creative briefing

A few days ago, I wrote about the making of Creative Briefing and touched briefly on how the notepad sketches that you see on the top left of this site came to be. I’ll now go more in depth and offer a quick and easy tutorial on how I produced the image using Adobe Photoshop.

It should be noted that much of the work in this tutorial can be replaced by simply purchasing stock photos of notepads. However, if you’re not into spending money or aren’t able to find a stock photo that suits your needs, then this tutorial is for you.

The Goal

Here’s what this tutorial will help you achieve:

Let’s get started!

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User-generated content is not uncommon to websites today and its popularity has grown over the years with the public’s demand to have control and input over what they’re seeing on websites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and countless others will typically offer a form on the front-end of their website for users to submit content for immediate publishing, enhancing user interactivity and overall experience.

For WordPress users, this is usually a problem because the post and page-writing functionalities are hidden away in the back-end admin panel of WordPress. Not only that, but users are required to have a registered account before being able to access these functions. Add on the fact that logging into the admin panel exposes the user to a different interface and visual environment, and you’ve got yourself a bad user experience and little incentive for the user to want to submit content.

So how do you create a site that offers a usable front-end form that will allow users to publish content immediately onto your site while still taking advantage of the powerful publishing engine of WordPress?

This tutorial will break down one way of overcoming this obstacle using cantwaitforchristmas.com to illustrate examples.

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