As important as information and interface design are, it’s the satisfied feeling of designing something that just plain looks awesome that keeps us going during those times when the creative well is dry, when you’ve stared at a blank canvas for hours, when you’ve saved a hundred attempt.psd’s, and when you’re fed up of design. It’s because you know that when you have that finished, polished, veritable work of art up on your screen, and you’ve switched Photoshop into full screen mode and you’re looking at it from different angles around the room, and you’re basking in the glory of your perfectly positioned pixels, you just know that this is the greatest profession in the world!
14 Quick and Slick Portfolio Templates (via ThemeForest)
Dec 5th in Web Roundups by CollisHaving an online portfolio is pretty much a no-brainer these days. But all too often it’s the old story of the cobbler’s children who have no shoes - or in our case the designer who has no time for their own portfolio. Whether it’s because there’s too much work on, or because you can’t settle on a design, or because you’re somewhere in the middle of building the "perfect" portfolio, sometimes you just need to get something together, and fast.
Photoshop Paper Texture from Scratch then Create a Grungy Web Design with it!
Dec 4th in Interface by CollisThis year has seen a big increase in grungey / textured / hand-drawn styled website designs. By nature I tend to design a cleaner look myself, but I thought I’d try my hand at grunge today and write up a tutorial on creating a simple paper texture from scratch in Photoshop then marrying it with a web layout to create a neat design.
Then later this week we’ll take this same web design and I’ll show you how you can take remixing even further than just changing backgrounds and colour schemes, that in fact you can change the entire style of a design. But first let’s make our paper texture site!
9 Information Design Tips to Make You a Better Web Designer
Dec 3rd in Articles by CollisIt’s probably the least glamourous part of web design, but information design is by no means the least important. Locating and consuming information is the quintessential web task, far surpassing buying, playing and communicating, all of which include a good portion of information design themselves. How users find and then avail themselves of all that information is affected by how it is structured and presented. Thus every web designer should be equipped to make qualified and informed decisions on just how to do this.
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The 3 Components of Good Web Design
Dec 3rd in Articles by CollisGood design isn’t just about good looks, and nowhere is this truer than in web design. In fact it makes sense to think of web design as being made up of three major non-technical components: aesthetic design, information design and interface design. If you want to be a great web designer it’s essential that you have a firm grasp of all three.
How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed ‘n’ Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds
Dec 2nd in Interface by CollisIt’s pretty amazing how much colour and background can change the look and feel of a website. In this tutorial we’re going to put together a quick, simple but effective layout and then create variations using backgrounds, photos and patterns. We’ll also look at how to make seamless tiled backgrounds out of a photo, methods for ending a single photo and simple ways to create pixel patterns. In short it’s a jam packed tutorial!
How a Turn a Texture into a Seamlessly Tiled Background
Dec 2nd in Interface by CollisTiled backgrounds are great for both website backgrounds and in all kinds of Photoshop work. They are particularly useful when working with textures where you need a larger overall background than the small image you have to work with. In this quick tutorial I’ll take you through taking a texture and turning it into a background image ready for seamless tiling. It’s a useful little technique that’s been around forever. We need this technique for today’s other tutorial - How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed ‘n’ Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds.
Web Design Week on PSDTUTS + You Can Now Sell Photoshop Templates via ThemeForest
Dec 2nd in Articles by CollisFor as long as I can remember we’ve gotten requests for more web design posts here on PSDTUTS. Well web design fans, it’s your lucky day because all this week we’ll be bringing you articles and tutorials on just that topic. What’s the occasion? Well today our sister site ThemeForest is adding a whole new section - Photoshop Templates - meaning you can now sell your straight Photoshop designs via ThemeForest.
Best of TUTS - November 2008
Dec 1st in Web Roundups by SkellieThe TUTS+ network has been growing like crazy and this month we received more page views and visitors than ever before. Here’s a showcase of the best TUTS+ content in November.
Best of the Web - November 2008
Dec 1st in Web Roundups by EmilNovember was a month filled with tons of good material worth featuring in this wrap up. I narrowed down the best tutorials, free downloads, and articles on the web for this month. We have an article featuring our editor Sean, a interesting tutorial on a planet scene, and some cool free brushes and textures. Lets get into the content.
