We once again have worked our way through another week, that even came complete with a family holiday over the weekend, and have arrived once more at time for our weekly round-up. As always, we have rundown through the design communities postedings from this past week to showcase those that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and wanted to share with our readers. We wanted to ensure that these brilliant bits from the week didn't somehow slip under your radar. So take a moment to sift back through the offerings that were left in our readers, and we just couldn't keep to ourselves.
Roundup - A Showcase of 3D Typography: Tutorials & Examples - First in the post, we are going to point you to a few different tutorials that will teach you how to do a variety of 3d typographical effects to incorporate into your work. Then we are going to show you some beautiful examples of 3D typography to inspire you into using your newly learned techniques.
Inspiration - Print Design – That Was Then, This Is Now! - We wanted to look back at the earlier days of print ads and see the styles and techniques that were prevalent back in the days. But we wanted to go just beyond a simple showcase of retro print designs, we also wanted to compare them with a slice of today’s print advertising market to see how far we’ve come. So we set out across the vast sea of cyberspace to fish out a few examples from the vault of yesteryear, and to track down a couple of newer examples to showcase along side them.
Roundup - 5 Unique and Unusual Twitter Tools - Since the launch of Twitter, the app-happy webs have flooded with thousands of tools to accompany this social media mogul dedicated to one singular purpose. Serve the Twitter. More specifically to selectively serve up the twitterverse’s offerings in so many different ways and through so many different interfaces. Of the applications available, some are extremely useful, some are purely crap, and some are just strange and fun. For this post, we will be focusing on the latter.
Handy Tips for Creating a Print CSS Stylesheet - Print stylesheets often come as a secondary thought on many websites, after all, who prints a webpage anyway?! Despite their slightly infrequent use, a print stylesheet can really help polish the printed document for when it is used. It doesn’t take too long to create, so let’s take a look at some handy tips that you can put into practice on your own site.
Review: Tweetdeck Refresh plus new iPhone App - Just a little bit ago tweetdeck released its refreshed desktop client and iPhone app. I was pretty stoked to find them showing a new site design as well. There is a video review of the Tweetdeck interface and as well as RAM usage.
Tips For Creating High Selling Templates - Creating templates that will sell extremely well is something we all want to do, but it takes time and skill. Luckily, there are some tips we can take from the masters and apply to our own work. Here are some great ways to improve your templates and increase your sales.
10 Rules of Front End Coding - What follows here is a series of 10 things to remember and practice on each web development project. I have listed them here in order of importance as many of the steps build on each other.
A Detailed Look at the Z-Index CSS Property - I would venture to guess that z-index is probably the CSS property that is more speedily abandoned than any other. Hopefully this article will clear up some misunderstandings regarding z-index.
Random Gradients vol. 1 - There are 100 gradients included and they're free to download for personal and commercial uses. I've created random solid colors (no particular style or whatsoever).
MOO! Font - Free for Download - Ideal for Logo Designs and Posters - MOO! is a free font, a ultra-fat, electro-style, geometric typeface. It was designed focusing on logotypes, titles and display letterforms, with cut-out diacritics.
Free Texture Tuesday: Extreme Grunge - This week I went out of my way to make the dirtiest, most grunge-y textures I could conjure up.
Free Vectors - 15 Paint Brushstroke Illustrator Brushes - A pack of 15 high-quality paint brushstroke Illustrator Brushes. I think they came out really cool, and could be used subtly, and for details, as well as full blown paint brush strokes.
Finger Paints Brush set - 20 brushes free for commercial and non-commercial use.
10 Colorful Motion Blur Textures - The majority of the time motion blur is looked down upon in the photography world. Sure, it can come in handy at times when used properly, but it's more often a nuisance caused by low-light rather than a deliberate creative element. Hopefully you can find some cool uses for motion blur in texture form though.
Free Theme: WP Typo - WP Typo is a beautiful theme that is 100% typographic, there are no images used at all. You can do whatever the heck you want with it. No attribution required.
10 High-Quality Free Brown Paper Textures - In this set, you’ll find 10 free and high-resolution brown paper textures which can be used in a wide range of ways. They have a very liberal Creative Commons license so you can use them in any manner you choose, whether it’s personal or commercial.
Interview with Ee Venn Soh - Ee Venn Soh has one of the most unique design styles I have ever seen, and it all roots from his passion and devotion to art. He designs in the purest form and you can see he has a genuine love for creating illustrations by having a conversation with him. In this interview, we discuss his style, one of his best illustrations "Silver Maiden," and a lot more.
