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Gearing up for Photoshop World!

Hey everyone! Things are full speed ahead in getting ready to head out to Photoshop World March 24-26 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando! I’m pretty excited to be amongst some wonderful instructors to teach the latest and greatest in Photoshop and the web. One of… read more

The “Dark Side” of inspiration: 30 uber-cool images of Darth Vader

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Re-Create a Logo in Illustrator Based on a Photo

Have you ever worked on a layout that required a specific logo but all you had was a photograph of that logo, and no matter how hard you tried you couldn’t find a nice high-res or vector version to use? In this tutorial, we’ll take you through one example of… read more

50 Examples of Creative 404 – Page Not Found Pages

There are two ways you can go when designing a 404 page for your website – you could go the sensible route and make it usable and try to help the reader find exactly what they were looking for or, you could design a 404 page that not only defines… read more

Hack: The iPod serial library enables homebrew remote controls

On the Make: magazine blog, they recently posted a piece about the evolution of a project. It was an iPod remote from last year that has gone from a “start and stop” only device to a full featured remote. It is a lovely piece of tech, powered by Arduino hardware…. read more

35 Amazing Traditional Art Paintings

By Obaid ul Rehman

Traditional art has always been the source of inspiration for many artists and designers. With its conventional look and feel, it appeals your visitors and let them amaze on your creativity and artistic skills. In this post, we have piled up an inspiring list of some great… read more

Uncovering Toy Cameras and Polaroid Vintage Effects (With Photoshop Tutorials)

Since its emergence, the digital photography market has gradually supplanted the traditional one. APN and digital SLR cameras entered our lives, and some people announced the death of silver-based images. This is not all lie, and yet old-fashioned images have been particularly popular in the past few years. All we… read more

The Secret Behind Great Designs: A Young Web Designer’s View

To find a career to which you are adapted by nature, and then to work hard at it, is about as near to a formula for success and happiness as the world provides.

One of the fortunate aspects of this formula is that, granted the right career has been… read more

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Slate comes to the iPhone, along with a lot of advertising

Now, Slate has come to the iPhone in a US$1.99 app that features all the articles from the site, as well as the blog posts, staff tweets and streaming video from the Slate podcasts. Once content is downloaded you can read it off-line, which is a worthwhile feature. Access to… read more

MediaLoot Competition – 5 Free Year Long Licenses up for grabs

Once in a while a new design resource arrives that looks so good you simply have to shout about it from the rooftops and make sure everybody knows about it. And today such a resource has launched, it is called Media Loot – a lowly priced subscription-based online toolbox of… read more

Using Adobe Bridge to Create a Mosaic

Get Creative with Adobe Bridge

Many people, understandably, think of Adobe Bridge as a visual file browser, and of course, that’s its strength. But thanks to the Output module, Bridge also offers some interesting design possibilities. In this example, we’ll use Bridge to create both a filmstrip of images and a… read more

A look at the framework of Apple’s iPad ad

<phe iPad, like the iPhone, used the Oscars to make its ad debut. As is typical with an Apple ad, the iPad's ad featured a montage of different uses for the device, all while set to the backdrop of a catchy tune.

In making his case for the iPad, Apple CEO… read more

Architect Day: Octavio Mestre

Professor of architecture in Barcelona, Octavio Mestre, who has provided numerous services to the Catalan city, now has major projects in Spain and is already present in other European countries with homes and housing of high quality.

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Photos from site octaviomestre.com.

Octavio Mestre graduated with honors from the Higher Technical School of… read more

Motion Graphics And 2-D Animation: 10 Tips For A Clean Workflow

By Melinda Rainsberger

More and more, designers, illustrators and coders are being asked to animate. Animation adds energy to a brand and heightens a customer’s emotional response. The software to do it is reasonably priced, and Internet connections can now deliver high-quality video. For these two reasons, animation-based advertising is booming… read more

This Weeks Twitter Design News Roundup N.27

This is our weekly Twitter Design News Round-Up, a collection of fresh design related resources that we have shared via Twitter in the past week.

