A few months ago at Vandelay Premier we recently released a set of highlighter brushes for Adobe Illustrator,and in this tutorial we’ll show how you can accomplish the same thing on your own. We’ll scan some lines made by a highlighter and that will give us a nice brush for using whenever highlighter or marker effects are needed.

What you will need to complete this tutorial:

• Highlighter
• Paper
• Scanner
• Adobe Illustrator

Step 1: Draw Strokes with a Highlighter

Take your highlighter and paper and create some lines or strokes.

Step 2: Scan It

After you have some strokes on paper you are ready to scan them. This is what my scan looks like.

Step 3: Live Trace in Illustrator

We’ll be working with just one of the strokes for this tutorial.

Select the image and click on the arrow next to the Live Trace button.

This will open a drop down menu. Click on “Tracing Options” at the bottom of the list. You will then see a window that looks like this:

Now we’ll change some of the settings. You may need to experiment here, as your own scan will not be the same as the one we’re using for this tutorial. For this example we’ll change the threshold to 200. Threshold control how light or dark a color must be to be picked up by the trace. In this case our green highlighter is fairly light, so we’ll increase the threshold. If your scan is darker you may be able to leave this at the default setting.

We’ll also change the path fitting to 1, minimum area to 5, the corner angle to 10, and most importantly we’ll check the box for “ignore white”. By doing this, and white areas in the scan will be transparent instead of white.

If you plan to use the same setting for several different scans (which is likely if you are creating a set of brushes with the same style), click on “save preset” so you can run the same scan again without making the changes.

When you’re ready to run the trace, click the “Trace” button. After the trace is run it should look something like this:

Then you’ll need to click on the “Expand” button to complete the process of converting the image into a usable vector.

Step 4: Turn it into a Brush

Next, use the selection tool to select the highlighter stroke and tilt it so that the stroke is as straight as possible. If your scan is already straight, you can skip this.

Click on the brushes icon.

Click on the down arrow.

Then select “New Brush” and “Art Brush”. That will open up the Art Brush Options.

Give your brush a name, select “Scale Proportionately”, and change the colorization method to “Tints”. (Changing the colorization method to “tints” allows you to use the brush in any color).

After you’re done, click “Ok”. Your brush is now ready!

You can now try using the brush. Select the brush tool, select your new brush, and create a stroke.

You can change the color by selecting the path and changing the color of the stroke.

Step 5: Creating the Brush Set

If you want to continue and create a set of brushes you can repeat the process with the other strokes that you created. In this example we have a set of 3 brushes:

Then, save the file that includes all of your custom brushes as a .ai file. When you want to use your custom brushes on another file, click on the down arrow:

Then select “Open Brush Library” and “Other Library”.

Then browse to find the file on your computer. When you open the brushes file your see a window that allows you to select any of the brushes in that set.

You now have a set of custom highlighter brushes that you can use at any time.

For more tutorials please see:

• How to Create an Adobe Illustrator Brush
• Create a Fun Ink Splatter Vector
• Create a Drippy Spray Paint Vector

Photoshop presets like brushes and patterns get more attention, but custom shapes can be equally useful. Because custom shapes are vectors, they can be scaled to larger sizes with no decrease in quality.

In this post we’ll link to some of the best custom shapes sets that can be downloaded for free. As always when working with freebies, be sure to read the terms of use or license details to make sure that you are using it in accordance with the designer’s guidelines.

You may also be interested in:

• Ultimate Roundup of Free Photoshop Patterns
• Ultimate Collection of Free Photoshop Styles
• 100 Sets of Free Photoshop Brushes
• 5,000 Free Photoshop Gradients for Designers
• 45 Amazing and Free Photoshop Actions

Web Shapes

Hand-Drawn Arrows

Chat Shapes

Speech Balloon Shapes

People Silhouettes

Costumes and Characters

Silhouettes of People

People Shadow Set

Fashion Girl’s Silhouettes

Dancer Shapes

Floral Shapes

Flower Shapes

Tree Silhouettes

Dead Trees

Live Trees

Plan View Trees

Hoops

People Shapes

Birds

Animal Shapes

Sea Creatures

World Maps

United States

Guns

Ray Guns & Laser Blasters

Maritime

Paperclips

Kiddy Stuffs

Summer Time Shapes

Circle Shapes

Wavy Lines

Batman Vector Shapes

50s Custom Shapes

Bugs

Flying Bugs

Media Shapes

Different Speaker Shapes

RSS Feed Shapes

CDs

Tag Custom Shapes

Many blogs get re-designed every couple of years, if not more frequently. Re-designing a blog brings a number of challenges because more content is being added to the site all the time, new types of content may have been introduced since the last design, and the priorities and goals of blogs often change or evolve over time. This means that when re-designing a blog you’ll need to take some time before jumping into the design work in order to think about how to prioritize the right content, how to make it easy for visitors to find what they want, and how to use the design to make the blog more effective at achieving it’s purpose for the owner.

