Best of the web for Design and Web Development May 2016

• May 30th, 2016
• News

The month of May has seen some tremendous Photoshop tutorials some great techniques for really refining you photo manipulation skills, alongside some great illustrator text effects. We have included some good articles we have been reading through the month from CSS coding technique to 17 things people hate about your website. If your a Front End Developer or Designer this is perfect read to catch up on the month of May from the online design and web development community.

Photoshop

How to Create a Layered Floral Typography Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Floral typography is a design trend that combines nice floral elements with bold typography, to create some elegant designs. This tutorial will show you how to use a flower stock image, with a simple text, and a couple of layer styles, filters, textures, and adjustments to create your own floral typography design.

Create a Set of Hand Drawn Icons Using Adobe Photoshop

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a set of hand drawn icons using only Adobe Photoshop.

Create a Wild Looking Colored Face in Photoshop

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a set of hand drawn icons using only Adobe Photoshop.

How to Create a Floral Portrait Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop

Floral typography is a design trend that combines nice floral elements with bold typography, to create some elegant designs. Illustrator

Illustrator

How to Create a Blueprint Text Effect in Adobe Illustrator

In the following steps you will learn how to create a blueprint text effect in Adobe Illustrator.

Create an Ice Cream Cart

In this tutorial, we’ll be creating a detailed illustration of an ice cream cart using Adobe Illustrator. One of the things that you will learn is how to create the main shape using several tools with the basic vector shape building techniques, some masking techniques as well as other simple effects. Also, applying different shadows and highlight effects will be learned so that our cart will look more glossy and three-dimensional.

How To Create a Decorative Drop Cap in Adobe Illustrator

A fun personal project designers and illustrators often take part in is ’36 Days of Type’, or equivalent challenges like ‘Daily Drop Cap’ where artists express their style on a new letter or number every day. Initials have received decorative treatment throughout history, with examples dating as far back as early biblical texts. In today’s tutorial I’ll take you through the process of decorating a letter in Adobe Illustrator with a range of vector embellishments. We’ll make use of some really useful techniques that you’ll be able to make use of in all kinds of illustration projects in the future.

Draw a Realistic Coffee Cup Background

This Illustrator tutorial go through some really basic and important Illustrator techniques while showing you how to create a realistic cup of coffee from scratch. You will learn interesting techniques on how to use the Appearance Panel in Illustrator CS6 with its very useful features. Using various techniques, we can create really realistic water effects.

Web and Design articles

17 Things People Absolutely Hate About Your Website

a list of the 17 most annoying things we’ve seen on websites to act as a sort of guide for what not to do when designing your website. Let’s take a look at the worst offenders!

Creating A Living Style Guide: A Case Study

a Living style guides are an important tool for web development today, especially in large, complex web applications. They help document styles and patterns, keep designers and developers in sync, and greatly help to organize and distill complex interfaces. Indeed, living style guides remain one of the best ways to communicate design standards to an organization.

Split Testing Titles and H1s: Do They Still have an SEO Impact?

Let’s start by going back to 1998, back before anyone knew what Google was and the likes of Tom Anthony and Will Critchlow had just begun to build websites from their bedrooms. It was important to repeat your keywords keywords keywords across the site so that AltaVista & co. would know your keywords were very important, as keywords were how you ranked. You wanted to make sure your keywords were in your title, and that your keywords were in H1 tags, and that your keywords were just about everywhere else. (Ok, I can’t keep this up any longer, but you get the point).

CSS coding techniques

In this article you will see some tips and recommendation to write better,easier-to-maintain CSS code, so your stylesheets are shorter and have fewer rules. CSS can feel like a handy tool instead of a burden.

How to start a WordPress theme business w/ Mike McAlister

With so many WordPress themes available on the market, it might sound crazy to even try and start a business selling your own. There are super-huge, multi-purpose themes selling $100k worth a week with option panels the size of their revenue charts, others with big passionate communities supporting them, and countless other shops just as successful in their own right. How can you compete?

What the designer of the old Instagram icon thinks of the new one

Plenty of people are complaining about the new Instagram logo and want it changed back to the “original.” But wrap your mind around this little-known fact: The old Instagram logo — the square instant camera with the tiny rainbow — was actually not the original.

The 8 Principles for Success – Whiteboard Friday

On-page SEO is no longer a simple matter of checking things off a list. There’s more complexity to this process in 2016 than ever before, and the idea of “optimization” both includes and builds upon traditional page elements. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the eight principles you’ll need for on-page SEO success going forward.