Best Of Web And Design In March 2010

• April 1st, 2010
• News

March has been another great month with loads of great resources for designers aswell as web designers from articles, tutorials to even freebies shared with all our readers at Creative Nerds.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to Create Realistic, Vector Bubbles

In this tutorial you will learn how to create realistic colorful bubbles. We’ll cover numerous techniques and build this illustrations step by step. Set aside a couple hours for this one!

Create a Tasty Burger Icon in Illustrator

In this delicious tutorial you will show you how to create a three-dimensional, scrumptious burger using Adobe Illustrator.

An Illustrator’s Project: From Start to Finish

In this tutorial, you’ll walk through the steps of how to create an illustration art piece so that you can witness what goes behind a digital illustrator’s work, as well as gain some new insights for your own projects’ workflow. We’ll go through conceptualization and idea gathering, creating illustrations in Illustrator, and then finishing the piece in Photoshop.

Create a Candy Inspired Vector Snowboard Design

Learn how to put together a sweet candy inspired design in Illustrator by cutting, splitting and joining vector paths to produce an intricate weave of shapes. We’ll then add some finishing touches with subtle shading and a cool striped overlay to add depth to the design. The final concept will them be ready for being mocked up as a custom snowboard design.

How to Make an Attractive Vector Butterfly

In this tutorial it will show you how to make a vector butterfly using the blending mode from transparency box and the gradient mesh. The techniques shown in this tutorial will help you make shades on objects and liquid transition of colors. Believe me it is very easy.

Create a greedy monkey

This tutorial will help you create a simple illustration of a monkey face. It uses the Ellipse Tool, the Pen Tool, the Rectangle Tool, the Crystallize Tool or the Gradient Tool. For the the shadow effects you’ll use some classic effects like the Inner Glow or the Gaussian Blur.

Photoshop Tutorials

How to Create a 3D House Icon with Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn to design a house icon in Adobe Photoshop. I’ve focused mainly on the flexible use of Layer Styles to give the different shapes its colors, giving us the ability to scale our work easier if needed. All the shapes involved in the tutorial are simple and can easily be made using shape tools. It is strongly recommended that you must have good command of shape and selection tools for certain portions of this tutorial.

Create a Stunning Retro Futuristic Typography

In this tutorial, you will learn some really cool techniques to help us achieve a few aspects of Retro Futurism. You will be learning a lot of concepts, tips and tricks in Illustrator. You all also learn how to add the futuristic look using Photoshop.

Create a Digital Camera With Wooden Accents Using Photoshop

As designers, we occasionally need digital versions of electronic devices to use in our designs. All to often however, we find that the device we need doesn’t actually exist in the format that we need. In times like those, having experience building realistic-looking electronic devices in Photoshop can be a real life-saver. In this tutorial we will learn how to draw a digital camera using Photoshop.

How to Make a High-Impact Fashion Poster in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to use shapes and other objects to create a unique fashion poster scene. Utilizing Adobe Photoshop shapes is an awesome means for improving your designs and they can easily be used without spending too much time on them. The results of using shapes can be completely different every time depending on various factors such as what shapes you use, how many you use, and how you apply them to your work.

Underwater Content Box Design in Photoshop

In this tutorial it will teach you how to create an underwater content box. It will make it appear as if the content box fell into the water using stock photos and different techniques. If you have any questions about this tutorial be sure to ask in the comments. Also, remember with all the tutorials, the psd is available for download.

Web And Design Articles

Ask the Expert – Speaking About Startups with Collis Ta’eed of Envato

Ask the Expert is a popular and on-going interview series here on Design Informer. In this edition of Ask the Expert, Design INformer had the chance to email Collis Ta’eed and ask him some questions regarding Envato, the popular web startup.

Basic CSS3 Techniques That You Should Know

After 13 years of being a vital part of web designs, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has evolved into a powerful tool, allowing you to develop more efficient and better-looking sites. Many of the new features in the latest CSS revision (CSS3) are rich and take the quality of our designs to the next level.

Subscribe to These Excellent Design-Related RSS Feeds

An excellent list of top design blogs you should be subscribe to.

5 Things That Can Make (or break) A Killer Website Design

Starting the website design process can either give you a really great feeling, or can leave you feeling hollow in the pit of your stomach. The feeling you get is usually dependent on how great of a kick start you get with your design process.

5 Advanced CSS Pseudo Classes that will Save your Day

CSS3 provides powerful pseudo-classes that allow the designer to select multiple elements according to their positions in a document tree. Using these pseudo-classes can be a little confusing at first, but it becomes a lot easier over time to set up your layout.

CSS Bugs and Inconsistencies in Firefox 3.x

CSS3 provides powerful pseudo-classes that allow the designer to select multiple elements according to their positions in a document tree. Using these pseudo-classes can be a little confusing at first, but it becomes a lot easier over time to set up your layout.

Fundamentals for a Kick-Ass Creative Company

This post has a little background to its inspiration.At the start of Summer 2009, we started Official as a way to showcase the offices of companies that “get” creative culture. The numbers are slowly increasing, but it’s ended up serving a more important role. We’ve seen the kinds of things that make companies more than just a place to work. These are the types of companies that create lifestyles you want to be a part of.

Can You Teach Yourself Web Design?

I recently received an email from someone who was interested in becoming a web designer. They wanted to know if they should go to school for it, or if it is possible to learn on your own. My answer, in short, was “Yes.”

10 Tips for Effective Creative Brainstorming

Brainstorming is often discussed in relation to a business environment. In college, nearly every one of my business school textbooks had an entire chapter dedicated to the concept. Though creative brainstorming is in many ways a different beast due to its visual nature, many of the same concepts apply.

Freebies

Free High Quality Premium Apple IPAD Icons

This is Icon stet of is Apples brand new latest product the Apple Ipad. The Icon set feature four high premium icons for you to enjoy for person use and commercial use.

5 High Resolution Abstract Brushes

Abstract brushes can often be a quick and easy solution to adding an interesting effect to a graphic without spending a whole lot of time on it. This set of 5 high resolution abstract brushes from FortyWinks may be just what you need for your next project. Download this free set and see

More Stunning Smoke: 30 High Resolution Photoshop Brushes

30 truly amazing smoke brushes worth downloading.

Decorative Elements Pack – 33 Free Vectors, Brushes, and Images

This design pack comes with 33 unique decorative elements such as flourishes, swirls, motifs, and more! They look great as text dividers or as a border surrounding your design. They are available for free as vector, brushes, and images. The images are PNG files with a transparent background. They are all high quality and handmade.

+180 Massive Minimalistic Icon set

A minimalistic icon set which is available in a range of various colours, which includes over 175 icons all in one set available to be used in commercial design projects.