Best Of Web And Design In August 2010

• September 2nd, 2010
• News

A ton of great tutorials from august some useful design tutorials to teach you some new useful tip and tricks. Alongside Creative Nerds launching an new design blog, we have featured a few freebies within the roundup of our new site.

Photoshop Tutorials

How To Create The Expendables Winged Skull Poster Art

When I saw the bad-ass poster design for the upcoming movie The Expendables, I just had to open up Photoshop and have a go at recreating it. Follow this step by step guide on how to create the menacing winged skull design for yourself, complete with an overkill of weaponry surrounding a sinister looking skull face.

Create a Cosmic-Inspired Dreamy Scene in Photoshop

In today’s tutorial we will demonstrate how to use stock photography, 3d elements, and various techniques to create a cosmic-inspired dreamy scene in Photoshop.

Combining Custom Brushes for Wild Effects in Photoshop

Custom brushes can be an incredibly powerful way to add a touch of originality to your work.  By photographing or otherwise capturing given effects such as splatters, drips and watercolor textures, you can easily create your own custom brushes in Photoshop, and apply them to your own work right away to make it stand out.

Create Gold Ornamental Text in Photoshop

Ornamental text can be created in several ways. Today we will demonstrate how to combine several stock images to create some nice gold ornamental typography.

Illustrator Tutorials

How To Create A Very Scary But Cute Monster In Illustrator

Monsters, they can be bad and ugly or they can be nice and cute. How is this monster you decide by yourself. This is a tutorial on how to draw a complex monster illustration, I tried to make it as easy as possible but knowledge of basing drawing tools is advised anyway.

How To Create a Detailed Vector Sugar Skull Illustration

Follow this Illustrator design tutorial to create a super detailed sugar skull illustration made from lots of sweet vector elements. We’ll use a mix of basic and advanced Illustrator tools to build various decorative objects to slowly build up the features until we have an awesome looking skull design that pays homage to the Mexican Dia de los Muertos tradition.

Illustrator Tutorial: Give personality to character art

What’s tastier than an iced doughnut with sprinkles? A whole plate of yummy cakes, that’s what. If you’re looking to create a series of characters based on a theme, what better one to sample than one of Aaron Miller’s delightful confections?

How To Create a Fun Cartoon Style Poster Design

Follow this step by step guide to creating a fun cartoon style poster design. We’ll combine a quick character doodle with some bold and blocky text, then bring it to life with a muted colour palette and a mix of textures to give the poster an old and retro feel.

Web and design  Articles

7 Reasons Why I Choose Fireworks Over Photoshop

My name is Russell McGovern and I use Fireworks to design websites. There, I said it. I could be wrong, but it feels like I’m in a small minority; among web designers, the application of choice seems to be Photoshop.

Some Reasons You Might Not Want To Become A Web Designer

Web design is often an appealing career choice for artistic and creative people. It’s seen as a potentially lucrative opportunity to be creative on a daily basis. But there are drawbacks that many people don’t realize going into the field.

A 6-Step General Process for Producing a Website

When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are just getting started as a web designer. Good guidelines can help you work better by keeping forgetfulness to a minimum.

15 Great Ways to Secure Your Website

Since there are no point and click software, like an Anti Virus solution, available to secure a website, people just consider the job is done once the website is up. It definitely is not. Protecting a website or webserver is possible only by continued efforts. Unlike a poorly protected desktop in your place of business, a hacked website will reflect poorly on you, your business or brand.

An Effective Marketing Plan: Getting Started

A well-conceived and properly implemented marketing plan is the foundation for your business’ success. You might be the best at what you do, but if nobody knows about you and your offerings, and why they’re of value, then that shingle you hung up is going to come tumbling down

Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations.

25 Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets for Developers

CSS is no doubt up there with the most important web languages that we use. While html provides the structure it can be inconsistent and unpredictable across different new and old browsers. Css is where the html is styled though, and where we get creative as well as addressing those inconsistencies. Below is a fantastic list of 25 Css snippets that I am sure you will find extremely useful. Whether you are a veteran web developer, or are just getting your foot in the door of css, they are all well worth checking out.

Freebies

Exclusive Freebie Pack – 25 Ink Brushes

Ink droplets are probably one of the coolest types of Photoshop brushes. Mostly because of how intricate they look in use. They are created when you drop ink into water and then photograph them. Today, we have a set of 25 ink brushes to give away for free. Feel free to use them in your designs.

Ornament

A vintage old ornament seamless vector pattern created using illustrator, this pattern can be used when creating a  vintage design to give this design a more authentic look. This pattern is free to be used commercial design projects as well as non commercial design projects, hope you enjoy and fee free to leave a comment to share your feedback.

Cute Folk Seamless Vector Pattern

A vintage old ornament seamless vector pattern created using illustrator, this pattern can be used when creating a  vintage design to give this design a more authentic look. This pattern is free to be used commercial design projects as well as non commercial design projects, hope you enjoy and fee free to leave a comment to share your feedback.

Simple But Sophisticated App Icon Set

A nice simple but at the same time well designed sophisticated icon set which can be used in the interface of an app. This beautiful icon set is available to be used in commercial design project an non commercial design projects