Web Designer and Web Designer Premium

Xara Web Designer is unlike any web design software you will have seen before; an easy template based solution that gives you total page design freedom, no HTML skills required. It comes in 2 versions, Web Designer and Web Designer Premium; Premium offers advanced web and graphic design features - find out more below

• There's no easier solution

The Web Designer approach is simple: You can either create your own page and site designs from scratch with the powerful page layout and design tools or simply:
1) pick your design from the templates
2) customize it with complete freedom
3) publish.
Absolutely no HTML or Javascript skills are required!
Templates include individual web graphics, complete pages and even pre-built multi-page sites.

• A one tool solution

ou only need one program for creating graphical websites - from design to publishing - and that's Web Designer or Web Designer Premium.

Web Designer includes customizable web graphic, webpage and website template designs plus tools for creating your own designs, for photo editing (an integrated ultra-fast, non-destructive photo tool), and for advanced text layout. The Designs Gallery also includes a collection of Widgets. Site upload is covered too and there's even a free web hosting offer!

• Flash & GIF animation

Web Designer Premium is one of the easiest tools for creating truly efficient Flash animations, which you can export as .swf or add to any page being created in Web Designer.

•  Extra Widgets

Web Designer Premium includes a larger selection of Widgets in the Designs Gallery, including the new, resizeable photo and content slideshow Widgets that can help give your website an edge, making them more interesting and dynamic. Plus there's a selection of interactive chart and graph widgets.
Premium also includes a choice of e-commerce Widgets and a neat 'embed a website' Widget - perfect for embedding blogs, microsites and other sites within your page.

•  Website and remote presentations

With Web Designer Premium you can easily create web-based 'slide-show' style presentations, that your website visitors can step through using the keyboard arrow keys. Plus you can apply animated transition effects as each step and page is displayed.
You can also easily remotely host a web meeting (a 'Webinar') to showcase your presentation, step by step and page by page, to a group of invited participants.

•  Animated page and layer transition effects

Web Designer Premium makes it easy to add a wide range of animated effects to the layers and page links in your website. You can add animated transitions to any page link or pop-up layer in your web pages.

• Advanced graphics tools

Web Designer includes many customizable graphic templates of course, and a good set of basic drawing tools, but Premium includes a range of additional graphic creation tools for those who wish to create their own graphics from scratch. These include freehand and quickshape drawing tools, bevel, mould and 3D extrude. Plus additional photo features such as content aware scaling and zooming, and masking, and the Live Effects tool which provides support for Photoshop plugins.

• Download

You can download or buy this product from xara website.

How to design Blog Calendar Icon in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to design Blog Calendar Icon. We will be using some tools like Rectangle Tool, Marquee Selection Tool, Horizontal Type tool etc. We will also learn some Layer Styles techniques like, Gradient Overlay, Inner Glow, Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow etc. Nice tutorial for those who are new to Photoshop and wanted to learn Icon Design technique. Lets start.

Step 1:

Let’s start out by creating a new file. I used a 200×200 pixels canvas set at 72dpi, and I filled my background with #D0E8EA color shade. In a new layer, draw a gray rectangle with #A7A7A7 color shade and 96 x 63 px dimensions.

Step 2:

Under Layer add a Gradient Overlay blending option to your gray rectangle layer.

Result:

Step 3:

In a new layer, draw a white rectangle with 92 x 45 px dimensions. Then cut the bottom left corner as shown below.

Step 4:

Under Layer Style (Layer > Layer Style) add a Gradient Overlay blending option to your white rectangle layer.

Result:

Step 5:

In a new layer, draw a light gray right triangle on the cut out corner of the white rectangle. Then in another layer, draw a red rectangle with #FF0000 color shade and 92 x 17 px dimensions.

Step 6:

Under Layer Style (Layer > Layer Style) add an Inner Glow blending option to the red rectangle layer.

Result:

Step 7:

In a new layer, draw a small gray rectangle with #D2D2D2 color shade and 6 x 12 px dimensions as shown below.

Step 8:

Under Layer Style (Layer > Layer Style) add a Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, and Gradient Overlay blending options to the small gray rectangle layer.

Result:

Step 9:

Duplicate the small gray rectangle design and place it as shown below. Now select the Horizontal Type Tool then set the font family to Arial, regular, 12 pt, none and white color shade. In a new text layer type the month on the middle of the small gray rectangle designs.

Step 10:

In a new text layer add the day using font Arial, bold, 20 pt, smooth, and #6D6D6D color shade. Then in another text layer add the month below the day with smaller fonts.

Results:

So here is our Final Clean Blog Calendar Icon Design which we just made in Photoshop, hopefully you like working on it and learn something by following this tutorial.