Holiday & Winter Design Elements Savings
Just in time for the Holidays and the Winter season, get these amazing design elements for a fraction of the price. Snow generator text is 71% off. Lets you easily create 3D style typography with a snow and Ice texture. The pack comes with a PSD file, snow background, brushes, overlays and much more!Accompany your […]
The Creative Design Process
To create a logo or other design material, professional logo designers follow a proper design process. A well-thought-out and systematic design process minimizes the chances of errors, resulting in an impactful and professional logo. However, if you don’t follow a design process, then you might face serious problems, which may undermine the credibility of your […]
Blur Like Jony creates iOS-style Filters in Photoshop
This cleverly-named Photoshop addon is made to replicate the crystal glass blur effect found in Apple’s mobile OS & product base. Blur Like Jony is a filter plugin for Photoshop CC that creates Apple-style blurring effects. It comes with three different view modes to blend naturally with Photoshop’s GUI. Plus you can manipulate settings to […]
Ready-to-Use SVG Icons for Web & Mobile Design
How many times have you scoured the web for custom SVG icons? There are hundreds of sets online but it’s hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. Well a new resource by SPARKK offers brand new custom SVG Icons built into SVG & CSS formats. This allows both designers and developers to work with […]
32 Detailed Text Effect Tutorials for Photoshop
The best way to learn Photoshop is to push the boundaries of your knowledge. If you don’t know the basic tools then it can be difficult to get started. But true learning occurs with practical real-world application of skills by creating unique projects from scratch.
How To Design Magnetic Banner Ads for the Web
Advertising is a massive industry with a lot of money and agencies vying for attention. But the purpose of this industry is generally to drive people towards something whether it’s a product or service. Great ads will draw your attention even if you don’t have a need for the product.
But poorly-crafted ads will come off as revolting and insincere. Nobody wants to deal with the metaphorical used car salesman, and this type of advertisement can be an immediate turn-off.
For this post I’d like to examine a few design techniques for polishing beautifully-magnetic advertising banners. Although designs can vary from each website the general techniques remain the same. Take a look at the BuySellAds marketplace to see some of the most creatively and well-designed banner ads online today.
Designing Custom iOS App Interface Elements using Photoshop
Free iPhone GUI PSD kits include a lot of the primary elements needed for app design. But sometimes it’s necessary to build your own custom interface elements. I always preferred the older iOS 5-6 UI above the more flat-looking iOS7. Specifically I fell in love with this Microsoft Word app for iPhone created by the very talented Victor Erixon.
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how to recreate a couple of these same MS Word interface elements from scratch. Building with shapes and paths will allow for an easier process of scaling the graphics to larger sizes. You don’t even need to know a whole lot about Photoshop to follow along with this tutorial. Plus you can download a copy of my PSD file to check out the final result.
Pixel-Perfect Design using Photoshop on a Retina Display
I recently purchased a MacBook Pro with the infamous retina screen display. Everything does look beautiful and there is a noticeable difference in comparison to non-retina icons. However I noticed a problem using Photoshop that others in the web design field have also likely noticed.
Every new document is shown at half-size while the document view claims to be 100%.
Anyone running CS5 or below should not find this to be much of a problem. But CS6 and CC have been updated to include retina-based icons and interfaces. This creates a pixel-dense display in Photoshop(and other Adobe programs) where new documents appear twice as small instead of “regular size”. Another way to put this is @1x images will appear tiny because retina Photoshop only uses @2x documents.