Best Of The Web August For Web/Graphic Design

August 31st, 2009
News

Another awesome monthly roundup featuring a couple of videos including a “A Crash-Course in Advanced CSS3 Effects”. Some great Photoshop and also illustrator tutorials featured in the roundup, also a great SEO article and video which contain some really valuable SEO tips.

Interview with Envato Founders Collis and Cyan

Photoshop Tutorials

Create a Rebellious Skateboarder Using Digital Painting Techniques in Photoshop

The aim of this tutorial is to take you through the process of coloring an image in Photoshop using digital painting techniques. Being such a flexible piece of software, there are several ways to approach this task, each with its merits.

Reader Tutorial: Create Vintage Traveler Diary in Photoshop

In this reader tutorial Nikola Lazarevic aka Colaja from Nis, Serbia will show us how to create a very stylish vintage traveler diary in Photoshop. We will mix brushes with stock photos and blend modes to achieve the effect.

Photoshop Tutorial: Design the Mac OS X Leopard Folder

Learn how to create the popular Mac OS X Leopard Folder icon using Photoshop in just Ten Easy steps. Comes with a PSD, useful brushes and custom shapes!

Manipulate Smoke to Create Hyper-Real Images

Learn to apply the Warp Tool effectively and a few other tricks to make smoke look like a skull. This technique has a variety of outcomes and works well with water, clouds and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Design a Vibrant Blackberry Inspired Ad in Photoshop

The Blackberry Loves U2 TV promo features some awesome, bright and vibrant lighting effects. Let’s take a look at recreating the style to produce a Blackberry inspired design of our own.

Illustrator Tutorials

Make an Eye-Popping Vector Eyeball

Need to improve your Illustrator skills? Learn to make an eye-popping vector eyeball with this intermediate Illustrator tutorial. We’ll use numerous Illustrator tools, including 3D tools, to create this illustration. Let’s get started!

How to Make a Vector Diamond Ring in Illustrator

If you love jewels, like I do, then this tutorial will be interesting. By the end of it you will learn how to make two vector diamond rings and the details that give them realism.

Creating Editable Letterpress Styled Text

A popular typography trend in web design and print design is letterpress styled text. This text styling is easy to do in Photoshop, but in Illustrator, it is super simple to create letterpress styled text while keeping the text editable.

New Websites Launched in August

New Design Website Design Chair Launch By The Creative Nerds Team

Design chair is the perfect website for designers offering daily Photoshop and illustrator tutorials also high quality design resources such as brushes and vectors.

Fuel Your Illustration Launches!

You’re masters at visualization. Magicians, if you will. Illustration is an art form unlike any others and we recognize that. Fuel Your Illustration is here to pay homage to those folks who take this genre to the next level. You want the latest news and interviews with the hottest talent. We’ve got that covered.

Brand New Tuts Plus Site Photo Tuts

A combination of step-by-step written tutorials and screencasts/video lessons. In most weeks they will be publishing 2 – 3 high quality tutorials, so make sure to subscribe to the Phototuts+ RSS feed so you don’t miss a thing.

Webdesign

Create a letter pressed with css text shadow

The letterpress effect is becoming hugely popular in web design, and with a couple of modern browsers now showing support for the text-shadow CSS3 property it’s now simple and easy to create the effect with pure CSS. No Photoshop trickery here!

A Crash-Course in Advanced CSS3 Effects

In the video tutorial, It reviews a bunch of different neat effects that can be used in Safari 4, Chrome, and for all iPhone development.

5 CSS Dont’s for Beginners

There are plenty of CSS tutorials out there that are aimed to increase your knowledge of CSS so you can cut down on mistakes. This tutorial is going to point out some obvious mistakes that beginners to CSS coding make, with the intention of helping you stop doing these techniques.

Front-End Design Conference ‘09 Wrap-up

The Front-End Design Conference was made from a lot of “firsts”. Many of us speakers were speaking in front of an audience of peers for the first time since college Speech. For Dan Denney, it was his first time organizing and promoting an event. For me, it was my first time speaking or even attending a design conference, not to mention my first Gator-meat taco. But the overwhelming response from the attendees was that nothing felt first-time about it. The venue was very nice, everything was nicely organized, and the print materials were nice. A+ work by Dan and his whole crew!

I thought I’d gather up all the materials and get them out to you folks here, in case you are interested.

Excellent Free Editors and IDEs for Developers

Most developers have picked their favourite editor and/or IDE and use it many hours every day (and night). Still it can be quite useful to know what the free alternatives are. Some of the free editors and IDEs available are really high quality and may be worth investigating.

editors

Seo

20 Seo tips every designer should follow

One aspect of web development that is many times overlooked is search engine optimization. In this list, I’ll show you some basic SEO techniques that will help you make friends with Google, and increase your page rank!

WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

JavaScript

50 Useful New jQuery Techniques and Tutorials

he simplicity, advanced features and strong support are common arguments for developers preferring jQuery against other JavaScript-frameworks. In fact, jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, with powerful tools that can significantly improve the user’s interaction with Web applications.

Elegant ScrollPanes with jQuery and CSS3

I like the design of TweetTab, clean and simple and I like in particular scrollpane used in each search tab. Take a look at this screenshot of TweetTab for a preview of the scrollpane used:

16 Free Javascript Code Syntax Highlighters For Better Programming

If you are programmer or actually if you at least have some basic coding skills, you’ll find this article useful. For example just look at this page source – without highlighting that whole code is just a bunch of plain black text and it is really hard to find specific things if everything looks the same.

Creating a JavaScript slide show image description/ effect

Freebies

Free High Resolution Spiral Brush Set

A high resolution spiral brush set, featuring over 14 amazing brushes for you to play around with.The brush is available for free and has been released under the creative commons license

81 Pixel perfect Social Media Icons

1 Pixel perfect Social Media Icons free for personal and commercial work. Each icon is hand crafted and available as a large share button, 32 pixel and 16 pixel icon.

Free Icons: Grunge Peeling Stickers Social Media Icons

Each icon is in .png format sized at 128×128px with transparent backgrounds. The pack comes with a .PSD source file so that you can customize your own icons. Additionally, you can read up how to design these beautiful icons on your own.