I think that, like me, a lot of people out there actually learn most of what they know about Photoshop by teaching themselves. Even if you do take a class, it will likely focus on the basics, and just won’t have the scope to dig into all of the finer details of the application. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this, and I think that the best way to learn anything is to get your hands dirty and dig into it yourself.

Recently, however, I was at a Photoshop seminar in which the instructor, Dave Cross, was discussing this very thing. He said that there is one significant problem with being a self-taught Photoshop user, and that that problem was the teacher. The comment was perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and intended to draw a chuckle from us, but there’s definitely some truth to it.

To take another of Cross’ lines: would you trust a “self-taught” surgeon?

Anyhow, this idea became apparent to me just over a year ago, during a discussion with a friend with whom I regularly share tips and suggestions for using Photoshop. Though I cannot recall his exact phrasing, he basically asked me what I thought of the Clone Stamp tool, and whether it was something worth using.

Template tags can be used in your wordpress theme to display information dynamically or retrieving information about your wordpress blog. In this post we will show you some easy and useful wordpress template tag that you can use in your theme.

Template tags are codes that instructs wordpress “get” something/information for example to getting your wordpress blog description, title, category. The great part of using template tags is you can avoid using plugins, which can certainly make your website faster. Before we get started you should have the basic knoweldge of PHP, since wordpress is built on it. Also, just to make sure you must wrap all with codes with <?php (all codes here) ?> .

Listing Wordpress Categories

This tag is used to retrieve all the categories in your blog. You can also pass different parameters to exclude some categories or other functions. The simplest way to pull your category is :

The result you will get it is

Poster design is a favorite of many graphic designers, and there are a number of quality tutorials available to teach you more about poster design in Photoshop. In this post we’ll feature 33 of the best. This list includes a variety of different styles of posters, so you should be sure to find something that you like.

How to Create a Retro Boxing Poster in Photoshop

Business cards are a necessity for designers and other creatives. In this post we’ll feature some tutorials that will teach you how to design an attractive business card. You can follow the tutorials exactly or use parts of them to learn new tricks and create something unique for your own business card.

How to Design an Abstract Business Card in Photoshop

Well-designed icons can make a website more attractive and easier to use. While there are a lot of quality free icons available and stock icons that can be purchased, there may be situations where you want or need to design your own. In this post we’ll feature 30 tutorials that show you how to create beautiful icons in Adobe Illustrator.

How to Create a Vector Sketchbook

A few weeks ago we published a collection of jQuery plugins for working with forms. While those plugins can be very useful, there may be times where you would rather learn how to code the solution yourself rather than simply using a plugin. There are a number of quality tutorials available for working with jQuery and forms, and in this post we will feature 25 of them.

jQuery Form Tutorials:

Creating a Slide-in jQuery Contact Form 3.jpg

Today we’ll be going through the process of designing a website for a fictitious marketing company, step-by-step. The design uses a blue color scheme and is intended to put the emphasis on services offered and what the company can do for its clients. Our friends at SnobbySlice are in the process of coding this design into a template that will be distributed for free in the near future.

What We Will Be Designing:

Here is a look at the end result (click the image to see in full size)

Last week we published a tutorial for designing a basic corporate website layout in Photoshop, and in this tutorial we will walk through the process of coding that design in HTML and CSS. Here is a look at the design that we will be coding (click the image to see it in full-size).

Today we’re going to walk through the process of designing an example corporate website in Photoshop.

Here is a look at the end result of what we will be creating (click on the image to see it in full size).

The new O.S. Windows 7 has improved aesthetics to make the user interface at least more appealing. There are huge ultra detailed icons for folders, devices and so on. This time we will use Illustrator CS4 to create a nice briefcase with the Windows 7 style. You need only a few basics on how to copy, paste, rotate, scale and color the shapes. Let’s focus on business.

Step 1:

Start selecting the Rounded Rectangle Tool (fig. A) and make a single left click on the art board to bring the Rounded Rectangle options configuration window appear. Use 16 px. for corner radius (fig. B) and press Accept. Then left click and drag to draw a shape as shown.