I love when I can sit down and take the time to learn new tricks for my print designs, photography, or interactive stuff. Over the years I’ve created a bookmark haven of inspiring tutorials and now I want to share them with YOU! You may find some of the tips to be tedious or too extensive, but once you apply them to your designs, they can truly enrich your skills & take your work to the next level.
PHOTOGRAPHY/PHOTO EDITING TUTORIALS
In this tutorial you learn how to process your photo in Photoshop and make it look like you used a tilt shift lens (tilt shift lenses focus on a single part of the photo and shift (blur) the surrounding area to create an optical illusion of miniaturized scenery).
I love the way HDR photographs look. This tutorial shows you how to take photos for HDR then process them in Photoshop.
This can be really beautifully done if you have the right photo & it’s super quick.
This may seem like a simple, no-brainer to some, but I didn’t realize you could so easily do this with just a little prep and few clicks of a button in Photoshop (CS3 or later).
PRINT DESIGN TUTORIALS FOR ILLUSTRATOR OR PHOTOSHOP
I actually found a handful of these helpful when trying to produce a realistic grunge effect in Photoshop.
Essential Illustrator Tips & Tricks
This tricks could be major time savers if you don’t use them already.
Mastering the Pathfinder Panel in Illustrator
This tutorial is key to helping you become more efficient in Illustrator & meet those tight deadlines.
Add Decorative Glamour to Your Ordinary Script Font
You don’t actually need Illustrator for this tutorial, but you will need a vector editing software; & this used to be a premium tut but is now free! Bonus!!
WEB DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT TUTORIALS
For a job interview I had to create a dynamic poll with all the bells and whistles where the answers were stored in a database. I had zero experience with databases & dynamic polls so I had to do a lot of research in a day to figure out how to get this to work. This tutorial really helped me out… it’s actually pretty cool!
Inset Text Effect
This actually isn’t a web design tutorial, but I used it when trying to create the inset look for my website’s footer. Gotta have Photoshop for this one.
CSS3
I know this is an old tutorial, but I found it useful still. Make sure though to know which of these effects aren’t compatible with certain browsers if you plan to implement them.
A Slide-In JQuery Contact Form
I really wanted to do this for my personal site, but it just wasn’t working with my layout/flow so I saved it for another project.
FURTHER RESOURCES
You can find tons more great tutorials at the following sites, just to name a few…
*TutsPlus Network – paid & free
My favorites are Webdesigntuts+, Vectortuts+, Phototuts+, & Psdtuts+
*Photoshop Tutorials – free
Computer Arts Magazine – free
Web Designer – free