I use Balsamiq a lot and am comfortable in it (and I usually play with pen and paper before touching Balsamiq) but sometimes I'd like to produce a mock up that looks a lot closer to reality and I just wish I had enough command of the basics to be able to do this in photoshop or illustrator rather than cobbling together some html and css (which is what I do now).
Edit: to expand on the cook book idea, I'm thinking of recipes along the lines of:
- This is how you can quickly draw a button (and here's how to give it a gradient or a shadow)
- This is how you setup your canvas as a grid
- This is how you do layering (so you can try different headers, footers etc.)
- This is how you embed an image and clip it (and here are some tips on choosing images that are easy to work with and fit in to a design)
- This is how you make a repeating background
- This is how you blend one colour in to another
- This is how you do transparency
- These are some common gotchas to look out for
- These are some good practices you should follow (e.g. do it this way so that if you want to change all the buttons to a different colour you can do so with one click)
- This is a run down of some common layouts and what sort of content they're suited to
- Here are some solid online resources for fonts, background patterns, stock photography, icons, showcases of good design, forums/sites where real designers hang out
Basically, enough information and resources in a single reference book so a non designer can fire up photoshop or illustrator and be able to end up with a PNG file that's somewhere between a wire frame and the finished version you'll get when a real designer has worked their magic on it.
Fireworks is a good option, with pages and hotspots with browser export. Easy to create mid-high fi mockups, much faster than in photoshop for prototyping and user testing.
Faster to learn also.
Re: prototyping
I use Balsamiq a lot and am comfortable in it (and I usually play with pen and paper before touching Balsamiq) but sometimes I'd like to produce a mock up that looks a lot closer to reality and I just wish I had enough command of the basics to be able to do this in photoshop or illustrator rather than cobbling together some html and css (which is what I do now).
Edit: to expand on the cook book idea, I'm thinking of recipes along the lines of:
- This is how you can quickly draw a button (and here's how to give it a gradient or a shadow)
- This is how you setup your canvas as a grid
- This is how you do layering (so you can try different headers, footers etc.)
- This is how you embed an image and clip it (and here are some tips on choosing images that are easy to work with and fit in to a design)
- This is how you make a repeating background
- This is how you blend one colour in to another
- This is how you do transparency
- These are some common gotchas to look out for
- These are some good practices you should follow (e.g. do it this way so that if you want to change all the buttons to a different colour you can do so with one click)
- This is a run down of some common layouts and what sort of content they're suited to
- Here are some solid online resources for fonts, background patterns, stock photography, icons, showcases of good design, forums/sites where real designers hang out
Basically, enough information and resources in a single reference book so a non designer can fire up photoshop or illustrator and be able to end up with a PNG file that's somewhere between a wire frame and the finished version you'll get when a real designer has worked their magic on it.