Best Of Web And Design In February 2014

• February 27th, 2014
• News

A great collection of photoshop and illustrator tutorials, perfect for beginners or more vetran design users. We have also included some of the best web design articles published through out February.

Photoshop Tutorials

How To Create a Grainy B&W High Fashion Photo Effect

You’re going to play around with various image adjustments to recreate the emotive style of high fashion black and white photography. Typically these photographs feature many of the characteristics of old school 35mm film, such as heavy film grain and low contrast. Follow this step by step guide to quickly transform your own photos into artistic black and white pieces of art.

Create a Mixed Martial Arts Event Flyer in Photoshop

Most of you have probably seen event posters displayed in your area promoting a boxing, mixed martial arts (MMA), Ultimate Fighter, or wrestling match. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a similar event poster in Photoshop using several techniques including photo manipulation, retouching, and typography.

Create low-poly art portraits

You’ll see how to create this cool, grainy work with a low-poly (a polygon mesh of a small number of polygons) twist. First we’ll create some vector portraits, then get texturing in Photoshop with self-made brushes.

Create a Mobile Shopping App Design in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the techniques used to create a modern and flat user interface (UI) design for an iPad app.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to Create a Polygonal Vector Mosaic That Will Wow Any Crowd

You’ll learn how to create a polygonal vector mosaic from raster images with the help of a free Triangulator web-based tool and Adobe Illustrator. To strengthen the visual affect, we’ll also create a reflection with the help of the Opacity Mask and a dropping shadow by using the radiant gradient and the Transparency panel.

Use Pattern Brushes to Create a Shoe Lace Text Effect in Illustrator

You will learn how to create a laces text effect in Adobe Illustrator. For starters you will learn how to create the main lace shapes using a simple rectangle, three Transform effects and some basic vector shape building techniques. Using similar effects and techniques along with the Warp and Distort effects you will learn how to create the laces tips. Moving on, you will learn how to save two simple pattern and how to use them to create your own pattern brush. Finally, using that pattern brush, some basic masking techniques and several Drop Shadow effects you will create the text.

Typographic Logo in Illustrator and Photoshop

In this tutorial It will show you how to use simple Illustrator tools to create a very trendy logo. The process is quite simple and can be applied to all sorts of logos and illustrations for your future projects.

How to Create a Gold Text Effect and Graphic Style in Illustrator

You’ll learn how to create a complex gold graphic style which includes a reflection, dropping shadows and highlights. These all can be created with the help of the most powerful tool available in Adobe Illustrator–the Appearance panel. You learn how to create this graphic style and then apply it to editable text objects.

Web Design And Article

40 CSS3 button examples with effects & animations

Are you looking for some CSS3 buttons, which are good enough to be used in real-world website projects? here are some CSS3 buttons you might like. Since my last post about codepen buttons, I’ve been searching sites like codepen, cssdeck and jsfiddle for some good practical buttons and I’m amazed to find so many cool CSS3 buttons with nice effects and animations.

CSS Best Practices to Follow and Bad Habits to Avoid

Creating a well-managed set of CSS codes can be a challenge. As technology evolves, it’s not really easy to say if you’re doing the right CSS practices or you’re just messing up the code and compromising the quality of your website on different browsers.

Design Systems: Building for the Future

Full disclosure: Media Temple has long given me free hosting. I even use an affiliate link when I link to Media Temple, which I earn a little money from. But I’m not publishing for some backroom shoulder-rubbing reason. I’m publishing it because they did a good job with the redesign, Ara wanted to write it, and I think we all can benefit from his insights on an important large-scale redesign.

How To Make An Effective Style Guide With Adobe Fireworks

I started with style guides like any other obsessive-compulsive designer: with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. Plus, knowing which component to use in a given situation is nice, too, right? Since making this a regular practice, I’ve found it’s been like having a nice combination of a CSS class and a pattern library all in one.

The State of SEO in 2014

Back in December 2012, we published the first article of our SEO for Web Designersseries. The fundamentals we covered still form a great basis for the optimization of a website, but because of some changes to Google’s algorithm, I’ve decided to give you some additional advice about the application of these techniques.

Introducing the Redux Framework

When it comes to creating WordPress themes, we often want to provide our users with a selection of options to customise the experience for their needs. As something that needs to be done for each and every theme, it’s nice to find an off-the-shelf solution you can drop into each project to get you most of the way there.