Business Template

Kinda, you're a programmer, not a designer. The world needs both. Good designers need good programmers to help make their designs work on the backend.

My suggestion is that you continue to develop your programming skills and find some designers to work with, and take the time to learn from them. Offer to exchange programming assistance for design help.

Consider taking basic art and design classes to learn the fundamentals of design, color choice, and font usage. Get books on good design and read them. Find a mentor.

Finally, art is a lot harder than it looks. Maybe you should consider your artwork a hobby and do it for the pure enjoyment of it, and do photography, drawings, and other art just for fun. When you've developed your own sense of style, then think about doing commercial design work.

I hope you don't find this too discouraging, but I suggest a lot of study and exploration before you start trying to earn a living in commercial design.

Ok first of all as a fellow programmer i know the place you are at right now. My programming skills are far superior than my design skills. And when i started to try out designing i was far worse than you are right now. But I think that you really need to take your time with it. Read a lot, watch a lot and try a lot. Practice makes perfect after all. There is no way around it but you have to keep on following tutorials, trends, color meanings and also random things like research on certain target groups etc.

It took me 4 years to slightly improve my designing skills and still i am far behind compared to most designers. So don't try to hurry everything up, to be a master at multiple things does come at it's price. Your programming skills will becomes worse unless you keep up with that also, but that would be quite hard to do. Else it would be unfair to real designers that only focus on designing don't you think?

Right now i can see though that you are in the stadium of overusing the standard design program features. I'm talking about drop shadow, bevels, etc. And an important thing to learn is that to be a good designer you have to learn to use less, I know it might sound strange, but eventually you will know what i mean. Designing isn't about using as many tools as possible, it is about using the right tools.

I do recommend you to spend a lot of time on tutorial sites and design sites to learn from other designs. Here is a list of sites I used to use and/or still use.

• http://psdtuts.com
• http://bestwebgallery.com
• http://thefwa.com
• http://patterntap.com
• http://smashingmagazine.com
• http://creatica.com
• and of course conceptfeedback.com :P There are a lot of very good designs on the site so do check them out.

I hope this will help you out a bit on becoming a better designer. But just take your time to learn about the world of design because it is VERY big and there is tons to learn. I wish you the best luck!

To improve this I would get rid of all the "web 2.0" glossy, curved, shadowed elements. Stick to a clean design with straight lines and subtle text shadows to create letter press type effects and clean cool colours.

The colours are not making it look professional, also the font. The font gives off a comical feel, which is not what you want to give off when it comes to business!