There are a lot of great tutorials on the web and, as Chris pointed out, Drupal is a pretty developer friendly platform. With some chutzpah and the power of Google, you can build just about anything in Drupal.
But for the beginner to intermediate Drupaler, even a well crafted text tutorial can be just a bit outside their knowledge and hard to follow. As someone who learns visually, sometimes I just wanted someone to show me how to do something. In that spirit, I offer up this lesson on creating your first custom Panels layout. I hope you find it useful and if you have questions or feedback, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Be sure to watch our other two Drupal tutorials:
Drupal 7 Advanced Views Tip: Contextual Filtesr
Drupal 7: Custom Sorting with Draggable Views