The success of a blog re-design is more heavily influenced by a proper planning process than it is by the design skills of the person creating it. A blog can get a fancy new design that looks great, but if it doesn’t help to make the site more user-friendly and it doesn’t do an effective job of achieving the blog’s purpose, the impressive look ultimately has very little impact.

In this article we’ll take a look at 7 keys to the blog re-design process. These are all things that should be considered at the time of the re-design in order to make the site more useful for visitors and more effective for its owners.

1. Same Design Style or New Approach?

Most of the time when a blog is re-designed it will maintain a similar style or look and feel, just with an updated approach. Brand development takes time, and if a blog has established a certain identity with its audience you will usually want to maintain that identity through the re-design process. However, there are some cases where the re-design presents the opportunity for the blog to go in a new direction. This includes color schemes, logos, and general design styles.

One of the first decisions that should be made is whether the blog should keep a similar style to the existing design, or if it should feature a new design style. Think about the blog’s current audience, how they view the blog and the brand, and if that still fits with the direction the blog is headed.

2. Focus on Conversions

Every blog should have some type of conversion goal. The content is obviously intended to be helpful, useful, and interesting to readers, but ultimately there is probably some action that the blog owner wants the reader to take. It could be to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, sign up for an email newsletter, purchase a product, download a free e-book, sign up for membership, connect via social media, etc.

Whatever the priority of the blog may be, it should significantly factor into the re-design. In fact, this is one of the reasons blogs need to be re-designed or re-aligned from time-to-time, as it is normal for a blog’s priorities to evolve. When that happens, changes to the design should be made. In some cases minor changes are sufficient, and in other cases it may require a more thorough re-design.

In order to focus on conversions you will of course need to know the specific priorities of the blog. This sounds simple, but many bloggers don’t take the time to think of it in these terms. So if you’re designing for a client you may need to prompt them to think about what types of conversions are most important to them. Once you know the priorities you can include calls to action in the most influential locations of the re-design. This could include the blog header, directly above or below the post title, directly after the post, the sidebar, etc.

3. Determine What Content Takes Priority

In addition to knowing what types of actions you’ll want visitors to take, you also should think about what content should be prioritized in the design. By default most blogs prioritize the newest content by showing it at the top of the font page.

News-related websites obviously want to prioritize new content because that freshness is what visitors are looking for, and it’s what keeps them coming back. Many news blogs also prioritize content based on it’s category. For example, the front page may list new posts in different categories such as world news, finance, sports, politics, etc. Some blogs use a “featured” category to determine what posts get priority on the front page. Many WordPress themes use a slideshow to scroll through top new posts, and if they are placed in the “featured” category they will be included in this slideshow.

The front page isn’t the only way that content can be prioritized. Many blogs, like our own, link to important or popular posts from the sidebar. Blog visitors often look to the sidebar when they want to browse the archives, so this is another way to control what content is noticed by visitors.

Other options also exist for prioritizing content. Linking to specific posts or pages can be done at the end of blog posts (this is often done through related posts lists), below the loop on the front page, or even in the footer. IncomeDiary uses the area below the main loop on the front page to display a list of “our favorite posts”.

4. Decide on the Front Page Approach

The font page is obviously important to the blog because many visitors will arrive here first. Blog front pages typically show excerpts from the most recent posts, but there are plenty of options. Rather than simply displaying the most recent excerpts from all categories you could choose a magazine-style approach that shows recent content by category. This is usually most effective for sites that publish a lot of content (typically more than one post per day) and probably have multiple authors contributing.

Another option that should be considered is the static front page. Rather than just displaying recent posts on the front page you could set a static page to draw attention to something specific, and to work as a call to action. For example, Copyblogger was recently re-designed and they moved from a more typical blog front page to a static front page that promotes the resources that they have for sale, as well as their email list. The new Copyblogger front page is not completely static, it does include a featured post area at the bottom of the page.

The approach that you take with the front page should be influenced by the decisions that have been made regarding the conversions and content that are prioritized. If you are focusing on a conversion for selling a specific product (as is the case with Copyblogger), a static front page may be more effective than a typical blog front page.

