Best Of Web And Design In April 2010

April 29th, 2010
News

Another month has come to end which means time for Creative Nerds creative findings from the month of April full of design resources, tutorials as well as deign articles.

Illustrator Tutorials

Create a Grimy Text Treatment with a Pen Tablet

In this tutorial I Twill show you how to create a grimy text treatment utilizing Illustrator’s Blog brush, Live Paint, and a pen tablet. You can easily apply these techniques to other illustrates, type treatments and logos.

Create a Simple Storefront Icon

In this tutorial It will show you how to create a simple storefront icon using some rectangles, Illustrator Effects, and gradients. This icon is great for use in e-commerce sites and the techniques in this tutorial can easily be applied to other icons, illustrations, and logos.

How to Illustrate a Professional Looking Apple iPad

How To Create Face Of A Hippo Using Illustrator

This is a great illustrator tutorial perfect for beginners learning illustrator, because it shows you how you can use illustrator basic tools in order to create cool cute character illustration design of an hippo using mainly only the ellipse tool and the gradient tool.

Photoshop Tutorials

How to Create a Retro Sci-Fi Computer Game Poster

Combine stock photos and design resources to create an awesome retro sci-fi themed game poster that takes inspiration from Atari games of the 80s. By mixing up bright and vibrant cosmic designs with old, distressed and grungey textures we’ll create a retro futuristic poster design for ‘Galactic Attack’.

Clash of the Titans Text Effect in Photoshop

So, in this tutorial It will show you how to create a text effect inspired by the Clash of the Titans posters and artworks. We will use layer styles and basic filters to achieve the effect. It will not take you more than 45 minutes to achieve the effect, but the outcome is really cool.

Photoshop Tutorial: Realistic, High quality printer icon

In this long tut you will make a lot of use of vector masks and layer styles in Photoshop in order to create a slick looking ink printer reminiscent of some Canon and HP ink printers. So let’s begin!

Melting Girl in Photoshop

So in this tutorial It will show you how you can mix stock photos with blend modes, basic filters and tools to create a really cool design. The whole process is very simple and won’t take you more than 1 hour to finish the tutorial.

Web Design Articles

WordPress Caching: What’s the best Caching Plugin?

Your WordPress blog getting sluggish? Caching is a great technique for speeding up your blog and the WordPress community has a lot of caching plugins to choose from. Lets review each one and find out which caching solution will work best for your WordPress blog.

The Good, Bad And Ugly Of The Web Design Industry

From the outside looking in, the freelance web design lifestyle is lavish – big houses, fancy cars, sleeping until noon, working in your pajamas and never answering to a boss. Wait, those are just the things people think make up a freelance life. Today’s article will go over the good, the bad and the ugly of the web design industry. After all, not everything is sunrises, rainbows and cute little bunnies – there’s dirt to dig and mountains to climb.

19 Carefully Picked Coding Editors To Choose From

Great coding software to help in daily development process can be irreplaceable tool – bad software can lower your work efficient stage so badly, you would even don’t want to hear my experiences. For example – Dreamweaver, try to write there any code in Design view, you will get so dirty code, that you will have to spend hours until you will understand and clean it to make your page load faster.

How to handle negative criticism

As a blogger, something you’ll have to (or already had to) face is negative criticism. Let’s be honest: No one likes to receive negative feedback about his work. Though, any public figure, nevermind how good they are, receive lots of criticism.

Five Tips For Making Ideas Happen

Creative types have a problem. We have so many great ideas, but most of them never see the light of day. Why do most ideas never happen? The reason is that our own creative habits get in the way. For example, our tendency to generate new ideas often gets in the way of executing the ones we have. As a result, we abandon many projects halfway through. Whether a personal website, a new business idea or a long-dreamt novel, most of these projects stagnate and become a source of frustration.

9 Critical Tasks Before Launching Your Small Business Blog

In this post Mark Hayward shares some ‘must do’ tips for small business owners who are getting ready to launch a blog.

24 Irresistible jQuery Tips to Power Up Your JavaScript Skills

jQuery makes using JavaScript easy even for most designers because of it’s huge community and supply of really useful plugins. Using plugins is great for sure but knowing a bit more of what is going on behind the curtain can make you more powerful than you would expect. Digging into the coding details may not be that simple but with the good examples, tips and tricks in this article you should have a good chance. jquery

Top Three Motivators For Developers (Hint: not money!)

Software has long since lost its glory-days status. We’re not the go-to field anymore. Geeks are no longer revered as gods amongst humanity for our ability to manipulate computers. We get crappy jobs just like everyone else.

13 Ways To Improve Client Interaction

There are several articles on the internet about problem clients. You’ve probably read a few of them, I’ve even wrote one. Yet, when was the last time that we bothered to think that maybe we as designers and developers; assisted a client in going from “Problem Client” into “Client from Hell”? So instead of throwing fuel on the fire, lets look at some ways to improve client interaction. client

Freebies

Lion In The Dark Free Wallpaper

The wallpaper has been entitled “Lion In The Dark” and is available in 8 different wallpaper resolutions including resolutions for the Iphone and even the Ipad.

Isometrica (Volume 1): A Free Social Media Icon Set

Ahoy there! It’s another social icon set to soak up your precious bandwidth, royally entitled, Isometrica.

Vibrant Stickers Web Icon Pack

This Free Icon Pack is for use in your personal and commercial projects, and can be used without attribution. It may not be redistributed.

Payment icons

A great set of payment icons, with an original perspective, very useful in your websites. These icons were designed to our frinds of speckyboy magazine.