Best Of Web And Design In June 2014

June 30th, 2014
News

A monthly round up of some of the best tutorials for designers, as well as web articles to read through. The monthly round-up includes some excellent illustrator tutorials worth checking out, alongside some great web articles to read through. A personal favourite was a great article for graduate web design students on how to get in to the industry.

Have we missed any good posts from the compilation, which should have been included ? Please feel free to share those in the comments below.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to Overprint Colors to Create Cool Print Effects

how you can use this technique to produce colourful overlapping effects in your prints.

Illustrator Tutorial: Orchid Plant

Here you will learn how to draw beautiful orchid in a pot. The tutorial is composed of two main parts, creating the pot and creating the orchid plant. You will start from basic shapes, use the techniques that involve the Transform, Blend and with a few effects such as Grain, Spatter, Gaussian Blur you will easily create the shapes that you need.

Create an Easy Field of Flowers Pattern Design in Adobe Illustrator

Create a simple, shape-driven floral pattern with Adobe Illustrator. Use polygons to make each of the pattern’s elements, distort them with vector effects, and use the Pattern Options panel in order to bring your design together.

Tips for Creating a Cardboard Vector Texture

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a Cardboard Vector Texture by using the Wrinkle Tool and graphics texture. Today you’ll also find out how to edit and apply native Adobe Illustrator’s patterns. Cardboard vector textures are pretty hot these days and they are being used in abstract backgrounds and product designs and that’s why creating your own texture will be super useful for you in future.

Photoshop Tutorials

How to Turn your Image into a Color Mixture Photo in Adobe Photoshop CS5

In this tutorial I will walk you through the steps needed to turning your image into a color mixtures photo, complete with overlay effects, colour treatments and elements that you can easily create in Adobe Photoshop.

Create a Fantasy Photo Manipulation of Valkyrie

Learn how to do this fantasy photo manipulation with mythological goddess – Valkyrie. You will learn, how to create dark themed background by using only two stock photos, how to add dramatic effects with particles and how to make depth of field in your work.

A Simple Photoshop Trick for Getting White Backgrounds

Create Unique Splash Gold Typography in Photoshop

Web and design articles

8 Tips To Become A Better Front End Developer

Should I use this plugin or that library? Should I plan this project or dive straight into coding? Should I ask for help or figure it out myself?

Ideas to Keep in Mind When Designing User Interfaces

What is a good user interface? As you read through the following ideas, you will see two reoccurring themes: Ease of use and simplicity.

Career Advice For Graduating Web Design Students

It’s that time of year again: graduation, when students transition away from the classroom to what will hopefully be a long and successful career in their chosen industry. I recently said goodbye to some of my own website design and development students. Instead of teaching lessons in design principles or responsive websites, I spent our final evening together answering their questions. One of those questions was, “What is the best career advice you’ve ever received?”

Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid

This is great, van Schneider says, but not if it becomes a cliche. His argument: In order for side projects to truly succeed, they have to be stupid. Here’s what he means, and how it can help your company stay creative and competitive

How to get started with Git

Git is a free open source distributed version control system. Which sounds incredibly dull, until you need to revert to a prior version of your code, when it’s a godsend.