Best Of Web And Design In May 2010

• May 31st, 2010
• News

  Another month has passed which means its time for our monthly wrap of of design tutorials, freebies and articles form over the web/design community. A great collection of photoshop tutorials which have been published this month which i feel is the highlight of the monthly roundup, feel free to leave a comment we would love to hear your feedback and thoughts upon the article.

Photoshop Tutorials

Create an Abstract Design with Patterns in Photoshop

Photoshop patterns and simple shapes. Follow this walkthrough as It takes you through the steps It takes to recreate this detailed design with nothing more than gradient and pattern effects.

How to Create a Social Media UFO Icon

When we design websites or user interfaces, often times we need to create unique and creative icons. Most websites these days have some sort of social media presence; with a link to their Facebook or Twitter pages prominently displayed on their front pages. With so many sites linking to their social media profiles, it’s not surprising that many sites are simple regurgitating the same icons. In today’s tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a completely unique UFO inspired social media icon based on a theme.

Create an Abstract Cloud Jumper in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will manipulate a photo with abstract elements to make it more interesting and active.

Create a Magical Four Piece Stardust Composition – Basix

For whatever reason it is always fun to create composite images that use star fields as a backdrop. Star fields have a unique ability to make a composition look mysterious and even magical. In today’s tutorial you will demonstrate how to create a 4-piece stardust composition using textures and masks.

How To Design A Detailed Printer Icon in Photoshop

In this tutorial you’re going to be creating a printer icon, suitable for both the web and print. We’re going to be basing the icon on a Canon printer/scanner I use on a daily basis, the MP610.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to Create a Charming Jewellery Box

Learn how to create this charming jewellery box using Extrude, Gradient and the Appearance Panel. You will learn valuable skills in how to create realistic mirror effects and perspective by following this detailed and informative tutorial.

Create a Trendy Seamless Type Pattern

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a trendy seamless type pattern in Illustrator using some text and icons. Although I won’t go in-depth about creating the icons, it will take a close look at creating a seamless pattern swatch.

Create The Toyota Logo Using Illustrator

In this tutorial you can learn to create the Toyota logo. It is all about circles and the Pathfinder panel. You will have to create a series of circles of exact dimensions. Regarding that,the grid and the snap to grid option will ease your work.

Create a simple paint brush icon using illustrator

Here you can learn to create a quite simple paintbrush icon. For this fast tutorial you’ll use some basic tools like the Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool or the Pen Tool. Then, for some neat effects you’ll need the Wrinkle Tool or the Warp and Rougher effects.

Web Design and Design Articles

7 Personality Types of Developers Today

This article looks at 7 types of developers today and their defining characteristics.

Making a Donation Center With PHP, MySQL and PayPal’s APIs

PayPal provides numerous APIs and integration options for third-party developers. One of these is the Donation button, which you can generate straight from PayPal’s site and include directly into your pages. Conversion rate for these buttons is typically minimal, but the right incentive can make a big difference.

Quick Tip: Google Fonts API: You’re Going to Love This

Google have made two huge announcements today. One of these concerns the Google Fonts API. Simply by linking to a particular font, stored on Google’s servers (save on bandwidth + caching benefits), we now have access to a wide array of custom fonts.

18 Dos and Don’ts Of Usability On The Web

Google have made two huge announcements today. One of these concerns the Google Fonts API. Simply by linking to a particular font, stored on Google’s servers (save on bandwidth + caching benefits), we now have access to a wide array of custom fonts.

Fresh Sliding Thumbnails Gallery with jQuery and PHP

In this tutorial we are going to create another full page image gallery with a nice thumbnail area that scrolls automatically when moving the mouse. The idea is to allow the user to slightly zoom into the picture by clicking on it. The thumbnails bar slides down and the image resizes according to the screen size.

CSS Three — Connecting The Dots

As a web community, we’ve made a lot of exciting progress in regards to CSS3. We’ve put properties like text-shadow & border-radius to good use while stepping into background-clip and visual effects like transitions and animations. We’ve also spent a great deal of time debating how and when to implement these properties. Just because a property isn’t widely supported by browsers or fully documented at the moment, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working with it. In fact, I’d argue the opposite.

HTML5 Unleashed: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Can we use HTML5 today? What can we do with it? Is it really going to kill Flash? You must have noticed a gradual increase in the frequency of these and similar questions being asked, debated and even answered. In my opinion, you must answer such fundamental questions yourself.

Breaking the Rules: How to Effectively Break the “Rules” of Good Web Design

We’ve all seen articles devoted to the various web desing “rules” out there. In fact, they’ve probably been drilled into all of our heads ad nauseum. And for many, they serve as a comforting set of guidelines that make our lives easier, at least when it comes to design.

Some Opinions on the SEO Myths & Realities Fight

A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer (one of my Art of SEO coauthors) authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to Create a Charming Jewellery Box

Learn how to create this charming jewellery box using Extrude, Gradient and the Appearance Panel. You will learn valuable skills in how to create realistic mirror effects and perspective by following this detailed and informative tutorial.

Free Icons

Hand Drawn Sketchy Icons of Your Favorite Social Sites

This new collection of 16 sketch social icons includes logos from all your favourite social networking and bookmarking sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter and more.

Isloo – 50 Free High Quality Icons

To celebrate IconFinder’s three-year anniversary we have a free present for all the readers of Psdtuts+. It consist of 50 icons designed by the talented Asher Abbasi.

Social Media And Blogging Icon Set

Ah, don’t we all love icons? This time we’re giving away an icon set containing 65 icons in total, which combines social media, technology and blogging icons. The full preview image is below ;)

120 free new icons!

A set of 120 simple icons, in 2 resolutions: 68×68 & 48×48px. In the zip file you will also find the AI & EPS files so you can either grab and freely use various elements or crop them for your resolution.