5. Plan for Ease of Navigation

One of the biggest challenges that you will face with a blog re-design, especially on blogs that already have a lot of content, is to make it easy for visitors to find the content that they are looking for, and to make it as easy as possible. And to make it more of a challenge, you’ll also want to consider the content that hasn’t even been published yet.

Most blogs use categories to help organize content, and links to the category pages are frequently used in blog navigation menus. However, sometimes a blog may have too many categories to include in a primary navigation menu. Tags and tag clouds are sometimes used as well. Linking to an archive that lists all posts can be helpful to some visitors, but not in cases where there is too much content to sift through. Links to monthly archives can also be helpful at times, especially for content that is time-sensitive.

When it comes to navigation there are several elements of the blog design that should be considered, and in total they should all work together to help visitors find the right content. Those elements include the main navigation menu, a secondary navigation menu (not used on all blogs), sidebar links, related content links at the end of posts, category/tag/author links at the top or bottom of posts, footer links, and a site-wide search.

It’s important to also consider the direction that the blog seems to be headed in the foreseeable future, and take this into consideration when planning for ease of navigation. For example, some blogs change the type of content that they publish every now and then, or they may take a different approach with their content. If the blog’s primary navigation menu includes links to five different categories and it is likely that new categories will be added, make sure that the menu can be adjusted to include those new categories when the time comes. So avoid designing the navigation to work with the blog as it is right now, but rather think about where the blog is likely to be over the next year or so and try to design it to support new types of content that may be added.

Smashing Magazine has adapted it’s current design several times in regards to the primary navigation in order to make it easier to navigate. They have added sections for posts on Coding, UX Design, and WordPress.

6. Consider Ads

Advertisements are a critical part of the sustainability of many blogs, and they should be accounted for in the design of such blogs. Ads that are not considered during the design process will usually look out of place and will wind up being more intrusive to visitors.

Before re-designing the blog consider the specific ad units and sizes. You’ll also want to consider any new ad zones that are likely to be included in the near future, so if you are working on a design for a client make sure you discuss this with them.

7. Prioritize Engagement

The ability of a blog to engage its readers will go a long way in determining the success of the blog. There are several different ways that readers can engage, including blog comments, following/connecting on social networking sites, votes on social media sites, and sharing links on sites like Twitter and Facebook. The more readers become engaged with a blog the more likely they are to keep coming back. Building a strong, loyal following will make the blog more successful in every way.

Almost all blogs include a comments section where readers can leave feedback. Some blogs are now using Facebook comments instead of typical blog comments, which is something that can be considered if Facebook is a major resource for connecting with the blog visitors.

Most blogs are now linking to profiles/pages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or other social networking sites that are relevant to the blog’s audience. Engaging with your readers now involves the use of these social networks that are outside of your website, but promoting the profiles through the blog can help to drastically increase engagement. During the re-design process, consider what social networks are the most important for engaging with the audience, and determine locations to promote them on the blog in order to attract new followers and increase engagement.

What’s Your Experience?

From your experience with blog re-designs, what have you found to be critical to the success of the re-design?

Photoshop is an amazing tool that allows designers and photographers to do some incredible things. But not every Photoshopped creation works out exactly as planned. Whether it is poor execution, going too far, or oversight of something important, Photoshop disasters are not uncommon. In this post we’ll showcase 30 examples that come from psdisasters.com, photoshopdisasters.com, and photoshop-disasters.net.

Holding a Hand

Metro Town: Shoulder Slip

Cote Rouen: A Screen Askew

Mr. Big: Belly Button-B-Gone

Gridiron: Mosaic Monstrosity

Fun.TV: Crotch-tastrophe

Wired: Staying Connected

E-Marilyn: Miss Direction

Maroon 5: Moves Like Jagger – Skills, Like, Missing

Schoner Wohnen: Changing Table Tragedy

AIM: Ready, AIM, You’re Fired

TRESemme: Inflatable Head

Aldi: Hard to Believe

Infolettre – Karoutchi: Serious Traffic Problems

Trending District Council: One of Us One of Us

Pearl: Three Finger Discount

Michael Strahan’s Horrific Claw Hand

25% Off an Arm

Awful Heads

Double Head

Wrong Legs or Wrong Dress?

Eye of the Storm

Half a Woman

Midget Arm

Home Depot: Running with Scissors

Fake Crowd

Yoga: Eight Angles Three Feet

Body Shop: The Tell-Tale Mart

Totsy Baltex: Somebody Stop the Screaming

Pampas Restaurante: Sliced and Ready to Serve

A few weeks ago we posted a showcase of beautiful HDR photography. True HDR photography involves taking multiple shots of the same subject with different exposures and combining them, but Photoshop allows you to mimic those effects with just one image. While you can always go through this process manually, there are also a number of Photoshop actions that can do the work for you very quickly. In this post we’ll highlight some of the best HDR Photoshop actions that will make it easy for you to create your own HDR images.