Just in case you are not one of our Twitter followers, click here: twitter.com/speckyboy, and you’ll be kept up to date with loads of design news… read more

Gowalla Launches on webOS and Vies for Your Checkins with Free Stuff

Foursquare is battling for your SXSW check-ins with a musical scavenger hunt. Rival Gowalla is going to go after them with free gadgets – specifically free Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus devices as part of a promotion the location-based social networking service is unveiling in conjunction… read more

Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

I thought I could not be out-geeked. With a background in radio, and having dabbled in the demo scene on the Commodore 64 and hung out on BBSes and IRC for a long time and all the other things normal kids don’t quite get, I thought I was safe in… read more

Daily Inspiration #451

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it,… read more

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Free Music Monday: 10 Free Tracks

Hey there, music fans! Thanks for joining us for Free Music Monday this week, where we offer you 10 free downloads for your eclectic listening pleasure. If you haven’t been with us before, we’re collating free and legal tracks in honor of the #musicmonday tradition on Twitter.

We happily accept… read more

Creative Use of Blur in Digital Photography

If you’d like to download the images used in this tutorial to practice these techniques, visit www.layersmagazine.com and navigate to the Magazine section. All files are for personal use only.

Sharpness is an important element in any photograph, but a creative use of blur—whether from shallow depth of field, motion blur,… read more

14 Free Mobile Application Development Icon Sets

The gap between the desktop/laptop and the mobile device is becoming smaller and smaller, it has never been a better time for mobile app development – The market is huge, very lucrative and highly profitable. Our ever growing appetite for more powerful and better mobile devices has pushed the demand… read more

40 Outstanding Photo Manipulation Tutorials

Photo manipulation is an art that requires lots of patience along with the expertise in Photoshop and other photo editing tools. With your creativity and imagination, you can manipulate any photograph the way you want! Now it’s all about your imagination and using Photoshop’s effects and other tools cleverly.

You simply… read more

Common Questions About Design Professionalism

The design profession is full of happy folks, and understanding why so many designers enjoy their work is not hard. But not all are so happy. If you’re not careful, the joy of getting paid to pursue your passion can be tainted by the less joyous realities of the professional… read more

Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration – N.31

This is our selection of our favorite web designs from the past week, some sites we discovered, but the most of them have been recommended by our readers.
Thanks for all your recommendations, and we hope you like the selection of sites as much as we do, feel free to… read more

Foursquare and SPIN Magazine Turn SXSW Into Musical Scavenger Hunt

For complete SXSW coverage, check out Mashable’s SXSW channel.

Popular music magazine SPIN is going geeky for South by Southwest’s music festival, integrating custom Foursquare badges into its event presence and rewarding the most adventurous users of the location-based game with free tickets to their annual music showcase at Stubb’s.

Festival… read more

Best of the Week #109

It’s time for our best news of this week, the first one of 2010. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to… read more

Handy Tools and Tips for E-Commerce Websites

Running an e-commerce website is a never-ending task, from trying to squeeze that extra bit of conversion rate out of the check-out page to figuring out which referrers give you the best traffic. There’s also a plethora of tools out there to help you achieve your goals. But which ones… read more

Top 20 Free Windows Mobile Social Media and Networking Apps

There are thousands and thousands of social networking and media apps for the iPhone and for Android, we all know that. But what about all the apps for Windows Mobile? Certainly, Win Mob is no where near as popular within the mainstream of mobile users as the other two, but… read more

Print Magazines for Web Designers, Digital Artists, and Photographers

Although much valuable information for all sorts of web and print professionals can be found online, it is often difficult to weed through all the noise and find good quality content. I believe it’s vital that professionals in different creative fields supplement their online learning and research through well-edited and… read more

10 Free Beautiful Calligraphic Fonts

By Paul Viluda

The word “calligraphy” is derived from two Greek words, denoting “beautiful writing”. Calligraphy or the art of writing has thousands of years in its history and development, and indeed calligraphy fonts, which we often use these days on our PCs to create a postcard or a wedding invitation… read more

Apple tops Fortune’s Most Admired Companies list again

GE has actually had the most appearances at number one on the list, and Apple needs to stay high for two more years to take that record. But it’s certainly possible — if the iPad is as popular as expected, and Apple follows it up next year with an updated… read more

The Colorful Showcase Of Beautiful Floral Typography

Floral Typography is a form of art that coalesce typography, calligraphy, and lettering to create dynamic, flourishing designs. Since flowers are universal images that never go out-of-date, many designers opt to create floral typography for their designs. With floral typography, you can create appealing and noteworthy designs that capture the… read more

