Best Of The Web June For Web/Graphic Design
- June 29th, 2009
- News
Another great month within the graphic and design community with new illustrator tutorials, Photoshop tutorials, blogging articles, web design articles and a wide selection of the best freebies released on the web in May.
Illustrator Tutorials
Create a Realistic Candy Bar in Illustrator
In this tutorial, created exclusively for WDD by Wendy Ding, she’ll be guiding you step by step through the stages required to create a realistic candy bar using Illustrator.
Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator
Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.
How to Create a Rocketing, Vector Aircraft Shuttle
In this tutorial, you will be creating a illustration of a speeding aircraft shuttle. It’s going to be all vector, but along the way we’ll use blends, and other techniques that give this rocketing aircraft an interesting look. Let’s get to it!
How to Create a Stinking Zombie Flesh-Eater in Illustrator
In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a cartoon zombie in Illustrator. Starting by creating a fresh corpse, we will then ‘yuck’ it up using a number of techniques.
Turn Any Font Into a Sketch Font
In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a cartoon zombie in Illustrator. Starting by creating a fresh corpse, we will then ‘yuck’ it up using a number of techniques.
Photoshop Tutorials
Super Cool Watercolour Effect in 10 steps in Photoshop
It will be using Masks and Watercolour brushes, it’s inspired by another great digital artist, the master Scott Hansen the mind behind ISO 50 and also some images from the abduzeedo Daily Inspiration.
How to Design a Stunning, 3D, Sunset Type Illustration
The tutorial covers multiple platforms to create a warm and sunny typographic treatment. We’ll use C4D to create the text, Illustrator for several decorative motifs, and Photoshop to bring them all together. Let’s get our hands into creating this warm type illustration.
3D Puzzle
A great tutorial on creating a cool illustration from just using Photoshop.
Create a Dramatic Car Speeding Scene
A great short but sweet tutorial which takes no longer thank five minuets in total in order to complete.
How To Create a Post Apocalyptic Photo Manipulation
In this tutorial, it will show you how to create a post apocalyptic manipulation using adjustment layers, vector masks, and some special effects. Let’s get started!
Website Photoshop Tutorials
How to Create an Illustrative Web Design in Photoshop
In this web design tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a professional web design with an illustrated “vector” header in Photoshop. You’ll see many techniques here including how to draw using the Pen Tool and a excellent type treatment using layer styles.
Create a Clean and Colourful Web Layout in Photoshop
In this tutorial it will show you how to create a clean corporate layout in Photoshop. The original layout was created by kuntiz from Theme Forest.
Creating a tech blog layout in adobe Photoshop
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to design a “Premium” blog layout in Adobe Photoshop, from A to Z. If you have any questions about this tutorial don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.
Web design
10 CSS Properties which where impossible to implement in IE6
This post is about 10 commonly used css properties that were impossible to implement in IE6. While redesigning ProductiveDreams, I came across a few css compatibility issues with IE6 and had to spend hours searching the solution for each issue.
10 HTML Crime Tags You Really Shouldn’t Commit
You better watch out, because the HTML police are about. They scour your code and pick out the most unspeakable crimes against HTML markup. This handy list of ten HTML tag crimes sheds some light on some of the most common coding mistakes and helps provide an alternate solution. Tips include writing valid markup, making semantic choices, avoiding deprecated tags and more!
15 Effective Tips and Tricks from the Masters of CSS
There are thousands of sites out there offering tips and tricks for using CSS. But how do you know where that information is coming from? Who says the people writing these “tips” know what they’re talking about? For all you know, it could be someone who has not clue what CSS even stands for, let alone how to use it effectively.
How to Stay Ahead of the Curve as a Designer
With the lows of financial times, and bleak economic outlook lately it can be a bit unnerving for us as creatives. Will our jobs be in danger if there are budget cuts? Will our client/freelance work slow down as a result of small business having to cut expenses? Is there enough work out there for all of us? These are all honest questions that have probably crossed our minds at some point over the last few months, and rightly so, but before we get all doom and gloom (which this article isn’t) I think we should look at things from another angle.
