Thomas Rondony - 30+ Best Texture Tutorials for Photoshop Making art or various designs will often require different textures. It can be that you need it for that extra grungy look or maybe you are trying to recreate a piece of denim for a logo. It can be very useful to be able to make your own textures in Photoshop. This way you get the exact effect you want, its customizable, no need to pay anyone for the use of it etc. I’ve collected some of the best texture tutorials I know of and hope these will inspire! Enjoy! 1. Denim, a rugged cotton twill textile has been around for a long time. 2. The texture of Grass can be used for many different designs, and also here the variations are many. 3. The crumbled paper texture is a texture that always is popular. 4. Military style textures are mainly popular for those who make artwork that features military machinery or personnel. 5. These cool and versatile scales can be made in any color combination you want. 6. This is a texture trying to recreate the look of the good old Mac Powerbook (g4). 7. 8.
Retro and Vintage In Modern Web Design Advertisement Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale. When applying “old-style” elements to their works, designers produce creative and appealing designs that make their websites stand out and look really different. Retro and vintage designs exhibit graphic solutions that are strongly influenced by the time period that they are supposed to represent. Such elements create a nostalgic atmosphere, awaken feelings and memories and attempt to communicate information effectively using emotions. The Secrets Of Vintage and Retro Designs What elements do designers use to create a genuine vintage or retro atmosphere? illustrations from old posters, movies, newspapers, CDs, vinyls, ads; old-style typography (e.g. Custom Design6 Prahba29
Thomas Rondony - Photoshop: How To Make An Awesome Grungy Paper Texture From Scratch If our freebies have benefited you personally or have helped you earn a profit please consider donating via paypal. Donate Now Many of you might remember my Free High-Res Grungy Paper Textures I gave away a while back. Step 1: Scan Get a natural-brown-colored piece of paper (or brown paper bag), give it a good crinkle, then flatten it back out and scan it in. If you don’t have a scanner click here to download the image I’m using from Flickr if you’d still like to follow along. Step 2: Add Texture First, we’re going to add a little texture to the paper itself. Select “Canvas” from the drop down menu, set the scale to around 100, and the depth between 2 and 4, then Click OK. You should now see something like below: (full size close-up) Now we have a canvas-like texture, but it only goes in one direction. Now that your image is on it’s side, we’re going to apply the texture again, this will give us the grain going in both directions. Step 3: New Layer Now it’s time to start grunging it up. Done!
More Web Design Trends For 2009 Advertisement Last week we presented 10 Web Design Trends For 20091, our review of the most promising developments and techniques in web design that may become big in 2009. In the first part we covered embossing letters (“letterpress”), rich user interfaces, PNG transparency, big typography, carousels and media blocks. This post is the second part of our review. You may want to take a look at the following related posts: Web Design Trends For 2009 Let’s first take a closer look at some of the trends we identified, discovered and observed over the last months. 1. As we pointed out a couple of months ago in the showcase 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box8, we are observing a strong trend towards more individual and creative layouts. In these out-of-the-box-designs, the overall creative approach is often more important and more memorable than the attention to details. 2. 3. A design with multiple columns (3+ columns) is not necessarily a complex design. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Thomas Rondony - 100 Beautiful Free Textures - Smashing Magazine Use of texture in Web design is extremely common. Part of the reason textures are so useful to designers is the relative ease of the integrating one into a design if a high-quality textured image already exists, not to mention the endless possibilities . Fortunately, plenty of photographers and designers are willing to share their work with the rest of us so that we can use them in a number of different ways. In this post, we’ll look at 100 different textures in a wide variety of different categories. For more on textures see: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. (al) Leave a Comment Yay! Web Design Trends For 2009 Advertisement We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go mainstream and become a classic approach. As a result, new design approaches come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them, new trends emerge. Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. This article covers only 10 of the over 25 trends we’ve identified over the last months. Update: the second part of our review1 is now published as well. Web Design Trends For 2009 Let’s first take a closer look at the main trends we identified, discovered and observed over the last months. Embossing Letterpress Rich user interfaces PNG transparency Big typography Font replacement (sIFR, etc.) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Symptoms Of An Epidemic: Web Design Trends Why You Should Get Excited About Emotional Branding Globalization, low-cost technologies and saturated markets are making products and services interchangeable and barely distinguishable. As a result, today’s brands must go beyond face value and tap into consumers’ deepest subconscious emotions to win the marketplace. In recent decades, the economic base has shifted from production to consumption, from needs to wants, from objective to subjective. We’re moving away from the functional and technical characteristics of the industrial era, into a time when consumers are making buying decisions based on how they feel about a company and its offer. Read more... A Guide To Validating Product Ideas With Quick And Simple Experiments You probably know by now that you should speak with customers and test your idea before building a product. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. Read more... Read more...
Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design - Volume 2 Advertisement When it comes to web design too often perfect, colorful and boxy designs make the cut; however, the reality is different as it is hard to find objects with a perfect shape and a perfect color in our daily routine. To achieve a unique and communicative design we need to consider more creative approaches. For instance, we can draw sites by ourselves — or at least some parts of it. The main purpose of hand-drawn elements lies in their ability to convey a personality and an individual note in times when perfect, boxy and rounded elements can be found almost everywhere. They look different and they can make a web-site look different. And in fact, this is done quite often: whether a blog, a shop, an ad, a private page, or some collaborative project — doesn’t matter whether with Flash or (X)HTML. Please also have a look at our previous showcase Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design What’s new? Hand-drawn elements are used moderately Script fonts gain on popularity 1. Logos Headers 2.
Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples Advertisement Navigation is the most significant element in web design. Since web-layouts don’t have any physical representation a user can stick to, consistent navigation menu is one of the few design elements which provide users with some sense of orientation and guide them through the site. Users should be able to rely on it which is why designers shouldn’t mess around with it. That’s why in most cases it’s where simple, intuitive and conventional solutions are usually the best option. However, it doesn’t mean that they need to be boring. This article presents recent trends, examples and innovative solutions for design of modern navigation menus. 1. The most significant task a navigation menu has to fulfill is to unambiguously guide the visitors through the different sections of the site. This navigation scheme can be used not only for the horizontal navigation; it can can be applied to vertical navigation as well. 2. “Green” version of the traditional Mac-style menu 3. 4. 5. 6.
Веб-дизайн. Каждому устройству свое представление Регулярно увеличивающееся количество разнообразных устройств предоставляющих доступ во «Всемирную паутину» радует практически любого гика, но зачастую огорчает разработчиков и дизайнеров сайтов. В абсолютном большинстве сайтов совершенно нет поддержки ничего, кроме браузеров обычного компьютера, да и пресловутая кросбраузерность не всегда реализована в полном объеме. Хоть разработчики устройств и стремятся свести к минимуму различия в необходимом представлении, но не всегда это возможно по техническим причинам. Стоит ли поддерживать различные методы доступа к своему сайту? Какими устройствами сейчас пользуются? Попробуем определить какими устройствами, на сегодняшний день, пользуются люди для доступа в сеть и попробуем разобрать, каковы отличия в сайтах оптимизированных для этих устройств. ПК, ноутбуки и нетбуки Самая массовая часть пользователей использует именно эти классы устройств для доступа в сеть. Основных проблем разработки сайта для ПК я вижу две: Иная ситуация. Интернет планшеты
Использование ориентированного на пользователей подхода в веб дизайне для мобильных устройств « uxdnepr Перевод статьи A User-Centered Approach To Web Design For Mobile Devices опубликованной на сайте Smashing Magazine. Термин «Мобильный Веб» (который часто критикуется) обычно используется для описания доступа в интернет с помощью мобильного устройства. Это определение достаточно широкое, и покрывает такие понятия, как использование браузеров в стандартных мобильных телефонах, так и приложений для смартфонов и интернет планшетов. В наши дни, компании часто начинают разговор с точго, что «нам нужно приложение для iPhone», вместо того чтобы для начала изучить что именно требуется пользователям от мобильной версии, какие устройства они используют, и только потом определиться с направлением – мобильный веб сайт или мобильное приложение. Мобильные веб сайты достаточно универсальны, затраты на разработку весьма малы, при этом они доступны практически для любого мобильного телефона. Непрерывный жизненный цикл дизайна мобильного веб сайта Давайте обсудим каждый этап этого цикла более детально.