Hey guys, I need to spec a web design but don't how to use the Adobe suite. Is there a simple web design application that will allow me to quickly & easily experiment with shapes, colours, gradients, text & images to put a simple idea together to hand over to a proper designer to implement? many thanks,
I use Gimp for when I need to quickly do something that I don't want to spend time figuring out in Adobe software. That should do the trick for you.
Agree with all above. GIMP is best alternative for Photoshop and the good thing is you can save images as .psd as well. Also IIRC we can open .psd files as well. It is available in both Windows and Linux. You will find a lot of tutorials on net on GIMP. Make sure you download GIMP 2.8.10 .
Now, you might not want to hear this, and warning, I'm a bit brutally frank... But dicking around drawing goofy pictures is NOT web design... no matter how many PSD jockeys tell you otherwise. Starting out drawing pictures of 'what you want' is a completely back-assward approach to web design, and usually results in bloated, slow loading inaccessible laundry lists of "how not to build a website" The proper procedure for building a site if you actually care about people using it (aka 'accessibility') is to start out with your content (or a reasonable facsimile) in a flat text editor, putting it into a logical order. You then add semantic HTML tags to it so you have your baseline (which is what screen readers, braille readers and search engines can see) -- then you build the layout in CSS adding any semantically neutral containers (DIV and SPAN) as needed. Then and only then does one apply effects (borders, colors, shadows, background-images) and any scripted enhancements. Playing around in a paint program? Other than presentational background images late in the process they have no business even being in there. Anything an 'easy' tool (wysiwyg designers, preview panes, paint programs like photoshop or GIMP) does is garbage so far as designing a site -- and you're shooting your horse in the foot before the gate even opens by even trying to use them.