Best of the web and design in November 2014

December 2nd, 2014
News

The last monthly round up of the year unfortunately, but what an awesome round-up to finish with some truly jaw dropping design tutorials for learning some amazing techniques using both illustrator and Photoshop. What’s your thoughts on the roundup ? would love to for you to share your thoughts in the comments.

Illustrator

How to Make a Neon Calavera Girl Vector Portrait in Adobe Illustrator

Celebrate Día de los Muertos in style with this vibrant, neon calavera girl portrait created in Adobe Illustrator. Manipulate basic shapes, render areas of design with linear and radial gradients, create custom brushes, and use the Blob Brush Tool (Shift-B) to draw fine details within your design. We’ll draw assorted flowers and really use that dark background to make this design POP from the page.

Easy Bokeh Vector Effects in 15 minutes or Less

Need an interesting and quick background or texture for your project? Create easy bokeh vector style designs for backgrounds, icons, to be added into larger work, and more in 15 minutes or less with this quick tutorial.

How Sweet! Chocolate Text Vector Effect Tutorial

Create beautiful chocolate text vector effects ready for candy packaging or advertisements in no time flat!

How to Create a Modern Hand Turkey in Adobe Illustrator

In this tutorial we’ll take a simple image of a traced hand, palm-side down, and transform it into a beautiful turkey, ready to celebrate Thanksgiving in classic four-feathered style.

Photoshop

Create a Fire and Rust Text Effect Using the Flame Filter in Adobe Photoshop CC

The Flame Generator filter in Adobe Photoshop CC is a new feature that’s designed to render realistic flames on user-defined paths. This tutorial will show you how to style and texture a rusty text, then add some flames using the filter, along with some other smoke and sparks textures to create a vibrant flaming text effect.

Create a Fire and Rust Text Effect Using the Flame Filter in Adobe Photoshop CC

Fabio Sasso shows you how you can put a stylish spin on one of Photoshop’s most hackneyed effects, Color Halftones

How To Create a Realistic Painted Effect in Photoshop

There’s some talented artists out there who can hand paint stunning hyper-realistic art, but those kinds of skills are something us mere mortals can only dream of. Thankfully with the help of Photoshop it’s possible to create cool effects to mimic the style of painted images. In today’s tutorial I show you a few steps that will transform a photograph into a digitally painted piece of art with detailed brush strokes and blotchy colours.

Use lighting effects to bring a sparkle to a photo illustration

There’s some talented artists out there who can hand paint stunning hyper-realistic art, but those kinds of skills are something us mere

Web and design articles

How To Create Your Own Front-End Website Testing Plan

So, your designers and developers have created a fantastic front-end design, which the client is delighted with, and your job now is to test it. Your heart begins to sink: Think of all the browsers, all the devices and all of these web pages you’ve got to test, not to mention the iterations and bug fixes. You need a front-end testing plan.

THE HOWS AND WHYS OF FLAT DESIGN

Flat design is exactly what its name suggests – design that is flat. A term defined by user interface (UI) designers, flat design removes stylistic 3D components like gradients, bevels, drop shadows and textures. Basically anything that would create visual depth so a graphic has the illusion of “popping out”.

Why You Should Include Your Developer In The Design Process

Should designers be able to code? This topic never seems to die, with its endless blog posts, Twitter discussions and conference talks. But the developer’s involvement in the design process seems to be addressed very little. This is a shame, becausedevelopers have a huge amount to add to discussions about design.

Basically anything that would create visual depth so a graphic has the illusion of “popping out”.