Or you could skip AI or PS -- and eliminate the designer -- by using any one of several dozen
automatic badge generator sites.
To me, the real point of lockstep, narrow Web 2.0 graphics has been to reduce graphic design to an easily automated handful of standard cliches ...then eliminate the need for designers.
You're missing the whole point with a tutorial, Web 2.0 is about eliminating thought and work and graphic design judgement. It's a brave new world of automatic stripe generators, automatic rounded corner layout generators, and so on down the line.
In fact the only -- and I mean the only thing missing is a mashup which produces automatic Web 2.0 layouts and generates them without any designer intervention whatsoever.