Best Of Web And Design In February 2011

February 28th, 2011
Tutorials

So February has finally drawn to an end the shortest month of the year and it really has felt like it this month has rapidly went by, nerveless this hasn’t stop the design community pumping out some great design tutorials with some great outcomes.

Photoshop Tutorials

Design a Beautifully Detailed Web Button

A simple, elegant, and professional button tutorial from Liam McCabe. Liam creates all sorts of great web elements, so he’s going to be a great guide through the process. If you’ve been looking for a way to spice up your designs with a uniquely styled button or UI element, look no further.

How to Create a Realistic Crack Effect on a Face

Today you will learn an easy way to add crack effects to your images. We will only need a couple of textures and our Photoshop brushes to obtain a realistic end result. This tutorial is split into 9 easy-to-follow steps, with some basic Photoshop features carefully explained.

Create an Intricate Mythological Statue Photomanipulation Photoshop Tutorial

In this Photoshop photomanipulation tutorial, you’ll learn how to take a stock image of a person, turn them into a statue using various texture mapping methods, and then how to superimpose this statue into an incredible scene. You’ll see how to handle various stock images of various colors and lighting, as well as how to work with a variety of photomanipulation techniques.

Create a Fallen, Rain-Soaked, Angel Composition in Photoshop

In today’s tutorial you will demonstrate how to create a lonely, fallen, rain-soaked, angel composition in Photoshop using photo manipulation techniques.

Illustrator Tutorials

How To Create an Intricate Vector Heart Illustration

In case you haven’t noticed, today is Valentine’s Day, so I thought it would be fitting to base today’s tutorial on some kind of ‘lovey-dovey’ theme.

How To Create a Vector Soldier Character in Illustrator

Follow this step by step Illustrator tutorial to create a simple vector soldier character. We’ll begin by building the structure of the character with basic shapes, then adjust the line weights to create definition between the elements. To bring the character to life we’ll add blocks of colour before finishing it all off with a simple shading technique.

Draw a traffic cone in illustrator

In this Illustrator tutorial, you will be creating a traffic cone. The creation process is quite simple: We just need to combine a few shapes, use the Pathfinder Panel and Illustrator’s shape tools smartly, and then apply nice gradients. What we will end up with is flexible and changeable artwork that can be used in a variety of ways, such as in web icons, business cards, or even big billboards and service signage.

Design Wedding Rings Using Adobe Illustrator

In this tutorial you create two wedding rings using 3D modeling in Illustrator. We learn a few operation techniques with gradient mesh. If you need to create an upcoming wedding invitation, this can serve as an excellent centerpiece for that kind of design.

Web and Design Articles

The Benefits of Wireframing a Design

Wireframing is an extremely important phase of the web development process. While it’s tempting to skip this step and proceed from the design brief and information architecture directly into design, it pays huge dividends to create wireframes somewhere in between of conceptual site planning and actual development of a site. Wireframing will allow you to do several things far more efficiently, and the time and effort you put into this phase pays dividends in the greater scheme of things.

The Bright (Near) Future of CSS

In this article, the focus is on what’s coming: styling techniques you’ll use in the immediate and near-term future. From styling HTML 5 elements to rearranging layout based on display parameters to crazy selection patterns to transforming element layout, these are all techniques that you may use tomorrow, next month, or next year.

110 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads

A monster list of over a hundred ideas designed to help you do just that. Not all of these ideas will make sense to everyone, but we hope you’ll find at least a few to help you find newer and better paying freelance opportunities.

How Blogging Makes You A Better Designer

As a visual designer the central problem you attempt to solve is one of communication. In writing a blog post the central problem you attempt to solve is one of communication. See the connection? Some might see visual design and blogging as having two different skill sets. Fundamentally though, each is the same thing.

HTML5 Tutorials and Techniques That Will Keep You Busy

Ever since the latest revision of HTML has launched, internet marketers have switched to HTML5 due to its several new features which facilitate Web development distinctly. It has opened new doors to designers and developers and as you may have already noticed, the use of Flash in Web and internet applications has significantly dropped. In today’s post, we’ve gathered some very useful tutorials that will help you achieve a good command of HTML5. Please feel free to share with us other useful tutorials that have kept you busy!

HTML5 Quick Guide: tags to add and tags to drop

HTML5 brings with it many new upgrades that expand the scope of our abilities with HTML4+. Some of the new additions will be easily welcomed into our upcoming development projects, and others we’ll find we don’t need to use quite as often. Regardless, it’s important to familiarize yourself with these new tags for future projects to ensure that you will always be coding semantically and in accordance with best practices.

Freebies

Designer CSS UI Kit

This UI kit has been designed and hand-coded from scratch in HTML5 taking advantage of modern CSS3 techniques, it includes a range of common user interface elements and font stacks, which look beautiful in modern browsers and degrade gracefully in Internet Explorer.

48 Pixel perfect credit card icons

These icons has been created pixel by pixel, each size has been done separately to guarantee the crisp look. of course, we include souce files as in all our other freebies.

Hand Drawn Damask Style Photoshop And Vector Pattern

An hand drawn damask style pattern, I’ve always seemed to like damask patterns but never seen a hand drawn style damask pattern therefore i thought this would be a useful pattern worth creating. What’s your thoughts on the pattern set we would love to hear your thoughts.