Interview With Darren Hoyt On WPTopics.com - Darren Hoyt who we know from creating the Mimbo Pro theme has launched a new site called WPTopics.com which tries to present WordPress information from only established sites. I was lucky enough to talk to Darren for an hour the other day to find out a little more about this particular website.
Interview - Florian Nicolle - Florian Nicolle is a young designer located in France. I have came across some of his works in DeviantArt and found his illustrations do have an unique style of his own.
Interview With Josh Tilton From Grip Creative - Today I have interview an amazing web designer called Josh Tilton. Josh owns his own web design company called Grip Creative. Some of his work is outstanding, and his weblog design is on many different web galleries across the internet.
Tutorial: Create a Very Informative Archives Page
How to Create a Stinking Zombie Flesh Eater in Illustrator - In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a cartoon zombie in Illustrator. Starting by creating a fresh corpse, we will then 'yuck' it up using a number of techniques. Let's 'rip' this one apart!
Create dropdown menus with CSS only - I rarely see drop down menus that behave like drop down lists, but I really like them. I noticed, however, that people often use JavaScript to achieve this effect. Actually, there is a simple way to do it only with CSS.
2 Ways To Create Realistic “Depth of Field” - In this tutorial we are going to learn how to create realistic “Depth of Field” in Photoshop. We are going to look at two different ways of doing it depending on what kind of picture
Create an Abstract Underwater Scene - Create an awesome abstract underwater scene using photo manipulation techniques. Learn how to create a complex abstract composition.
How To Create Your Own Stats Program (JavaScript, AJAX, PHP)
Create a Clean and Colorful Web Layout in Photoshop - In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a clean corporate layout in Photoshop.
Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator - Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.
Twitter Study Group - TSG is a service for anyone. It is starting for those in the design/programming community since that is where my interests lie, and I figured it would be best to work out the kinks on projects I actually took part in. The basic idea is like a study group – you have a group of people who all want to learn the same thing, so you support each other, and work on the project at the same time so you have others to go to with questions, show your progress and compare notes.
theWPresser - A new blog for Wordpress News, Reviews, A Gallery, Coding, and Tutorials.
Fuel your Photography - Ah, so you know your way around a dark room, eh? Maybe you’ve graduated from the old point and shoot to a camera that makes REAL magic. Nice to meet ya! We like people like you, after all, seeing the world through your lenses reminds us what a crazy world it really is. It’s because we like you that we’ve dedicated a website-Fuel Your Photography- to inspiring you.
Mariusz Ciesla - A new design blog featuring articles on design and inspiration, tutorials on working with designs in Photoshop, Pixelmator and GIMP, news and rumors.
Digging Into Wordpress - the blog home for the upcoming book of the same name by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. Books and blogs are the perfect compliment to each other when it comes to learning web technologies. The blog is there for searchability, quick tips, and copy and pasteable code. The book is there for offline reference and that essential full-attention first read through when your brain is ready to soak in a ton of new information. Digging Into WordPress brings you the best of both worlds.
Vlad Georgescu - A new web designer site launch
CSS Websites - A new CSS gallery with some beautiful sites already showcased
Improve Your Typography On Web Design – Tutorials And Resources Roundup
10 astonishing CSS hacks and techniques
16 Best Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Web Designs
25 Excellent Typography Tools for the Serious Designer
40 Top-Notch Print Based Tutorials
200+ Drupal Tutorials - Basics To Advance!
43 Must Read PHP Articles and Resources
Jermaine Rogers
Jermaine Rogers is easily one of our collective favorites here at Arbenting as far as graphic artists go. One of our favorite things about his work, is that he has a studio here in the same small town we are in, so we can see the work live. Okay, so it is really more of a perk than something we admire about his work, but that was actually how we were turned on him. We walked passed the studio one day and were immediately drawn in by his hauntingly original illustrations. His work tends to be dark, some times disturbingly so, but it is always an inspiration for us to peruse. We hope you find it to be that way as well. Enjoy a sample from Jermaine Rogers.
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A lot to sort through here, will keep me busy for a while. So far I’m really digging the “print ads, then and now” link near the top, good stuff.
@CSS Websites — You’re very welcome :)
@Brad C — Thanks a lot. That post was a lot of fun!