Premium HDR Photoshop Actions:

HDR Legendary Image Action by mrcharlesbrown $5

HDR Action by alter $4

Surreal HDR Actions by mudi $4

HDR Legendary Image Action Series 2 by mrcharlesbrown $5

HDR Legendary Image Action Series 3 by mrcharlesbrown $5

Dramatic Effect with False HDR by pastela $5

Supreme HDR Image Action by applelucero $5

Free HDR Photoshop Actions:

Fake HDR Photoshop Action by 2KOOL4U

Pseudo HDR by FinesseFX

HDR Effect by ALfannan8w

HDR Portrait by ALfannan8w

HDR Tools by forfie

HDR Effect 4.3 by sa-cool

Dylan’s HDR Detail Action by Toxic-Designs-Redux

HDR Action by SuperSzajs

For more Photoshop resources please see:

• Photoshop Actions
• Free Photoshop Brushes
• Photoshop Layer Styles
• Photoshop Patterns

Choosing the right color scheme is one of the most important decisions of the website design process, and it can also be one of the most challenging. Fortunately, there are a number of great tools available to help with color selection.

Some of the resources mentioned in this post will allow you to browse through a variety of color palettes or schemes, many will allow you to create and save your own color schemes, and some are interactive, allowing you to quickly create an effective color scheme.

Kuler

Adobe’s Kuler includes a large library of user-submitted color schemes. You can view the color schemes online or download them to be used in Adobe Creative Suite products.

Colour Lovers

Colour Lovers currently has almost 2 million color palettes created by its users. You can browse palettes by submission date, rating, views, and comments, or you can search by keyword.

ColoRotate

ColoRotate has a library of color schemes that you can browse, or you can create your own with their unique 3D tool. You can use it directly in Photoshop and Fireworks with the ColoRotate plugin.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer allows you to choose the type of scheme that you want to use (mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic, or accented analogic). You then adjust one of the colors on the wheel and the other colors will adjust as well, helping to create an appropriate color scheme.

ColorSchemer Gallery

ColorSchemer has a large library of user-created color schemes. You can browse by submission date, rating, or number of downloads, or you can search by keyword.

Pictaculous

Pictaculous is a simple online tool for generating a color scheme. You can upload a photo and it will suggest colors to use with the photo. You can then download the Adobe swatch of the suggested colors.

Color Spire

Color Spire is fairly simple to use. You select a starting color and it will suggest a palette of colors to use in combination. It also provides a basic preview to show how the colors would look on a sample website layout.

ColorExplorer

ColorExplorer includes a few different color tools. With the color picker you can select a color and see different variations. You can also view color libraries and use the color matching tool to help create a palette.

ColourGrab

ColourGrab is a simple tool that allows you to get colors from a picture that is online. Just enter the URL of the image and it will show which colors are used most in the photo.

Sphere: Color Theory Visualizer

With Sphere you can adjust one of the colors in the scheme and the others will automatically adjust to match. You can try different types of color schemes like analogous, complementary, triadic, tetradic, and more.

For more resources please see:

• Free Photoshop Actions
• Free Photoshop Styles
• Free Photoshop Patterns
• Free Website Analytics
• Free Photoshop Brushes

If you’re interested in designing your own custom t-shirts, there are a number of helpful tutorials that explain and demonstrate the process. Many web and graphic designers like to branch out to t-shirt design, even if it is only for fun and experimentation. In this post we’ll link to the best tutorials available for teaching how to design your own t-shirts.

How to Design an Impressive Graphic Tee in Photoshop

Vectorize a Landscape Photo Into a Watercolor Painting

DIY Vintage T-Shirts

Create a Custom T-Shirt Stencil Design

How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design

Create a Balanced T-Shirt Graphic

Design a One-Color T-Shirt

How to Design a Funny Monkey T-Shirt Illustration

Design Your Own Graphic Tee in Photoshop

Create an Iconic T-Shirt Artwork

How to Design a T-Shirt on a Budget and a Tight Deadline

Rapid-Fire Illustration Technique

Photoshop T-Shirt Design

Design an Artistic Watercolor T-Shirt Design

Design Your Own T-Shirt with a Typography Portrait

A Comprehensive Guide to Designing and Printing Your First T-Shirt

How to Prepare Artwork for Screen-Printing

Screen-Print Effects

Super-Slick, Screen Printing Separation with Illustrator

6 Great Tips On How to Prepare Artwork for T-Shirt Printing

For more tutorials please see:

• 30 Gadget Design Tutorials for Photoshop
• 25 Amazing Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials
• 30 Photoshop Tutorials for Amazing Lighting Effects
• 25 Photoshop Tutorials for Designing Abstract Backgrounds
• 25 Excellent Photoshop Texture Tutorials

Icons are an important part of web design. In many cases you can buy icons or download free ones, but sometimes you may need to create custom icons to get exactly what you need. Fortunately, there are a lot of tutorials out there that go through the process of designing an icon. In this post we’ll feature 35 tutorials for designing icons in Photoshop.

How to Create a Detailed Gauge Icon in Photoshop

Creating a Digital Tablet Icon

How to Create an Envelope Icon in Photoshop

Draw a 3D LCD Monitor with Photoshop

Create a Download Folder Icon in Photoshop

How to Draw a Shopping Bag Icon in Photoshop

Create an Apple Safari Icon in Photoshop

Create a Mac Style Home Icon in Photoshop

Make a Glossy Flash Drive Icon from Scratch

Create an Electrical Outlet Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Vibrant Radar Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Detailed Briefcase Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Social Media UFO Icons

Design a Sleek Google+ Icon

Create an Open Book Icon in Photoshop

Create a Detailed Vintage Television Icon in Photoshop

Creating a Paint Brush Icon

How to Draw a Vintage Polaroid Camera Icon

Creating a Camera Icon

Radar Icon in Photoshop

The Process of Making a Professional Set of Social Media Icons

Create a Google Docs Icon

How to Design a Beautiful Google Calendar Icon

Create a Beautiful Paint Brush Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a 3D Book Icon in Photoshop

Create a Cardboard Box Icon in Photoshop

Make a 3D Recycling Bin Icon with Photoshop

How to Make a 3D Folder Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Cute Yellow Alien Icon in Photoshop

Projector Icon Design Tutorial

How to Create a 3D House Icon with Photoshop

How to Make a Professional Buddy Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Beautiful Printer Icon in Photoshop

Create a 3D Industrial-Style Download Icon in Photoshop

Created a Detailed Camera Icon in Photoshop

For more Photoshop tutorials please see:

• 25 Outstanding Matte Painting Tutorials
• 25 Amazing Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials
• 35 Photoshop Tutorials for Website Layouts
• 35 Photoshop Photo Editing Tutorials
• 30 Poster Design Tutorials for Photoshop
• 30 Gadget Design Tutorials for Photoshop

Graffiti effects can be replicated with fonts that are designed specifically for this purpose. There are a number of free graffiti fonts available, and in this post we’ll showcase 25 of them. To download the fonts, click through to the source. Be sure to read the terms of use, especially if you are planning to use on a commercial project.

For inspiration, please see our Graffiti Art Showcase.

Street Writer

Scrawl

Graffogie

Most Wasted

Graffonti

Amsterdam Graffiti

Whoa!

Searfont

Street Soul

Rufa

Stylin’ BRK

The Battle Continuez

Subway

Ruthless One

Graffiti Treat

JustFist

Illegal Edding

Pyromane

ReskaGraf

STHLM Graffiti

Urban Scrawl Chill

Zit Graffiti

El&Font

Vandalism

Graffpity

Photoshop actions can be great tools for editing photos and for improving efficiency in Photoshop. You can, of course, create you own actions, but there are also a lot of actions out there available for free download.

We’ve posted collections of Photoshop actions in the past, and today we’d like to feature some fresh and new actions that are available for download. If you see something that you would like to try, click on the link or the image and you’ll be led to the source where you can download the action.

Smile Action

Lovely Bones Action

Soft Vintage Curve

David Action

Crystaline

Action the Otherside

Reach Out and Touch Me

Titanium Action

Blue Passion Action

Emphasize

How to Love Action

Action Dark Blue Tennessee

Taylor Action

Cozy Actions

Photoshop Action 375

ColdKiss 1

Action 34

Soft Honeymoon Action

Only Yellow

Action

Ladybug Actions

Vanilla Sky

Photoshop Actions 16

Retro Pink Action

BMR Action

Cross Processing Actions

Facebook Storyboard Actions

Hipsta Mini Set

Out of Ink

Summer of You

Because of You

Rusty Vintage PS Action

Ozgur’s Burned Light Action

Ozgur’s Sea Tune Action

PurpleSky