Best Of The Web And Design In January 2015
- February 2nd, 2015
- News
The first monthly round-up of the year, which as normal features some great articles worth reading through about webdesign. There’s also some amazing Photoshop and illustrator tutorial where you can learn some great new design techniques.
Photoshop
Create double exposure photos in Photoshop
In this tutorial, photographer Tigz Rice walks you through the process of creating double exposures in Photoshop, as well as showing you two quite different possible outcomes from the same first image.
How to Create a Painted Pet Portrait Effect in Adobe Photoshop
Pet portraits are are great way to add a creative flair to a snapshot of your beloved fur-covered companion. Crafting a hand-painted portrait may seem intimidating and the type of project only an accomplished artist should attempt. But Photoshop’s smudge brush makes the process so easy that even a beginner can achieve stunning results. In this tutorial I will walk you through the process of touching up a photo to be fit for a pet portrait, and then show you how to use transform it into a hand-painted masterpiece. It’s easy and it’s fun!
Create a retro photo collage illustration in Photoshop
With this design you’ll create a surreal-feeling composition by combining imagery inspired by the 1940s with an Egyptian landscape – in fact, a scene that’s straight out of Indiana Jones. To do this, you’ll use overlay effects, filters and exposure to create a realistic, hot, starched feel, and will place shapes to produce abstract designs.
How to Create a Clean, Glossy Plastic Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop
Using multiple layer styles can help achieve a more detailed and 3D-looking effect. This tutorial will show you how to use layer styles, filters, textures, brushes, and adjustment layers to create a shiny, clean plastic text effect in Adobe Photoshop.
Illustrator
How to Create a Glamorous Cinema Poster in Adobe Illustrator
The items we are going to create in this tutorial are well known and recognized by everyone who loves movies as much as I do! Let’s go through an exciting process and challenge ourselves by composing a shiny and glamorous cinema poster.
Cap Off Your Designs with a Customized Bottle Cap Vector!
For starters you will learn how to setup a simple grid and how to create the main shapes using basic tools and effect along with some neat stroke tricks. Using basic blending and vector shape building techniques along with the Appearance panel you will learn how to add color, shading and highlights for your main shapes. Finally, you will learn how to easily recolor your bottle cap vector.
How To Create Ropes & Knots with Illustrator Brushes
How to create ropes and knots in Illustrator, which are particularly common with nautical themed designs. A custom Illustrator brush immediately sprung to mind, so I played around and perfected a technique that can be used to make any path look like a twisted, knotted and entangled length of rope.
On Trend! Creating Isometric Icon Vectors
In today’s tutorial you will learn how to draw rather complex three-dimensional isometric icon vectors, specifically an isometric bank icon. This tutorial contains a description of the preparatory phase, which I hope will simplify your workflow and detailed guide for designing elements of the building. It is likely that isometric icon vectors will become a design trend in 2015, so it’s time to master this style!
Web and design articles
Hold A Kickoff Meeting Before Diving Into The Design
The kickoff phase sets the stage for the success of your product. Without properly conducting this phase, your team might as well be working in the dark. The worst enemy in product development, after all, is ambiguity.
A Vision for Our Sass
This is great news! Sass gives us a lot more power over complex, ever-growing stylesheets, including new features like variables, control directives, and mixins that the original CSS spec (intentionally) lacked. Sass is a stylesheet language that’s robust yet flexible enough to keep pace with us.
Semi-Transparent Buttons
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a semi-transparent UI button that works really well on photographic background images.
Why developers hate being interrupted
Interruptions are to developers what kryptonite is to Superman—they kill productivity and there’s a significant recovery period.
7 UX Predictions for 2015
I’ve seen user experience evolve over the past 3 or 4 years into something that’s almost commoditized; that is to say, everyone is versed in the art of UX. IF you trawl through the talent pages of LinkedIn, every Tom, Dick and Harry has some form of mention of UX regardless of experience or qualification, but out of necessity.
