Great design without designer on-board?
hs: true, ui != photoshop.  one can have pixel-perfect but unusable sitei like ui.jquery; adapt the API & bundled example source-code to simple projects, then after practicing, apply to larger projects.for ornaments, i like inkscape (pkg_add inkscape or apt-get install inkscape).  it's parametric, svg->png.  the bundled tutorials are extremely good.gimp and imagemagick sometimes are useful, but not necessary.i focus on ui.jquery and inkscape (both free, open source) which don't have very steep learning curve.