Best of the web and design in October 2014

• October 31st, 2014
• News

Happy halloween probably not the spooky post that you was expecting, but never the less a quality post featuring some of the very best web and design articles certainly worth reading. Alongside some fresh photoshop and illustrator techniques certainly worth sinking your teeth into.

Photoshop tutorials

Create a sci-fi robot cyborg in Photoshop

In this tutorial, Fabio Sasso shows you some techniques for creating a cyborg from photographic sources in Photoshop, tapping into the movie heritage of the cyborg, but mixing it with the glossy ‘Bleach-Bypass’ look of modern sci-fi TV shows such as V and The Event. You will use some stock photos and lots of adjustment layers, in order to achieve a convincing result.

Photo Manipulate a Dark, Emotional Fallen Angel Scene

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a dark and emotional fallen angel scene using a variety of photo manipulation techniques. You’ll work with blending techniques, adjusting colour, practice retouching, painting and more.

Create a skull out of type

You’ll get pretty friendly with the Distort tool, and will see the Multiply blending mode at its most brilliantly effective.

Create “The Walking Dead” Inspired Grungy Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Layering textures and brushes can give detail and depth to simple designs, making them look more interesting. This tutorial will show you how to do that, with the help of some blur filters and simple layer styles, in order to create a nice grungy text effect in Adobe Photoshop.

Illustrator Tutorials

Create “The Walking Dead” Inspired Grungy Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a simple retro text vector sign treatment. Even though its simple, it uses some powerful Illustrator features. If you’ve wanted a truly customizable retro text vector tutorial that you can bust out in a quick afternoon, this is the one for you.

Create a Devilish Text Effect in Adobe Illustrator

In this tutorial, you’ll create a devilish text effect in Adobe Illustrator.

Keep Away from this Halloween Lantern Vector Tutorial! Or Don’t…

In this tutorial, you’ll create a devilish text effect in Adobe Illustrator.

Creating Realistic Tomatoes

In this tutorial you will learn how to create realistic and detailed tomatoes in adobe illustrator. For starters, you will use basic tools (Pen, Ellipse tools) to create the main shapes that you need. Next, you’ll see how you can add depth and shading for your shapes using complex gradients, the Appearance palette and some effects (Gaussian Blur, Grain…).

Web design and articles

Improving Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting: A Beginner’s Guide

In this article, it will discuss card sorting, a tried and true technique for doing just that. We’ll go through some practical tips for running a card-sorting session, and also cover some examples.

How To Get Started in Web Design

As a PHP developer, or any kind of developer as a matter of fact, you need to constantly improve yourself in this ever-changing industry; you need to learn and use new knowledge every day.

WordPress Fans Beware: Main Disadvantages of Using WordPress

While everybody praises WordPress, we decided to be a rare exception in this harmonious choir and introduce a certain dissonance into it. First of all we would like to ask all loyal WordPress fans to pardon us and not take our words as a direct insult or something of the kind. Let’s set it straight: we have nothing against the CMS, moreover, we use it ourselves for producing our templates. Consider this: is there any need to enumerate all cool features of the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world exploited by millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day? Just imagine this one more useless and boring post repeating the truism web development community already knows well enough.

Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today’s websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images techniques are appearing to serve developers’ needs.