Best Of The Web And Design In February 2010
- March 1st, 2010
- News
February 2010 wow what a great month for the online design community, this month I saw a ton of great tutorials to help you grow as a design weather Photoshop or illustrator is your tool of choice theirs a handy tutorials which will be benefiting for you all collected within our monthly round up of the web and design community.
Our main focus on creative nerds is design but i think personally it’s important to have understanding and aware about what’s happing in the web design community as the fields are very closely linked. This month with collected a range of some amazing web design articles worth checking out this month.
PHOTOSHOP TUTORIALS
Lost in Space Typography in Photoshop
So in this tutorial It will show you how to create an easy and super quick text effect in Photoshop. It will play with Brushes, Blend Modes, basic filters like Blur and Liquify, and also text.
How To Create A Vintage Camera in Photoshop
In this Photoshop tutorial, you will reproduce a fairly old camera: a Halina Super 35X.you willuse various tools and techniques to create a vintage camera from scratch, from the basic Marquee Tools (to create simple shapes) to the Brush Tool (for highlights and shadows).
Make a Vivid Flaming Skull Conceptual Composition
In this Photoshop tutorial, it will show you how to combine stock images and typography into a beautiful conceptual composition. The aim is to explain the creative process and motivations behind design decisions made while creating a digital art piece. Also, it will try to drive you through powerful Photoshop tools and commands that allow you to control color balance and image vividness.
How To Design An Abstract Wallpaper In Photoshop (and Illustrator)
In this tutorial you will be creating abstract shapes using the Pen Tool and Shape Tools in Illustrator and then using those shapes to produce an abstract wallpaper in Photoshop using various color blending techniques, textures and transformation tools.
Make A Retro Space Typography
In this tutorial, It will show you how to create a stunning and high-impact retro-style typography poster that’s out of this world (literally). It will walk you through the steps for creating 3D text by combining the power of Photoshop and Cinema 4D. You’ll also learn how to create unique and detailed light streaks that give the typography poster its signature look. Finally, you will add some great textures that will give the composition an “out of this world” appearance.
Make a Freezing Cold Snow-themed Abstract Piece
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a snow-themed large piece. You’ll learn how to plan the composition of the piece, to add elements into the composition, how to recycle the piece itself to generate more elements for the piece, how to incorporate pentools into a design and finally how to finish off and fine tune the piece to make it look great.
ILLUSTRATOR TUTORIALS
Design seamless character patterns
In this tutorial It will take you through my process of making a character-based, seamless pattern in Illustrator. While using vector-based imagery, there is nothing to stop you using the same tiling techniques with hand-drawn imagery in your own patterns.
Make Watercolour Portrait illustration
In this tutorial It will take you through my process of making a character-based, seamless pattern in Illustrator. While using vector-based imagery, there is nothing to stop you using the same tiling techniques with hand-drawn imagery in your own patterns.
Create A Mouthwatering Chocolate Covered Strawberry
You can easily apply this illustration to your own greeting card, t-shirt, or anything else you can think of. Moreover, you can apply this tutorial to other illustrations and logos.
How To Design Your Own Valentine’s Day Heraldry Illustration
An Adobe Illustrator tutorial in which You will look at how you can create your own Valentine’s Day heraldry Illustration.
How to abstract typography art
For this beginner level tutorial, It will show you how to create a type design I like to call “Sauce.” The design will be done in Illustrator and will be a vector so that can scale the design up or down depending on where you want to use it, coming out with a vector image that will allow you to apply the design anywhere you’d like.
In this tutorial, It will show you how to create a briefcase icon with rectangles, ellipses, and gradients. This briefcase icon is great for web designs and user interfaces. Moreover, you can easily apply these techniques to other icons, logos, and illustrations.
Webdesign Articles
E-Commerce Design Resources: The Ultimate Round-Up
E-commerce design requires much of the same design knowledge and skill as any other type of web design. The pages are built from many of the same elements – headers, footers, columns, graphics, and text, among other things. But there are additional elements that need to be considered, from both a design and usability standpoint. Site architecture is often more complicated, with products sometimes falling into multiple categories. Product pages need to be laid out in a way that makes it easy for customers to see exactly what it is they’re getting. And the checkout process needs to be as simple and streamlined as possible while still capturing necessary information and encouraging repeat business.
WordPress out of the box comes SEO friendly, however there are many tweaks you can make to further optimize it for search engines. We recently covered 10 important tips to optimize wordpress for search engines, however this post will go more in-depth and offering further optimization tips.
16 Blogs To Help You Master the Business of Design
While your RSS reader is probably chalk full of excellent tutorial sites and you’ve got folders and folders of resources ready to go, do you have the marketing savvy to make make a splash with your design business. Bookmark these excellent resources to help you make sense of the business of design so you’ll be ready to take on whatever comes your way:
I am probably the ten billionth person who says this, but jQuery this just GREAT! By spending a few extra minutes you can add so much interaction to your website. It is so easy to understand and use, you do not even need to be able to create your own. So many plugins out there that can make life so much easier. Here are five plugins that are not only nice, but also easy to implement
The 30 Most Vital & Important SEO Factors
If you’ve been wondering these things then this article is exactly what you need. Listed below are the 30 most important SEO factors. Pay attention to these factors and you’ll see a drastic improvement in your listings on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
How Social Media Helps One Small Business Connect with Fans
What makes Tom Bihn’s social media efforts successful? Among the keys are product passion and that the social media networks are updated regularly. Engagement is going on among members on these platforms, not simply the company broadcasting promotional messages. Each social media platform has unique Tom Bihn content that doesn’t overlap with the other platforms the company is on, yet at the same time, they’re integrated and linked to each other.
50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms) 
Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. The good news is that designers and developers worldwide often face similar problems and choose to share their insights and workarounds with the wider community.
Ten tips for scoping your e-commerce platform
If the last five years have taught me anything about e-commerce platform selection, it’s that the devil is in the scoping detail.
50 Fresh Design Blogs You Should Be Reading
The last year or two has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of new design and development related blogs breaking out in to the community. In this article, you will see a list of fresh and new design blogs worth subscribing to and reading. Our goal here is to help you discover a few sites that you might not have heard of before.
13 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Web Developers
Google Chrome, like Firefox, has the ability to increase its functionality and capabilities through the use of extensions. If you’re a web developer, Google Chrome comes with a nice set of developer tools built in that will make your life easier. But there are also a number of extensions that will give you even more tools at your disposal.
Freebies
Free Set of Office Icons by IconShock
This set includes five icons of typical office items. The icons are free for personal or commercial purposes, and they are available below as PNG files or as Adobe Illustrator files.
20 Amazing 3D social icons!
A brand new set that consists of 20 3D icons in PNG format (64×64 & 128×128pixels). Hope you’ll find them useful.
A Free Sophisticated Premium Peel Over Icon Set
18 high quality icons for you to download which are available to be used within commercial and non commercial design projects.
NIXUS Icon Pack: 60 Beautiful Premium Icons (Free)
This Free Icon Pack is for use in your personal and commercial projects, and can be used without attribution. It may not be redistributed.
Smashing Release : Free Computer Part Icon Set
free icon set designed by Iconshock for exclusive readers of Smashing Apps. Iconshock – stock icons is a professional stock icons for web and software application. If you like, you can contact them for developing of a custom icon design project too. There are 5 icons included in this free icon set having a size of 512×512px in PNG format.
