Summer had to end eventually. However, with the coming of Fall comes an all new month with great new tutorials, articles and freebies! This is Creative Bookmarks September!
Quick Nav:
- Photoshop Tutorials
- Illustrator Tutorials
- Web/Blogging Tutorials
- Freebies, Inspiration, & Resources
Photoshop Tutorials
Nature-Themed Girl Composition in Photoshop
This great tutorial teaches you how to have some fun with vectors, custom brushes, and stock images to create a colorful and eye-catching nature themed girl composition.
Create a Detailed Ornate Heraldic Design in Photoshop
In this tutorial, by Chris Spooner, you’ll learn how to use some manipulation techniques combined with some Photoshop tricks to create an impressive Heraldic style emblem.
How to Create a Fantasy Banana Ship in Photoshop
In this great tutorial, from PsdTuts+, you’ll learn how to use a combination of photo to create a fantasy flying ship from a banana.
Create a Fantasy Girlbird Illustration in Photoshop
This great tutorial shows you how to create a make believe bird girl illustration with some Photoshop painting and photo manipulation techniques.
Create a Motorola Droid Style Phone in Photoshop
This tutorial teaches you how to use various tricks and techniques to create a realistic Motorola Droid phone.
The creation of A Life Of Aquatic Sounds
This great tutorial, from WeGraphics, combines the use of blending modes, Photoshop filters, and other tricks and techniques to create this beautiful aquatic manipulation.
Photoshop For Beginners: Creating Buttons for Web
In this tutorial, youll learn how to use blending modes and layer masks to create beautiful buttons for the web.
See Also: Part Two
Design a Grunge Vintage Poster in Photoshop
Another great tutorial, from WeGraphics, in which you’ll learn how to use a grid, patterns, layers styles and textures to create a vintage looking poster.
Playing with Custom Brushes to Create Magical Scenes
This tutorial teaches you how to create a custom brush and will walk you through the options of the brush to create a nice composition.
Harnessing the Power of Geometry for a Creative Nike Shoe Design
In this great tutorial, you’ll learn how to make geometric shaped brushes and apply them to create a Nike advertisement.
Make a Stylish Futuristic Textured Wallpaper in Photoshop
In this tutorial, from Design Instruct, you’ll learn how to use blending modes and textures to create a wallpaper that has outerspace-futuristic look to it.
A Perfect Lie in Photoshop #2
Too many photo retouching tutorials use techniques that make the skin look fake. This tutorial, from Abduzeedo, does the opposite, presenting a tutorial that achieves a beautiful and real effect.
Illustrator Tutorials
Create an Elegant Patterned Vector Owl in Illustrator
This brilliant tutorial, by Chris Spooner, will teach you how to create an owl illustration using basic shapes and the clever use of patterns and shading.
How To Create a Gothic Blackletter Typographic Design
This hybrid tutorial utilizes Illustrator to create and modify type, then uses Photoshop to create a grungy metalic piece of blackletter type.
Creating Seamless Textures
This great tutorial shows you how to creat clean, crisp textures and patterns using the newly improved appearance panel in Illustrator CS5.
How to Create an Adobe Illustrator Brush
In contrast to Photoshop, there aren’t many blogs that publish quality tutorials on how to create Illustrator brushes. This tutorial fills exactly that need.
Create Amazing Patterns using Adobe Illustrator
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the Pattern Brush in Illustrator. But wait there is more! You’ll also create your own pattern brushes and learn the right way of using them.
Create a Graffiti-Inspired Illustration Using Photoshop and Illustrator
This great intermediate-level tutorial, combines the power of Photoshop and Ilustrator to create a graffiti inspired drawing and then, bring it to life with color.
Design An Angry Vector Turtle Character In Illustrator
This excellent tutorial, from Spyre Studios, walks you through creating a vector turtle based on a photo; a technique that can be useful in the future.
Web Tutorials
Basic Beginners Guide to Installing a jQuery Lightbox
This is a great tutorial, from Line25, that gives you a crash course on how to setup a lightbox gallery on your website; perfect for the Javascript coding noob.
A Crash-Course in CSS Media Queries
This great screencast, on Nettuts+, show’s how easy it is to create browser width dependant layouts with CSS media queries.
An Analysis of Typography on the Web
Most designers will agree that typography is the most important part of a design. Unfortunately, it’s usually neglected online. This article/tutorial contains some very useful information on the topic.
Converting a clean magazine-style PSD template to HTML/CSS
This great tutorial, from WeGraphics, isn’t very step-by-step, however, it sheds light on the process and gives great tips and advice.
The WordPress Loop
I always love the screencast’s of Chris Coyier. In his latest he does a great job in explaining the WordPress loop and the different ways to use it.
On Designing Tumblr Themes: 7 Ways to Design a Useful & Customizable Tumblr Theme
This is an excellent article, by the great folks from A Good Company, that gives some great advice on what to think about when designing a Tumblr theme.
Professional Structure and Documentation in Web Design
As creative people, we usually don’t think about structure or organization. However, structure is needed in our projects. This article, from Specky Boy, explains why.
Five Useful CSS/jQuery Coding Techniques For More Dynamic Websites
The beauty of CSS and Jquery, is the ability to make a boring static web page into a rich user experience. This article, on Smashing Magazine, shows you how to do it.
The Look That Says Book
This great article was pointed out to my by Doug Neiner. Hyphenation is always seen in print design and I’m one to believe it should be on the web too. This article, on A List Apart, talks more about the topic.
Freebies, Inspiration & Resources
Piron
This beautiful typeface called Piron is great for both text and display use and at the moment, the regular and italic weights are free.
Social Media Sleek Icons: Icon Pack
This is a beautiful set of 25 icons that come in two different sizes that are free for your personal and commercial projects. As always, be sure to check the requirements for use.
Massive iPad Vector GUI Elements
This amazing freebie comes with every possible iPad element that you can think of. It includes not only the iPad, it also comes with buttons, alert boxes, tabs, the keyboard and more.
Weekly Vector Inspiration #88
Vectips publishes a collection of vector inpiration every week. Of the ones published, it was tough to only pick one of these. I strongly recommend you view the other showcases as well.
Creative Examples of Infographics
This is a great showcase, on Noupe, that is all about infographics. It’s the prettiest data you’ll ever see. I guarantee it.
50 Fresh and Inspiring Dark Web Designs
People liked the first collection of dark websites so much, that ,Web Design Ledger, decided it’d be a good idea to publish another. I disagree, it was a great idea.
40 Inspiring Portfolio Designs
This collection proves that a designers creativity and artistry aren’t confined to the “Portfolio” page. The whole site design can act as a showcase of one’s work.
Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration N.58
This great showcase, from Specky Boy has some beautifully designed websites. Also, I’m honored to say that my site forms part of the list.
Finding Success as a Self-Employed Designer
Being self-employed is tough. This great article, on Logo Design Love, gives some practical advice on how to be a successful self-employed designer.
Get Featured in Creative Bookmarks
If you’d like to be featured in the next volume of Creative Bookmarks, simply send us your tutorial, resource, or article link before the end of the month. If we think it’s a top notch link, we’ll be sure to share it with all of our readers!
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Gisele Muller is someone that recently discovered a new career online. A person that really likes technology, design, photography and creativity. An eternal geek wannabe, tech fan and a communication lover! Current location: Porto Alegre, RS Brazil. Twitter: @gismullr