Apple Tops Google and Amazon on “Most Admired Company” List

In Fortune Magazine’s annual ranking of “most admired companies”, Apple has once again walked away with the top spot. Apple was voted #1 for the third year in a row in a poll of executives, industry analysts and company directors. This year, Apple actually took pole position by its… read more

jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide – Free Book Giveaway, Comment to win

For this months book giveaway we have jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide, written by Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg.
To give yourself a chance of winning this book all you have to do is leave a comment below, and tell us how jQuery has helped you improve your web development projects, or… read more

Daily Inspiration #448

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it,… read more

Mashable’s Weekly Guide to Social Media & Web Development Jobs

If you’re seeking a job in social media, we’d like to help out. For starters, Mashable’s Job Lists section gathers together all our resource lists, how-tos and expert guides to help you get hired. In particular, you might want to see our articles on How to… read more

Create Photo Albums for Print with InDesign

Recently, I attended a seminar taught by wedding photographer David Ziser. While I learned a lot of good photography tips, one thing that caught my attention was an app David showed for laying out wedding albums. Typically, a wedding photographer has to narrow down his shoot to about 100 photos… read more

15 jQuery Plugins to Create Stunning Image Zoom Effects

15 jQuery Plugins to Create Stunning Image Zoom Effects

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Apple pressuring music publishers over Amazon Daily Deal

According to Billboard, participating labels entered into the program with Amazon in 2008 without paying a thing. It was simply meant to increase the store’s publicity. Two years later, that’s changed. An unnamed major-label head of sales told Billboard that “[the] promotion morphed into something where the labels make arrangements… read more

Dear John Makinson and Penguin, please don’t “reinvent” books

paidContent:UK has an article on a presentation by Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson gave here in London on Tuesday. Makinson presented ideas on how publishers might approach Apple’s iPad and the iBookstore. Makinson revealed “We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format,… read more

45 Stylish and Beautiful Fashion Photos

By Obaid Rehman

In this post, we are going to showcase some extremely charming examples of Fashion Photography which has been defined as a field of photography dedicated to put on show clothing and other fashion items. It is usually conducted for advertisement purposes, but now with the advancement of fashion… read more

Beautiful Illustrator Artworks By Artists Around The World

Adobe Illustrator is a powerful software for illustrating that allows users to produce beautiful artwork, technical illustrations, and even graphics for both print and the web. Adobe Illustrator is a multipurpose vector illustration tool and its versatility makes it the most preferred choice among many professional artists and designers.

In the… read more

Falling Off the Wall Text Effect – Photoshop Tutorial

At some time or another we have all seen it – neighbourhood walls with old and deprecated graffiti or, just as common, you may have seen some flyers or posters that have been stuck for so long on these walls that they start to peel and hang on by their… read more

Beautifully Weird Human Shapes

Experimenting is one of the greatest things on all creative fields. I was surfing at fffffound and got to see some crazy, beautifully weird experiments, a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess.

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They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression. Unconsciously their work touches upon these themes, however… read more

How to Kill the Design Community

Recently, the notion of killing the design community has come up on a few blogs (sometimes indirectly), creating many intense conversations on the direction the design community has taken over the past couple of years, and what can be done about it.

The possibility that such discussions… read more

Layers TV: Episode 127

Corey has some resolution tips for large format printing out of Photoshop. RC sits down with Dreamweaver author and instructor Janine Warner to talk about her upcoming courses on KelbyTraining.com

You can download each episode by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes.

Thank you so much to iStockphoto… read more

35 Incredible 3D Renders

Unbelievable, magical, miraculous… one can go on using adjectives, but nothing can come close to describing what 3D renders can to. It can transform your imagination into stunning pictures in a way such that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the real photo and the virtual one.

Applications like 3D Max,… read more

How To Market Your Mobile Application

App Store is a competitive environment. Against more than 140,000 apps, all screaming for attention, how do you make sure your app gets its time in the spotlight? What does it take to get good media coverage? How do you get people to talk about your app—and, ideally, how do… read more

Extend the Firebug Console with these 15 Extensions

There are a lot of useful tools for web designers and developers, they do tend to come and go and it usually depends on personal preference whether or not any tool is used. There is only one tool that has lasted the test of time and is not only universally… read more

Top Articles On The Web Design Billboard In February’10

A perfect layout, A Good Design and Nice Resource can produce a creative output. Layout, textures, typography and patterns are used more often than one may think but the outcome of different combination can result verity of excellent designs. Professionalism is built upon knowledge and experience. However, When it comes… read more

Animate Paint in After Effects

Franklin McMahon experiments with the paint tool in After Effects and demonstrates how to paint on top of a video using overlay with a color mode.

