Best Of Web And Design In July 2011

August 1st, 2011
News

All this great weather has meant the online design community has been fairly quiet this month, never the less all the best tutorials and freebies are featured within our monthly roundup. The highlight of this month and post has to be great collection of illustrator tutorials.

What’s your favourite article featured in the post we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Illustrator

How to Create a Circus Tent in Adobe Illustrator

Today you will be learning how to create a cute circus tent in Adobe Illustrator. Get ready to use some basic tools such as Pen Tool and some quite useful Pathfinder features. We will create colorful balloons and flowers as well. The illustration can be used for multiply purpose such as Birthday invitations, Circus posters, etc.

How to Illustrate a 3D Email Sign

This work is a common project together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Oleksandr Iegupov. This tutorial is for intermediate Illustrator users. We’ll use 3D-modeling, gradients, blending modes, blends, gradient meshes for creating the picture.

Create a Badass Gas Mask in Illustrator

An extremely detailed illustrations are really eye catching and sharp, I always wanted to understand how they do that.

Create a Stitched Type Effect in Adobe Illustrator

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a stitched type effect. You will create simple geometric patterns, a pattern brush and use the appearance panel to create the final look.

Photoshop

Create a Detailed Vintage TV from Scratch in Photoshop

In today’s tutorial, It will show you how to create a detailed vintage TV from scratch using Photoshop’s vector editing capabilities. The detailed step by step guide will help you to understand the process of its creation.

Create a Detailed Vintage TV from Scratch in Photoshop

This photoshop tutorial is about how to create 3D text effect in Photoshop using editable text and layer styles.

Creating a Spectrum Poster Design in Photoshop

In this tutorial, new WeGraphics contributor, Jonathan Wong walks you through how to create a Spectrum Poster design using Adobe Photoshop. So pull up a chair and join in as Jonathan takes us on a trip through his creative process.

Create a Star Trek Style Communicator in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will draw a retro Star Trek style communicator, a voice communication device used in the original Star Trek series. You will combine layer styles and lots of manual drawing. So, prepare your Wacom to boldly go where no Photoshop tutorial has gone before.

Web And Design Articles

Injecting Personality in Your Web Designs

If you want your websites to stand out from a sea of competitors, the easiest way to accomplish this is to give it a little personality. As web designers, we have the capability to tap into this human trait through well-conceived designs that forge an emotional connection with the visitor. How is this attribute achieved? In this article I will present ways you can inject personality into your web designs and create a memorable business solution for your client.

Super Simple Lightbox with CSS and jQuery

Rather than using a bloated plugin that has features you’ll never use, this tutorial shows you how to create a super simple lightbox for handling images. It’s perfect for image galleries, portfolios, and more!

Email Newsletters Worth Subscribing To

Staying on top of the most recent developments in your craft takes time, especially when you have to scan websites daily for articles and news worthy of your attention. Quality newsletters do the job for you. Just check your email inbox every couple of days to find a condensed and readily accessible selection of tidbits from a given website. We have selected here newsletters that deserve your attention.

Essential E-Commerce Website Features: Tips and Examples

There are many different approaches you can take when designing an e-store. However, you might notice that effective e-commerce websites have certain site features that are absolutely critical to the shopper’s experience.

5 Quick & Simple Design Tricks to Liven Up Any Project

Sometimes you have a perfectly good layout, but your design needs a bit something extra to finish it off. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get stuck and become completely void of ideas.

Top 10 Characteristics of GREAT Project Managers

Good project managers are hard enough to find, and great project managers are rarer still. Thanks to Andy Crowe, though, we now have a peek inside the top 2% of project managers, based on a study of 860 of them as rated by their peers/clients. Not surprisingly, great project management requires a lot more than the ability to move a milestone.

Freebies

Freebie: Professional E-Commerce Icons Set (20 Icons)

This set was designed by Web Icons Set with the purpose to be used in e-commerce websites and has been exclusively released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The set includes icons such as Empty Basket, Full Basket, Credit Cards, Delivery, Secure Payment, Checklist, Gifts, Shop Open, Shop Closed, Contact, Wallet and others.