Best of the web for Design and Web Development April 2019

• April 29th, 2019
• News

Our monthly tradition continues rounding up the online web and design community perfect if your a designer or a developer. This months round up includes some great Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials from learning how to create illustrations to how you can you use light effects in Photoshop. Followed by some great web development articles, which includes tips for improving site speed and tips on colour accessibility. This is a great web roundup you’ll  really enjoy reading through.

Photoshop

How to create a robot painting in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, Takumer Homma applies traditional art principles to create a digital painting of a robot mech.

How to create lighting effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial, New York-based illustrator Kervin Brisseaux shares his techniques to create a super-powered athlete within an atmosphere that draws on the traditions of sci-fi art, as well as religious iconography such as stained glass windows.

How to Create an Ancient-Egypt-Inspired Cat Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

Let’s learn how to create this amazing world from scratch using incredible stock images and Photoshop tools.

How to Create a Flame Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Pyrophobia is an inordinate fear of or hatred of fire. This tutorial will show you how to use Photoshop’s Flame filter, along with some flame, smoke, and spark image textures as well as blending options, filters, and adjustment settings, to create a blazing, fiery text effect.

How to Create a Cool Glitch Photo Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Pyrophobia is an inordinate fear of or hatred of fire. This tutorial will show you how to use Photoshop’s Flame filter, along with some flame, smoke, and spark image textures as well as blending options, filters, and adjustment settings, to create a blazing, fiery text effect.

Illustrator

How to Create a Seder Plate for Passover in Adobe Illustrator

In this tutorial, you’ll work from provided sketches in creating rendered illustrations of the six Seder dishes, while learning a little bit about each.

How to Make a Watercolor Brush in Adobe Illustrator

See how easy it is to take an ordinary paint brush such as the Bristle Brush, and turn it into a tool that you can use for drawing and shading in Illustrator.

How To Create a Retro Character Illustration

It will show you how to achieve the visual traits that give the artwork the appearance of a retro matchbook print, such as the use of limited colours, halftone shading, misregistration effects, and the all-important old paper texture that turns the clean and crisp vector illustration into a nostalgic cartoon that is full of character!

Web and design articles

You probably don’t need that hip web framework

Every year, there’s something new to learn and play with in the web development world that’s considered something you must use: React, Vue, GraphQL, Docker, whatever it might be. And, every year I mess around with these new things and find myself stuck, regretting even trying to use them when I could have just launched something.

Stop using so many divs! An intro to semantic HTML

We all love our <div> tags. They’ve been around for decades, and for decades they’ve been the go-to element when you need to wrap some stuff in a block for styling or structural purposes. It’s still very common to look through production websites and see stuff like this:

Gutenberg vs Page Builders: The Same? Different? Better?

With the release of WordPress 5.0, WordPress got a brand new content editor in the form of the new block editor (AKA Gutenberg).

Color accessibility: tools and resources to help you design inclusive products

With the release of WordPress 5.0, WordPress got a brand new content editor in the form of the new block editor (AKA Gutenberg).

12 Steps to Lightning Page Speed

At Wall Street Oasis, we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company’s website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.

What Do Potential Clients Want to See in Your Portfolio?

A design portfolio can be a tricky thing. On one hand, it’s very much a necessity for showing the world the great work you’re doing. At the same time, not everyone is going to pour over every bit of your work with a microscope. In fact, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition.