Best of the web for Design and Web Development February 2017

• February 27th, 2017
• News

The second month of the year coming to a close we have put together another great roundup of the best highlights of month from Photoshop to Illustrator tutorials. Learning how to create a water blaster illustration to creating an airbrushed poster effect. We have also included some worthwhile reading web and design related blogs posts from mistakes running A digital project to 25 logo design tips from several experts. There’s tons of great post in the monthly wrap up, which I hope you enjoy.

Photoshop

How to Create a Desktop Illustration in Adobe Illustrator

n this tutorial I will show you how to create an amazing night desktop using basic shapes and tools in Adobe Illustrator. It’s very easy and fun!

How To Create an Editable Retro Text Style in Illustrator

Many of the text effect tutorials I produce for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop tend to require the text to be permanently set, which means if the wording needs changing, the effect would have to be created all over again from scratch. In today’s tutorial I’m going to cover some useful tricks that incorporate the Appearance panel in Illustrator to create a Graphic Style that works with live text. See how a range of fills and strokes can be layered to produce a trendy retro style text effect, while retaining the ability to alter the wording and change the font.

How To Create Vector Smoke in Illustrator

Today you’ll find out how to create vector smoke with the help of gradient meshes, Transparency panel and Warp Tool. This is a very simple technique that every beginner can master, but you will still need to work hard to get a good result.

How to Design a Flat Sci-Fi Blaster in Adobe Illustrator

Are you keen on sci-fi movies, games, and fancy weapons? Follow this tutorial and try your hand at weapon design by creating a futuristic space blaster in trendy flat style.

Photoshop

Create Dispersion Disintegration Effect In Photoshop

Learn how to create dispersion effect in Photoshop using this free action. You can create endless dispersion disintegration photo effects using the dispersion brushes included in this pack.

Airbrushed Film Poster Photo Effect

In Photoshop tutorial your been shown you a mix of filters and adjustments we can apply to a photograph to mimic the retro style airbrushed painted look associated with classic film posters. Imagine the poster art for original Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones movies, and pretty much any action/adventure film from the 80s! They all feature incredibly life-like depictions of the the actors and characters, which are almost like photos, but they have a clear hand painted appearance with subtle brush strokes, outlining marks and quite high contrast with vibrant colours.

How to Create a Glossy, Puffy Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

This tutorial you will be shown how to use Photoshop’s layer styles to create a super quick and easy glossy, puffy text effect.

Create artwork with both real and digital brushstrokes

In this tutorial, Adi Gilbert explains how he produces beautifully-crafted illustrations using a blend of traditional brushwork, and digital techniques with a tablet, stylus and Photoshop.

Web and design articles

10 mistakes that are ruining the success of your digital projects

The nature of digital requires a unique approach to managing projects. We need to embrace new working practices if we want to see success.

25 logo design tips from the experts

Master the art of branding with these expert logo design tips.

A guide to cross-browser testing: installing all the things

So, you’ve written a website. Your carefully crafted HTML, CSS and JavaScript sits waiting to be sucked through the ether into the wild world of browsers.

A Straightforward Guide to the WordPress Template Hierarchy

If you’re building your own themes for WordPress, or using a child theme to customize a third party theme, at some point you’ll come across the template hierarchy.

How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation

We launched this update today as part of a series of changes supporting our core mission: Make developers’ lives better. In the past year, we fully integrated our by-developers, for-developers Jobs product. We added a whole new content type — Documentation — to help you find even more solutions to your programming questions. And we added Developer Story to help developers ditch the outdated resume format.

Creating Non-Rectangular Headers

Headers (or, more generally, any container element) that have a non-rectangular shape.