10 Ways To Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards
Without argument, one of the most important things to consider when creating a website is that it be accessible to everyone who wants to view it. Does your website play nice with screen readers? Can a user override your style sheet with a more accessible one and still see everything your website has to offer? Would another Web developer be embarrassed if they saw your code? If your website is standards-compliant, you could more confidently answer these questions.
Multi-Level Menus With Jquery And CSS
In this article we’ll take a quick look at several common multilevel menu options and then I’ll show you how to create a “mega menu”.
SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz’s New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data
This list is not all inclusive meaning there are many factors that are not included here. Instead, this list contains only the best practices that changed after we received new information in the field and our team member Ben Hendrickson statistically analyzed search engine rankings and our index of the World Wide Web.
10 superb social media presentations
Some slideshows lose a lot of meaning if you don’t have the author walking and talking you through them, but others are excellent, and there’s a kind of brevity associated with the best presentations / slides, which helps to drill home the message.
Blogging
How to Optimize Ads on a Blog for Higher Profit
This video post looks at 5 factors that help to make an ad be more profitable on your blog – it’s based on an older post here on ProBlogger where I presented an equation for AdSense success.
45+ Essential WordPress Plugins for Pro Blogging
A collection of 45 word press blogs perfect to implement into you word press blog.
New Websites
Whether you want to learn how to create awesome 3D models and characters for next-gen games, breathtaking CG art, gorgeous animations, or simply get started with 3D, we’ve got you covered! Keep reading to learn a little bit more about the new editor of Cgtuts+ and what we’ll be offering on the site.
Texture Lovers
Texture lovers is a site that only collects free to use textures that can be used for commercial and personal use without permission, but you’ll also find texture related inspiration and tutorials.
Vandelay Design launched a network of five niche gallery sites! Many of us visit design and CSS galleries on a consistent basis for design inspiration, and there is no shortage of galleries to choose from. Some of my favorite galleries are those that exist to showcase work of a specific kind (We Love WP is a good example, it is a showcase of WordPress-powered sites).
Freebies
Social Network Icon Pack
Introducing 80+ ridiculously rad social networking icons, made by deft-fingered Haitian refugees, not really… but really. Its over 80 refined, amazing social networking icons for the top networks around. They’re all the rage with you crazy newsk00l intarweb kids. Use them on your blogs. Put them on t-shirts, coffee mugs, your face-space or whatevs.
Cute Free Twitter Icons For Your Blog
A Free Twitter Icon Set, a set of 12 beautiful and lovely Twitter icons. This set was designed by IconEden and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. All the icons included in the set have clean shapes and neutral colors that can be used for various contexts, from a “Tweet it” button for your blogs to desktop wallpapers.
Extreme Grunge
The dirtiest, most grunge-y textures lost and taken could conjure up.
Free Super Vector Bundle Samples
This sample pack contains one piece of artwork from each of the 10 vector packs included in our Super mr Vector Bundle packs.
Watercolour Free Icon Pack
Each icon is in .png format sized at 256×256px with transparent backgrounds. The 36 different icons have varying opaquness that allow the background and texture seep through the icons like watercolor on canvas. This is a freebie you can’t pass up!
Freebies (Brushes)
Wet Paint Acrylic Photoshop Brushes
This Photoshop Brush Pack includes 16 High Quality, Wet Acrylic Paint strokes, all at super high resolution. Perfect for art projects, personal use, and commercial use. That’s right, this pack is free to use however you’d like, it just cannot be redistributed!
46 Stunning High Resolution Photoshop Light Effect Brushes
This set of brushes can be summed up with only 2 words “really” and “awesome”, but since this post would look rather silly if I only wrote “Really Awesome” as the headline I will tell you a bit more. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with lots of new Photoshop brush-making techniques. I’ve found that the inspiration for these new techniques always comes at the strangest times so lately I’ve been keeping some odd hours.
High Resolution Photoshop Smoke Brush Set
A high resolution smoke Photoshop brush pack. The brush pack enables any one with knowledge within Photoshop to be capable to create a great design using cool smoke affects. The brush is available for free and has been released under the creative commons license.