This video requires Adobe Flash Player.

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Designers: How to Search For, Hire, and Work With a Web-Developer

The market for freelance web design is huge. Being able to design a beautiful site in Photoshop is one thing. Programming a website is a whole other story.

So when clients come knocking at your door asking for web design services, what do you, the non-programmer but rockstar designer,… read more

Web Design Criticism: A How-To

Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go.

I came into my first job as a Web designer for Boeing back in… read more

80+ Incredible Collection Of Inspirations, Tutorials And Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In February

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list… read more

Architect Day: Murdock Young

Shea Murdock and Robert Young are the creators of office Murdock Young Architects. With a little more than 10 years behind them they have an interesting portfolio of work in the United States, with highlights on residential projects and art galleries.

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Photos from site murdockyoung.com.

Founded in 1999 by Shea Murdock and… read more

This Weeks Twitter Design News Roundup N.26

This is my weekly Twitter Design News Round-Up, a collection of fresh design related resources that I have shared via Twitter in the past week.

Just in case you are not one of my Twitter followers, click here: twitter.com/speckyboy, and you’ll be kept up to date with loads of design news… read more

Digital Canvas: January/February 2010

Showcasing the Design Work of Our Readers

Would you like to gain exposure by having your work featured in an international design magazine?
 Of course you would!

The staff at Layers magazine appreciates the time and effort involved in the creative process, no matter how large or small the project. With… read more

The Future Of CSS Typography

An excellent article by Inayaili de Leon for Smashing Magazine. There were a lot of new things that I learned in this article about web typography and CSS. You definitely need to read through this article. I guarantee, there will be little bits and tips that you will learn.

Related posts:Typography… read more

Topaz Adjust 4 AND a New Cintiq 21UX

Hey everyone, Happy Monday! Today I am happy to hear that there are two really cool additions that I think you’d be very interested in.

Topaz Adjust 4
Topaz Adjust is one of those products that sits on the computer of many a digital artist (myself included). it takes… read more

Best of AppStorm in February

We’ve collected the top five reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in February. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, or Web apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month.

Now would be a good time to explore a part of… read more

Condé Nast reveals initial list of iPad magazines

<p GQ
Vanity Fair
Wired
Glamour
The New Yorker

Expect GQ to be the first one available, either at or directly after the iPad's launch. Vanity Fair and Wired should be available in June, while launch schedules for Glamour… read more

Creative Bookmarks: Best of February 2010

February was a great month full of awesome tutorials, interesting articles and interviews, and stunning showcases for inspiration.

Quick Nav:

Photoshop TutorialsIllustrator TutorialsWeb/Blogging TutorialsFreebies, Inspiration, & ResourcesPhotoshop TutorialsSuper Easy Typographic Portrait in Photoshop

This tutorial, from Abduzeedo, will show you how to use the Displace filter and some Blend Modes to a great… read more

The Ultimate Collection Of Brilliant Web Design Tutorials

By Callum Chapman

In this ultimate collection, we bring you a massive selection of great Web design tutorials from all over the design community. All of the tutorials use Photoshop for the main application. By the end, you should have a pretty good idea of where and how to start designing… read more

The Future Of CSS Typography

There has been an increasing and sincere interest in typography on the web over the last few years. Most websites rely on text to convey their messages, so it’s not a surprise that text is treated with utmost care. In this article, we’ll look at some useful techniques and clever… read more

Top Condé Nast Magazines are Coming to iPad

When the iPad was announced, some media partnerships were announced with it, but it wasn’t hard to guess that, in the period before the device actually comes to the market, we’ll see many more.

We already know that Condé Nast is working on an iPad version of Wired magazine,… read more

25 Amazing and Fresh jQuery Plugins

Keeping up with the new jQuery plugin releases and developments sometimes feels like a full-time job! Every other day something new and better crops up that catches the eye and you think yourself “Wow, that looks good, I could use that!“.

For this post I have collected 25 of the best… read more

Daily Inspiration #444

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it,… read more

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: March 2010

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. And to make them… read more

Wallpaper of the Week #89 – Saad Moosajee

The wallpaper of this week is another super cool artwork from the young self taught freelance Illustrator and Art Director Saad Moosajee. We have already featured him in the past but he has some new works that are definitely worth checking them out.

