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Design with Swirls and Flourishes

Design with Swirls and Flourishes
It’s very common these days to see swirls and flourishes within graphic design. You can use brushes or vectors to achieve this look, but if you want to customize your own you’ll have to dig in and spend some time creating them. This swirl designs tutorial will cover some of the techniques you can use to create your own beautiful swirls and flourishes. A quick thanks to Zoe who requested this kind of tutorial by dropping me a comment. You should check out My 10 Favorite Swirls and Decorative Brush Sets post for some awesome free design elements you can download. Design with Swirls and Flourishes Tutorial Step 1 Open up Illustrator and create a new document. Step 2 Throughout this tutorial we are going to create brushes and symbols to help us make the shapes. Step 3 Open up the brushes palette. Step 4 Click on the swirl you made and then the new brush you made to apply the brush. Step 5 Next up we are going to make a tighter swirl at the end of our line utilizing the spiral tool. Step 6 Step 7

Illustrator Tutorial: How to make a Vector Glass Button | BittBox If our freebies have benefited you personally or have helped you earn a profit please consider donating via paypal. Donate Now If you are a regular BittBox reader, this is the post you’ve been waiting for! Not only will this tutorial help you make your own vector glass buttons, bars and who knows what else; it will help you to understand the structure of my free files a little better, and how to customize them easier. Make a new (blank) Illustrator file, name it, and save it to your desktop. Click once on the artboard, without dragging, to bring up the Rounded Rectangle tool options dialogue box. Click “OK” or hit enter to create your basic button shape. Next, apply a drop shadow, by going to the “Effect” menu and select > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Choose your drop shadow settings. Now we have our basic button shape with a drop shadow. Select your fill and apply the default black-to-white gradient from your swatches palette. Your second shape should now look like this: And presto!

Spiral Tool Mysteries - Solved! One of the most intriguing tools in Adobe Illustrator is the Spiral tool, not because of what it does – creates spirals – but because of the mysterious terms used its dialog box. Words like Radius, Decay, and Segments leave artists with more questions than answers. It's one of those tools that, even when you play with it, little light is shed on understanding exactly how it works. A few years ago, one bright student asked me the following questions: “What is this Radius actually measuring and from what center point.” “What is meant by Decay and why is it a percentage?” “I know that a Segment is the path that connects two anchors points. To answer these questions, I had to go beyond just playing with the tool. To stop this useful tool from spiraling out of control, follow the simple steps below as you solve the mysteries of this intriguing dialog box for yourself. STEP 1 Opening Up a Mystery. Select your Spiral tool and click anywhere in your work area to open the Spiral dialog box.

Thinking with Type | Home Blend and Mask Yourself a Great Poster - Vectortuts+ In this tutorial, we'll be creating a poster with a strong geometric central design, which utilizes flowing blends, masks shapes, and subtle gradients, to create a sophisticated final work. Learn each detailed step in creating this poster. Let's get started! Step 1 First, we'll prepare the document and swatches. Create a new US Letter sized document using RGB mode (located under the Advanced options). Bright Green: R=199, G=255, B=0Blue: R=121, G=255, B=255Hot Pink: R=255, G=0, B=139Orange: R=255, G=147, B=0Dark Grey: R=50, G=53, B=56 Step 2 Now let's create a 4xU shaped icon. Step 3 Grab the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) and select the bottom anchor point of the circle. Step 4 Turn on Smart Guides (View > Smart Guides or Command + U). Hold down the Command key and click on the white background of your canvas to end this path. Step 5 Grab the Selection Tool and use it to select the entire object. Step 6 Step 7 Step 8 Step 9 You should end up with this result (see image below). Step 10 Step 11

Web Design Library — One-stop Web Design Resource 40+ Freebies & Goodies For Web Designers - December Complete UIs and elements, textures and brushes for Photoshop, HTML templates, background designs, icons, fonts and tools make our lives as designers and developers easier, saving us the time we would otherwise be spending on creating them. Fortunately, around the world, there are many creators willing to share their work for free allowing the rest of us to use them. Here is the third collection of freebies and goodies available for web designers. If you would like to check out our earlier collections, follow the links: Should you find that these freebies have helped you in one way or another, do consider donating to these creators or supporting them in other forms of appreciation for all their hard work. PSDs & Templates Flat Infobox Layered PSD Colorful Business Card in PSD Format by al rayhan Tinyone: PSD One Page Template by Tommy Ngo LinkedIn Redesign GUI Kit PSD by Pontus Wellgraf Random UI Elements in PSD by Tyler Gross Bootstrap Style Homepage PSD Template Medical PSD Flat Theme Fonts

Useful Cheat Sheets for Web Designers - Six Revisions By Jacob Gube Cheat sheets (also known as reference cards, reference sheets, etc.) not only helps you remember things quickly, but can also serve as wall decoration for your workspace. In this post, you’ll find 28 excellent, useful cheat sheets in various file formats for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, colors, typography, and other web-design related topics all in one page with pictures of each cheat sheet. If you’re looking for front-end web developer cheat sheets (more CSS, HTML, and JavaScript) check out Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers. Photoshop Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet Downloads: PDF (Windows), PDF (Mac) Keys for using the Layers palette (HTML) Photoshop Toolbox Reference (HTML) Photoshop Lasso Tool Cheatsheet Download: PDF Photoshop Brush Tool Cheatsheet Download: PDF Color RGB Hex Colour Chart Downloads: PDF, PNG Color Reference Guide (PDF) Web Designer Color Reference Hexagon Mouse Pad Download: GIF Web Safe Color Chart (HTML) Hexidecimal Color Chart (HTML) Typography Browsers

Psdtuts+ | Adobe Photoshop tutorials, from beginner to advanced.

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