50 Fresh Sets of Free Photoshop Actions

Published January 26th, 2011 in Design - 11 Comments

Photoshop Actions can be an incredible time saving tool for designers and photographers. Whether you are creating your own custom actions or using those that have been created by others, actions help by saving time through elimination of repetitive tasks.

Last year we published a collection of some of the best Photoshop Actions, and today we’d like to follow that up with 50 new and fresh sets of free actions that have been released since our original post last May. If you see something you like, click on the image or the text and you will be led to the source where it can be downloaded.

Peace Action

25 Outstanding Poster Design Tutorials for Photoshop

Published December 22nd, 2010 in Design - 7 Comments

Poster design provides a wonderful opportunity to practice and improve your Photoshop skills. There are a number of outstanding poster design tutorials that will take you step-by-step through the process of creating something special. In this post we’ll feature 25 tutorials for creating impressive posters in Photoshop. The tutorials featured here will show you how to design posters in a variety of different styles.

How to Create a Retro Sci-Fi Computer Game Poster

40 Cinema 4D Tutorials for Impressive Results

Published December 15th, 2010 in Design - 10 Comments

Cinema 4D is a modeling, animation, and rendering program that allows designers to create impressive 3D works. In this post we’ll present a collection of 40 of the best tutorials for working with Cinema 4D. These tutorials cover a variety of topics and will show a sample of what can be done with Cinema 4D, hopefully also opening up your own ideas.

3D Text in Cinema 4D

25 Photoshop Tutorials for Stunning Photo Manipulations

Published November 29th, 2010 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 9 Comments

Photoshop allows talented designers to do amazing things with photo manipulation. Fortunately, there are plenty of quality tutorials available that teach a variety of techniques. In this post we’ll feature 25 tutorials from a variety of websites and blogs. If you see something you like, click through and follow the tutorial to improve your own skills.

You may also be interested in 30 Photo Manipulation Tutorials for Photoshop.

Melting Girl in Photoshop

Design a Portfolio Site in Photoshop

Published November 18th, 2010 in Design - 24 Comments

The portfolio site is critical factor in the success of a freelance designer or a design studio. Today we’ll be going through the process of creating a homepage layout of a portfolio site in Photoshop. The design we will be creating is available for download to Vandelay Premier members. The download includes the PSD files for the homepage and 2 secondary pages in three color schemes.

Here is a look at what we will be creating (click the image to view it in full size).

25 Photoshop Tutorials for Designing Abstract Backgrounds

Published November 17th, 2010 in Design, Photoshop Tutorials - 14 Comments

Abstract backgrounds are very common in web design and for other purposes like poster and wallpaper design. Photoshop provides plenty of potential for designing amazing abstract backgrounds, and in this post we’ll showcase 25 tutorials that show how it can be done.

Create Abstract Colorful Balls Illustrations in Photoshop CS5

Create a Grunge Texture Brush in Photoshop

Published October 27th, 2010 in Design - 12 Comments

Textures are commonly used in web design and other types of graphic design, and fortunately they are relatively easy to work with. You can use a photograph to create texture, but Photoshop brushes also present a simple way to add texture to your work.

While there are a lot of Photoshop brushes available for creating texture, there will be times when you’ll want to create your own. By creating your own brushes you’ll have more control over the final outcome and once you have the brushes completed you will be able to re-use them whenever you want to quickly add texture.

We recently released a set of 25 grunge texture brushes for Vandelay Premier members and in this tutorial I will go through the same process that was used to create those brushes.

50 Amazing After Effects Tutorials

Published October 21st, 2010 in Design - 16 Comments

After Effects is Adobe’s product for creating motion graphics and visual effects.  It’s amazing what you can create with After Effects and some knowledge, or in this case with a little help from some tutorials. Here we’ll feature 50 of the best tutorials for creating amazing work with After Effects.

Disintegration

35 Amazing Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

Published September 16th, 2010 in Design - 31 Comments

Creating amazing text effects in Photoshop can help to take your work to the next level. Fortunately, there are a lot of great tutorials out there that show a wide variety of techniques for working with text in Photoshop. In this post we’ll feature 35 Photoshop text effect tutorials. You may also be interested in a post from a few years ago, 50 Essential Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials. We also have a post that is great for anyone just getting started with Photoshop, Learn Photoshop: All the Basics for Beginners.

Clash of the Titans Text Effect in Photoshop

Tutorial: How to Create an Adobe Illustrator Brush

Published September 13th, 2010 in Design - 19 Comments

Both Illustrator brushes and Photoshop brushes can be extremely valuable resources for graphic designers, whether you are creating your own or using those created by someone else. There are several good tutorials out there for creating various types of Photoshop brushes (see How to Make a Photoshop Brush Set), but unfortunately there are not very many tutorials for creating Illustrator brushes.

If you’re more familiar with using brushes in Photoshop as compared to Illustrator the first thing to understand is that there are a few different types of brushes in Illustrator. For this tutorial we will be creating “art brushes”. In Illustrator you can apply the brush to a path that has been created. It could be a straight line, the outline of a shape, or some other type of path. This makes Illustrator’s brushes very versatile.

In addition to art brushes there are also calligraphic brushes, scatter brushes, bristle brushes and pattern brushes. We’ll really only be looking at art brushes in this tutorial, but for more on the various types you can see An Overview of Brushes in Illustrator.

Here is a look at the brush that we will be creating in this tutorial: