Entries Tagged as 'Design'
40 Excellent Photoshop Textures and Backgrounds Tutorials
Published June 2nd, 2008 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 119 Comments
When it comes to creating backgrounds for websites, posters, and other types of designs, Photoshop provides unlimited potential. Textures are often used in backgrounds in addition to abstract effects. Textures can sometimes be created from scratch using filters and other features of Photoshop, or they can be created with the help of photographs.
In this post we’ll link to 40 tutorials that will show you how to create impressive backgrounds and textures for your own work. Follow along with of few of these tutorials and you will be creating awesome backgrounds and textures that make your designs look great.
Unique Textures without Using Brushes
My Favorite Sites for Web Design Tutorials
Published May 28th, 2008 in Design - 30 Comments
For those of us who are interested in always learning new tricks and improve our design skills, we’re fortunate to have a number of very valuable websites and blogs that regularly publish high quality, informative tutorials. In this post I’d like to take a look at some of my favorite places for tutorials, and I encourage you to share your favorites in the comments.
PSDTUTS
While there are plenty of blogs and websites for Photoshop tutorials, PSDTUTS is the king. In recent months their team of writers have been publishing a new tutorial almost every day. You’ll find very high quality work here in a variety of different areas. I frequently work through their tutorials and always learn a lot from the process.
From the Archives: Create a Dark Themed Web Design from Scratch, Creating a Stunning Digital Smoke Effect.
40 Options for Converting PSD to HTML
Published May 26th, 2008 in Design - 259 Comments
I’m sure you’ve seen advertisements for a few different services that will convert your PSD files into HTML and CSS. If you’re looking to save some time on your next project you may want to consider trying one of these services. In this post I’ve compiled 40 different options. If you have experience with any of these companies please feel free to leave a comment.
CSS Rockstars
Turnaround – 2 Days
Starting price – $149
Additional pages – $65
Options for Easily Adding Flickr Photos to Your Website
Published May 11th, 2008 in Design - 13 Comments
Flickr is of course the most popular photo hosting and sharing service online. Many Flickr users also want to display their photos on their website or blog. Fortunately there are a number of different options for users. Here we’ll take a look at some of the best choices.
Official Flickr Badge – Flickr allows you to choose between two types of badges – HTML or Flash. Photos can be selected by using tags. (You’ll need to be logged in to Flickr to access this page).
99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration
Published May 5th, 2008 in Design - 113 Comments
Web designers and graphic designers are always looking for new sources of design inspiration. Of course, many of us turn to CSS galleries, and there are even more sources of offline inspiration. Personally, I find the work in many Flickr groups to be another excellent source of inspiration. Aside from the billions of photos on Flickr, there are also some groups that have been established to showcase the work of designers. Here is a look at 99 of them according to category (about half of them are general graphic design groups). Below the link to each group you’ll see the number of members and the number of items (pictures, graphics, screenshots, etc.) that have been submitted to the group, plus I have included part of the group description as listed by the moderator.
45 Photo Editing Tutorials for Photoshop
Published April 29th, 2008 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 158 Comments
If you’re looking to improve a website by using Photoshop to enhance a photo to make it clearer, more interesting, or more exciting, here are 45 of the best tutorials to show you some of the possibilities.
50 Essential Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials
Published April 21st, 2008 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 168 Comments
Last month I published a collection of 45 Photoshop Tutorials for Better Navigation, which quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog. Due to the response, I spent some time finding more great Photoshop tutorials. Here are 50 of the best tutorials for working with text.
Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text
65 Resources for Grid-Based Design
Published March 31st, 2008 in Design - 61 Comments
Grid-based design is obviously a popular approach in modern web design. Ford designers that use grids, this post includes links to useful tools that can improve your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as some articles for advanced techniques. For those of you who are not as familiar with the details of grid-based design, there are plenty of articles and learning resources here.
Articles:
Grids Are Good – Presentation in a PDF document
Grid (page layout) – Wikipedia
Why Use a Grid – Mark Boulton
5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Preface – Mark Boulton
5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Part 1 – Mark Boulton
101 Typography Resources for Web Designers
Published March 24th, 2008 in Design - 149 Comments
Lists of Great Fonts:
40+ Excellent Freefonts for Professional Design – Smashing Magazine
80 Beautiful Typefaces for Professional Design – Smashing Magazine
60 Brilliant Typefaces for Corporate Design – Smashing Magazine
30 Fonts that All Designers Must Own – Just Creative Design
Most Popular Free Quality Fonts – Tech Magazine
Great Fonts for Web 2.0 – Modern Life is Rubbish
13 Typefaces Every Graphic Designer Needs – David Airey
25 Best Free Quality Fonts – Vitaly Friedman
Web/Graphic Designer Group Interview
Published March 23rd, 2008 in Design - 53 Comments
Recently I had the privilege to do a brief interview by email with 10 excellent designers. I asked each designer the same five questions, and all of their responses are included below. You probably are familiar with most, if not all, of these people, and I’m sure there is plenty that we can all learn from these interviews.
The participants are:
Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe
John Phillips of Freelance Folder
David Airey
Matt Griffin of Liquid Design Media
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks
Connor Wilson
Thord Daniel Hedengren of Splashpress Media
Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design
Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design
Dejan Cancarevic of StylizedWeb
