Photoshop: Creating a Stylish Blog Design Layout in Photoshop

One of my current projects is a redesign of my personal blog over at ChrisSpooner.com. The aim is to move away from the current fun and cartoony theme and give it a more sophisticated, minimal and stylish design. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to create a blog design walkthrough. This tutorial starts with the Photoshop stage of the blog design process, and shows how the design and layout are created to form an initial concept from which the fully coded blog will be based on.