Best of the web for Digital Design and Web Development February 2016

• February 29th, 2016
• News

The 2nd month of the year has drawn to an end, and our monthly ritual where we round up the end of the month by looking back at what great articles and tutorials has arrived.

There’s has been some tremendous articles published this month about getting started with WordPress projects, which seems to be a very popular CMS choice these days. There’s also included in the roundup a great article about web design trends, which will be worth watching out for over 2016 its always good too keep abreast of what’s the popular trends you should be paying attention too.

We have included too some awesome new Photoshop and illustrator design tutorials. If you want to look at refining your design skills with some fresh new tutorials. I hope you enjoy the roundup feel free to share or leave your thoughts post in the comments below.

Photoshop

How to Create a 3D Pie Chart Design in Adobe Illustrator

In the following steps you will learn how to create a detailed 3D pie chart design in Adobe Illustrator.

How to Create Delicious Toast Icons in Adobe Illustrator

Love toast? Then why not create it in vector form? Here you have three delicious options: butter on toast, egg on toast and chocolate, and banana on toast.

How to Create a Gorgeous Metallic Text Effect

Get luxurious with this gorgeous metallic text effect. Create something fit for a king with 3D effects, gradients, and a patterned background in well under an hour.

Create a Toothpaste Text Effect in Adobe Illustrator!

In the following tutorial you will learn how to create a neat toothpaste text effect in Adobe Illustrator using a pattern brush. For starters you will learn how to setup a simple grid and how to build pixel perfect vector shapes using basic tools and the Pathfinder panel. Moving on you will learn how to use a simple script and how to ease your work using the Shape Builder Tool. Next, you’ll learn how to easily and rename two simple patterns and how to create your own pattern brush. Finally, using your pattern brush along with some subtle Drop Shadow effects you will create your text effect

Illustrator

How to Create a Rusted Metal Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use some real-life rust textures and the 3D tools in Photoshop to create some wonderfully flaky, crispy, crunchy rusted text without the fear of even getting cut!

80’s Style Chrome Text Effect in Photoshop

In today’s Photoshop tutorial you’re going back to the 1980s to create a rad text effect based on those 80s style chrome logos we used to see for games, movies, TV shows and more. The overall design incorporates the classic bold chrome text effect with a hot pink script font. It’s all done in Photoshop using a mix of layer styles and colour overlays to reproduce the shiny metal effects and vibrant colours.

Create an Emotional Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial I’ll show you how to create a beautiful field scene featuring an emotional girl.

How To Create a Suicide Squad Inspired 3D Text Effect

Hollywood has definitely been fuelling me with plenty of inspiration lately. A few weeks ago I shared a tutorial on how to create a movie poster based on The Hateful Eight. Today I have another movie themed tutorial, this time inspired by the vibrant text effect from theSuicide Squad trailer. Follow along to see how the 3D typography is made in Photoshop, along with various lighting effects to illuminate the design with bright colours.

Design and Front-End articles

ESSENTIAL DESIGN TRENDS, FEBRUARY 2016

Looking for a website refresh and don’t know where to start? Some of the trendiest elements in web design right now are fun aesthetically and pretty easy to use.

A Beginner’s Guide To Creating A WordPress Website

Looking for a website refresh and don’t know where to start? Some of the trendiest elements in web design right now are fun aesthetically and pretty easy to use.

An Introduction to PostCSS

Most developers who spend their time working with CSS are familiar with preprocessors such Less, Sass, and Stylus. These tools have become a vital part of the web development ecosystem. Writing styles for a website without using features like nesting, variables, or mixins now seems cumbersome and awkward. Although each of them is a great and extremely useful product, let’s take a step back and consider if using preprocessors in such a way is indeed the best approach.

Introducing Autotrack for analytics.js

The web has changed a lot since the early days of Google Analytics. Back then, most websites actually consisted of individual pages, and moving from one page to the next involved clicking a link and making a full-page request. With sites like this, it’s possible to track the majority of relevant user interactions with a single, one-size-fits-all JavaScript tracking snippet.

Why npm Scripts?

The web has changed a lot since the early days of Google Analytics. Back then, most websites actually consisted of individual pages, and moving from one page to the next involved clicking

Checklist for Delivering a WordPress Project

When you finish coding and designing a website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your job is over and ready to be delivered. You need to make sure that your client doesn’t have a hard time with the website in the future. So, you need to take some last steps.