The background and graphics elements I created for my site give it a unique graphical style and they won't be unique if other people start to use them. And their sites won't be unique because they used the style of another well known site. Using the visual style of any other site, especially one with 100,000 visitors each month, is going to do you more harm than good professionally. There are dozens, if not hundreds of site layout styles that we see over and over again. I find that my computer is the main barrier to design.
Ideas are light, wispy things.
They waft by on the breeze like flutterbies, much more easily captured with a pencil and paper than by thirty pounds of plastic, steel and silicon. If you can produce a cool, bevel-edged text effect with a filter at the touch of a button, just remember, anybody else can too. Effects are not ideas. Blaming your tools They say a bad workman always blames his tools - yes, it no good blaming your computer or software if your work is below par. Bad workmen often choose the wrong tools to begin with.