to help out:

  1. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of some design freebie sites to get some nice downloadable asset goodies like form elements, gradients, background patterns, etc. Some of my favorites are Premium Pixels and MediaLoot. Hopefully you know a thing or two about Photoshop, because a lot of these resources require at least that (sometimes Illustrator too). Knowing how to navigate the interface, hide and show layers, trim transparency and export for web should take you a long way. But this ain't a tut so go look up some tuts!
  2. If you're doing webby kinds of things, especially (read: only) for prototyping your newest web app, check out Zurb Foundation (our favorite) or Twitter Bootstrap. Again, maybe it's tempting to throw these styles up on a production site, but please don't do that lest we be faced with the "Bootstrap Web", which already appears to be happening anyway. Again, hire a designer and write some HTML/CSS. The effort shows and you might even learn something.
  3. If you're clueless about color theory and stuff like I am, don't try and eyeball it. There are some pretty nice tools that help you out with picking colors for your web design that go nicely with your brand-spanking-new logo. Hit up Kuler. There's also a nice app on the Mac App Store called ColorSchemer Studio. Basically these two apps have a function where you can upload an image (like your logo or icon) and have it spit out a set of colors as a theme for you to use for your site's background and font colors.

Other tools I find useful when winging some designs:

Good luck!