Since Saadart.com was established in September 2008, Saad… read more

Stunning Blogs Having Unique Designs on Each Post

Stunning Blogs Having Unique Designs on Each Post

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Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration – N.30

This is our selection of our favorite web designs from the past week, some sites we discovered, but the most of them have been recommended by our readers.
Thanks for all your recommendations, and we hope you like the selection of sites as much as we do, feel free to… read more

Best of the Week #108

It’s time for our best news of this week, the first one of 2010. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to… read more

88 Ultimate Round-Up of Photoshop Photo Manipulation Tutorials

When it comes to Image editing or photo enhancement, Adobe Photoshop is usually the primary option to consider. However, the software package itself is a quite hard to learn — and extremely hard to master.

Display beautiful images is a potent element in web and graphic design, where there is less… read more

Free SEO Icons Set (16 Icons, Private Use Only)

Today we are glad to release Free SEO Icons Set, a set with 16 original SEO-icons in .png (64×64px). This set was designed by Andrea Austoni and released for private use for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the icon set for free!

You can use the set for your projects private… read more

Textured Text Effects in Photoshop

Follow along with Corey as he creates text that appears to be made from this worn texture by using displacement maps, filters, and layer styles.

read more

Usability Review of Charity Websites Taking the Lead

Over the years designers have pushed themselves to create unique and inspiring designs. Companies have yearned to have websites which are innovative and make them stand out against their competitors. Yet charity websites have not progressed along with trends and expectations — they seem to have been designed for launch… read more

30 Creative 3D Concept Logos from Deviantart

DeviantART stands out as one of the most popular means of showcasing your design portfolio, were users of any artistic level can upload there art and allow others to offer a critique.

In this article, written by Richie Thimmaiah, he has rounded up some of the most awesome looking 3D… read more

12 Secrets Of Effective Business Communication

By Alyssa Gregory

The ability to communicate, and communicate well, is one of the biggest factors in business success. You could be an excellent designer, but if you’re unable to promote your services and communicate effectively with clients and colleagues, your potential is limited. The principal areas where communication is essential… read more

Finding Inspiration in Uncommon Sources: 12 Places to Look

Inspiration can be a fickle thing. Most designers, when lacking ideas, turn to design galleries to find ideas. But there are a few problems with that approach. The most obvious is that when taking inspiration from similar mediums, there’s a fine line between “inspired by” and “copied”. To some extent,… read more

Daily Inspiration #442

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it,… read more

25 of the Best Blogging and Social Media Icon Sets

Icons are a favorite free resource of designers and bloggers. There are tons of quality, free icon sets out there and in this post we’ll feature 25 that are great for blog design. These icons sets include the those that are great for use with blogs and social media.

Cute Blogging… read more

Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications

Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don’t meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications… read more

40 New and Trendy Free Social Media Bookmark Icon Sets

Social Media Bookmark Icons serve as significant design touches in websites and blogs. They help visitors bookmark their favorite posts and articles in any social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and others, ensuring that they can get back to your site directly for future reference. Using… read more

50 Amazing Personal Blog Web Designs

The importance of a unique, memorable and well designed blog, especially within the design community, should not be underestimated – First impressions will always count and your blog gives you an opportunity to showcase your skills and highlight how professional and serious you are as a designer.

For most web… read more

Food Design At Its Best: 40 Extraordinary Examples Of Edible Art

Everybody knows you’re not supposed to play with your food but that doesn’t stop these artists from creating some rather extraordinary edible art. Far from the mountains you used to make with your mashed potatoes, these masterpieces could go on display in a museum. Mixing together a little food and… read more

The Wild and Tender Photography of Rodolphe Simeon

Rodolphe Simeon is a french photographer living in Canada. And this is not the only thing mixing cultures in his life: he speaks French, English and German.

The first time I saw his pictures was in the brazilian magazine Zupi,which I recommend to read or at least to visit its site…. read more

36 Minutes of Creative Genius

We all need a small spark to get going sometimes… What makes it easier to get going than some creative videography, editing & animation? Not much. Here are some creative videos some with mind blowing CG landscapes or an amazing look at what goes into a Macworld cover and some… read more

Daily Inspiration #441

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it,… read more