Designing for the web
You don't have to be specially trained to be a web designer, in fact we often work with classically trained designers on website projects as good design is paramount, and teamed with a good web developer, the mechanics will always get sorted out. So keeping that in mind, if you are a designer or are creatively inclined, get yourself started with some tips and online resources. They are comprehensive, up to date, and free!
What you see is not what you get
Designers used to dragging elements around a canvas in Photoshop or Illustrator are in for a shock when they begin working in the web medium. For a start, the canvas can be any size, and any web design produced for the web is merely a set of requests to the browser (IE, Firefox, etc) on how the designer would prefer the page to be laid out. The browser and the user choose how the page is ultimately laid out at the time it is viewed, not at the time it is designed - think about that for a minute... tour design could potentially be displayed differently to every single person who views it!
So your challenge as a designer is to design, not to lay-out. What happens if a user has a small screen? What happens if they have a big one? What happens if they prefer a black background, what happens if the prefer really big text? What happens if they can't see? What happens if the can't use a mouse? A good design will cater for all of these problems and more to some degree, and always with compromise. If you are going to design for the web, get ready to compromise.
Font families
There are only a few font families that web browsers will support. Why? Because every font library that may ever be used by a web page must be distributed with every browser in the off chance that a web page may request them. This is exactly the opposite of a magazine ad where only the fonts required are printed and distributed with the ad.
Colour Palettes
Modern PCs support many millions of colours now and the only real limit is your imagination when it comes to choosing a colour palette. One consideration to make though is visually impaired viewers. Accessibility guidelines specify high contrast between foreground text and background as being best for colour-blindness and other visual impairments. If you are new to colour palettes, it is a real science and you will need a good colour wheel to help keep those hues complimentary. Colours are expressed in RGB values for the web.
Don't fudge the paradigm
It is tempting to change the way web pages work or look when designing, removing the underlines from links for example, but this will almost always lead to problems. Like any medium, there are certain boundaries we have to work within, and designing a good looking product while remaining within these boundaries is surely the art of the designer.
Column text flowing
Alas, no automatic column text flowing in web pages. You can painstakingly layout your columns by hand (using tables or DIVs) of course, but for dynamic text this is not an option. Klixo have come up with a working example of a script that will automatically arrange text in columns though, but look out for full support from browsers in CSS version 3.
Opacity / Transparency
A long time bug-bear of web designers, opacity and transparency support has been very limited, but modern browsers have good support. The PNG graphics format supports alpha transparency which is great news for Photo Shop heads.
