Best Of Web And Design In December 2013

• December 30th, 2013
• News

Where rounding up the end of the year with  our monthly web roundup of the best tutorials and design articles from around the web. The last edition of our our monthly roundup features as usually some great Photoshop and illustrator tutorials, in a relatively quiet month within the design community. A great post worth reading as you wind down from the festive holidays.

Photoshop Tutorials

Create a “Sports Center” Style 3D Text Effect in Photoshop

If you have ever watched a sporting event on television, you have probably noticed some of the 3D graphics that television networks use during the programming. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create your own “Sports Center” inspired graphics using Photoshop CS6′s 3D capabilities combined with Filter Forge. In the process, we will show you how to use several tools including basic shapes, gradients, patterns, and textures.

Photo Manipulate a Fiery Fantasy Warrior

Today’s design lesson will teach you how to photo manipulate a fantasy flaming warrior using a range of professional techniques. You’ll learn how to composite several images into a single cohesive scene. You’ll learn how to blend effectively, apply surface textures, lighting and much more.

Photoshop tutorial: Enhance live event photography

In this tutorial, increasingly high-profile photographer Tigz Rice covers how to correct key issues those photographing artificially low-lit indoor events – such as stage shows, theatre productions and awards ceremonies – will come across during their shoots. These include underexposure, colour spills, distracting backgrounds and noise from shooting at high ISO.

Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop tutorial: Create a 3D vector icon

This tutorial will show you how to create a 3D-looking icon, adding fine details and shadows, using textures and making the illustration very realistic with gradients and lights. At the end of the tutorial it will be hard to say which software you used to create the icon because of its depth and stunning look and feel.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to create a comic style text effect

In today’s Illustrator tutorial we’re going to create a comic book inspired text effect your favourite superhero would be proud of. Learn how to create a basic 3D effect using the Blend tool and produce cool halftone patterns to give the design that retro screen printed appearance. These two techniques alone are crucial additions to your Illustrator skillset and can be used in all kinds of illustration and design work.

Create a Cute Winter Seamless Pattern in Adobe Illustrator

Winter is a season of warm cozy clothes, white fluffy snow and clean bright colors. In this tutorial we will get inspired by this magical season and create a cute winter seamless pattern consisting of simple objects. We will go through the process of creation of every element in Adobe Illustrator and end up with forming a swatch using the Pattern Tool.

Adobe Illustrator tutorial: Faux 3D finishes in Illustrator

Karan finds Photoshop’s 3D lighting tools to be cumbersome, and says that Illustrator is more than capable of creating depth and dimension, using such effects as the inner and outer glows and the Gaussian blur.

Create a Wacom Bamboo Tablet

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a realistic Wacom Bamboo Tablet in Adobe Illustrator. You will find out how to add shadows and highlights to your Wacom Tablet using different Blending Modes, how to use the Round Any Corner Script and finally, how to create a nice textured background.

Web and Design Articles

Create A Clock In CSS

In this tutorial we are going to walk through the process of creating a ticking clock in CSS, using CSS3 features animation and transform. The animation will start when you load the page, the animation is the same for all hands we just need to change the timing used.

A Little Journey Through (Small And Big) E-Commerce Websites

In this tutorial we are going to walk through the process of creating a ticking clock in CSS, using CSS3 features animation and transform. The animation will start when you load the page, the animation is the same for all hands we just need to change the timing used.

How To Code an Image Zoom Hover Display with jQuery

In this tutorial I want to introduce a very simple jQuery plugin called EasyZoom. It’s all free and open source to download right from Github. The tool makes it super easy to create your own image zoom panel, which can appear on mouseover or be tied onto another event handler. Check out my live sample demo to get an idea of the final product.

10 Optimization Experts Share Their Favorite Google Analytics Reports (Copy Them!)

One of the key things Google Analytics helps us do when optimizing a website is identify conversion uplift opportunities. Traffic is precious, and we don’t want to waste any of it on tests that don’t result in learning or uplifts.

The top 10 beginner programming mistakes

When you’re learning to program, it goes without saying that you make a lot of mistakes. The problem is, sometimes you don’t know you’re making them. In my work teaching first year university students to code, I see the same errors come up over and over again, and they’re the same mistakes I made when I was learning. So here’s my list of the top beginner mistakes to avoid…

Designing a Merry Christmas Web App Interface

When you’re learning to program, it goes without saying that you make a lot of mistakes. The problem is, sometimes you don’t know you’re making them. In my work teaching first year university students to code, I see the same errors come up over and over again, and they’re the same mistakes I made when I was learning. So here’s my list of the top beginner mistakes to avoid…

Techniques for creating textured text

In this article we’re going to explore several techniques that can be used to create textured text or apply a background to text.