Dude, it's nothing you can't learn in a few weeks, or maybe even one week. Get GIMP, read a tutorial, fool around with it for a while, and try online tutorials on how to make a web 2.0 button, say. That might take one, two days tops.
CSS isn't rocket science either. It's a variant of html (sort of) where you choose stuff like font and background color (style, I guess) in one master document that all the other web pages refer to. It's like the Slide Master in powerpoint. It has slightly different punctuation than html, but it's not that special. It's just an easier system, and it's probably overhyped by design bloggers.
Visual design: there's all kinds of "7 mistakes begginers make" type articles in hacker news. Some are better than others. Just use common sense, good taste, effort, and knowledge.
That should get you acquainted with all three problem areas. In fact, after a few weeks one can design clones of homepages of Yahoo, Google, YC, delicious, facebook, and so on. Of course, I don't know what level of mastery you're talking about, and there's definitely a lot of fancy things you can do with photoshop that take a lot of knowledge, but the kind of design chops one needs to do a startup aren't that hard to get.
Good call on Inkscape - I have been looking for a decent Photoshop type app to run on OSX for ages. Finally got my next and back arrows drawn without starting up the windows box!
Comments
Dude, it's nothing you can't learn in a few weeks, or maybe even one week. Get GIMP, read a tutorial, fool around with it for a while, and try online tutorials on how to make a web 2.0 button, say. That might take one, two days tops.
CSS isn't rocket science either. It's a variant of html (sort of) where you choose stuff like font and background color (style, I guess) in one master document that all the other web pages refer to. It's like the Slide Master in powerpoint. It has slightly different punctuation than html, but it's not that special. It's just an easier system, and it's probably overhyped by design bloggers.
Visual design: there's all kinds of "7 mistakes begginers make" type articles in hacker news. Some are better than others. Just use common sense, good taste, effort, and knowledge.
That should get you acquainted with all three problem areas. In fact, after a few weeks one can design clones of homepages of Yahoo, Google, YC, delicious, facebook, and so on. Of course, I don't know what level of mastery you're talking about, and there's definitely a lot of fancy things you can do with photoshop that take a lot of knowledge, but the kind of design chops one needs to do a startup aren't that hard to get.
GIMP is good, there's no doubt, but I've found that 90% of the graphical development for my project can be done in about an hour on Inkscape.
Good call on Inkscape - I have been looking for a decent Photoshop type app to run on OSX for ages. Finally got my next and back arrows drawn without starting up the windows box!