Creative Bookmarks: Best of October 2009

Monday, 02 November 2009 06:00

There were so many quality links to share this month that this list could have gone on forever. So now, here’s the best of the best. This is Creative Bookmarks October.

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Photoshop Tutorials

How to Make a Creative Blog Layout

An excellent tutorial on PSDTuts that shows you how to create a blog layout in Photoshop. Very easy to follow and the end result looks great!

Design a Vintage Radio Icon in Photoshop

Jurgis did a great job with this tutorial. It’s really easy to follow and the techniques you learn will help you make other great looking icons.

Build a Slick Rich User Interface in Photoshop

User interface tutorials are my favorite. It continues to amaze me what a couple of pixels can do to a design. Chris Spooner wrote an excellent tutorial with a great looking end result.

Design a Realistic 3D Baseball Cap in Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop, the pen tool, brushes, some nifty tricks and this tutorial. Add all that up and what do you have? An awesome looking 3D baseball cap.

Create a Shiny Earth with Photoshop 3D Layers

Photoshop’s 3D capabilities can accomplish a lot. This is a great tutorial from PSDTuts that teaches you how to use them to create a Earth icon.

Create a Cool Wet Ink Typography Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, Chris Spooner, shows you some simple techniques that make for a great wet ink text effect.

20 Handy Photoshop Tips For a Faster Workflow

Most of us use Photoshop everyday. This article gives you tips and tricks on how to do common tasks quicker and easier; making your workflow that much more productive.

Create a Magnifying Glass Icon in Photoshop CS4

Andrea Austoni always makes some great looking icons and this is no exception. This easy to follow tutorial will help you make a very nice looking magnifiying glass icon.

How to Enhance Photos With a Pen Tablet

Enhancing photos is an art. This tutorial shows you how to take an ordinary photo and transform it into a photographic masterpiece.

Killer 3D Poster Design with 3DS Max & Photoshop

This is a hybrid tutorial by the Go Mediazine. The great thing of this tutorial; all of the source files are provided for you to follow along.

Illustrator Tutorials

How to Create a Textured Grungy 3D Type Design

In this step-by-step tutorial, Chris Spooner shows you how to make custom letters then apply effects to give it a 3D grungy feel.

Create a Happy Sun Character

Rype from Vectips created this Sun Character tutorial with Blog Action Day in mind. The techniques he teaches you can easily be used for other projects as well.

Tracing a Vector Face From a Reference Photo

I’ve always wanted to learn how to do this. Great tutorial. Very easy to follow. In fact, it’s aimed at beginners.

The Hidden Power of the Average Command: Creating Swirly Type

This tutorial uses relatively simple tricks to make swirly effects and then apply it to text.

Design a vintage film poster

This tutorial shows you how to make a cool looking vintage poster. The tutorial comes in a downloadable PDF so you can keep it for future reference.

How to Create a Recycling, Paper Bag Icon

This tutorial is aimed at people wanting to get into icon design. Simple shapes and gradients are use to make a realistic paper bag icon.

How to Create an Icon in Illustrator

Wendell Fernandes guides you step by step in this well written tutorial with an excellent end result.

Web Tutorials

How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps

This is a great article from Blogussion on how to properly edit and prepare a guest post. This is sure to help all of us bloggers.

Guide to a Successful Blog Post

As bloggers, we’d like for our every article to succeed. What can you do to make that possible? This article will teach you how.

One Big Way to Avoid a Headline Fail

Headline. A small word with such a big importance. A headline has a lot of power to either attract readers or repel them. This is a great article that exposes a mistake and explains how you can avoid it.

Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started

CSS is being used in almost every website on the web. If you’ve been wanting to learn it, this is the perfect tutorial for you. Fire up that text editor and get started!

Tips for Designing an Awesome Coming Soon Page

A well designed coming soon page can be the key to a successfully launched website. This great article on Line 25 gives you some tips on how to do it well.

The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Design and Converting it to HTML and CSS

We featured the design of this site in last months Creative Bookmarks. Now, see how that webite design, made in Photoshop, is sliced and coded into HTML.

Purely CSS – Faking Minimum Margins

When designing a website, you might have run into the problem that there is no min-margin attribute in CSS. The guys from Build Internet wrote this awesome tutorial to solve that problem.

Using Rounded Corners with CSS3

CSS3 is becoming the new standard when it comes to web design. With that, comes some great effects that you can now acheive. One of them is rounded corners. This simple tutorial shows you how to do it.

7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good

There’s a way to make a web design look good. In fact, Noupe says that there are seven. Take a look at this great article and be on your way to a great looking website.

Freebies, Inspiration & Resources

Free Vintage & Serpent Go Media Vectors

Go Media has a reputation of making some awesome looking vectors. This is no exception. Tutorial9 has the honor of having some exclusive sample vectors from their new Vector Pack 16.

Go Media’s New Color Radials Vector Pack

Go Media is offering a free sample of Radial Vector Pack on Fuel Your Creativity. This pack is part of their newest creation Vector Pack 16.

GoMedia Arsenal is Going Ape

Go Media’s name seems to be everywhere these days. VectorTuts is giving away a sample of Go Media’s Primate Vector Pack.

Super-Fun Monsters – Exclusive Vectortuts+ Pack

Another exclusive freebie vector pack from Designious for VectorTuts full of monsters and other semi-scary stuff; perfect for your next project.

Mixed Media Pack – 29 Free Textures

An awesome texture pack by Media Militia. It includes 29 grunge looking textures that are great for any project.

Watercolors Pack | Volume 2 – 30 Free Textures

Another great texture pack by Media Militia, only this time, it comes in watercolors. 30 excellent textures, free for your use.

Inspiration in Orange: The FYC Edition

One of the newest series from Fuel Your Creativity where they round-up some of the best works in a specific color scheme. Absolutely awe inspiring.

What’s In Your Design Toolbox? Part 1 Grace Smith

It’s always interesting to see what tools designers use to get their daily tasks done. Andrew Houle, from MyInkBlog, just started a new series where he ask designers to showcase their designer toolbox.

Get Featured in Creative Bookmarks

If you’d like to be featured in the next volume of Creative Bookmarks, simply send us you’re 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!