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Photoshop is a powerful tool for creating all sorts of imagery but it does have its limitations. While Photoshop does have some fantastic tools for creating 3D text, there are other applications that are often better suited for the job. That is why many illustrators use a combination of Photoshop and some other 3D application to help create 3D text. In this tutorial, we will show you how to use Cinema 4D to create wooden 3D text and then how to use Photoshop to add the final touches. Let's get started!

Packaging is always inspirational. It's one of our favorite subjects, perhaps because it's about real materials, something web designers don't get to enjoy so often. Packaging selections didn't used to be a regular feature on our blog, but we've decided to make a monthly selection thanks to the number of visually outstanding projects that are out there. The creativity to be found in this area is admirable, with such unexpected, aesthetically strong and practical solutions constantly being invented to improve the quotidian objects that surround us.

These days embedding video in a website is very easy, the element in HTML5 is compatible with almost all current browser versions (see Can I Use video), which saves us a lot of the old difficulties. Now we can implement video and customize a player without third-party software. element is very simple: the complication is in the browser support, especially in old versions and mobile.

Today we are going to look over the shoulders of quite a few professional designers. Using their original PSDs with open layers, we will be able to exactly reconstruct, what has been done and how. If you are like me, this way of learning by doing proves more effective than working through step-by-step tutorials. The following files come with lots of layers to be examined, as we are going to dissect a camera, a sports shoe, a cell phone and lots more. Have fun looking through the eyes of the most able Photoshop professionals. Before I forget: watch out for some layer-related Photoshop tips, I may have left for you throughout the collection…

CSS is a really simple and straightforward language, but when it is getting too long - let's say for a thousand of lines, it turns into a maintenance 'nightmare'. Everything will be too complicated to maintain, and we will get lost with which style rules to keep up with or overwrite. For that reason, a CSS Pre-processor is created to make writing CSS programmable and more maintainable............

For most web developers, delivering the images to the low-bandwidth mobile devices could not be less than any brain teaser, where they feel like they have been stuck in a complex task, just like searching a needle in the dry haystack! Well, it could screw-up the brain! Even the developers, who are well-acquainted with responsive web design techniques, know that by setting the max-width of the images up to 100%, can't resolve this issue as the server will still render big size image to the user's phone. The mobile optimized web applications are designed to run smoothly for the low bandwidth connection with formatting according to the screen of the device.

We're going to cover some incredibly practical, basic tips that you can apply in order to create your own cost-effective photo manipulations from scratch. Not everyone has access to professional photography studios, and today you'll learn how you can product high-end looking results on a very limited budget. This includes everything from correctly setting up a photo shoot, to moving into Photoshop and covering post-production essentials. You'll work with lighting, detail removal, color correction and photo manipulation.

I've been using Sketch properly for about a month now and I have to say that I'm really impressed as are a lot of others now using it in the design community. I first found out about it after reading a blog post by Meng To on How To Design Pixel Perfect Assets in which Meng refers to Sketch a few times and explains that it's great while designing for mobile as you can export in 2x even after designing in standard dimensions. Sketch has had a lot of attention lately so here's a few blog posts and freebies that you may have missed: Simple Vector iPhone Sketch Freebie Browser Wireframe iPhone iOS 6 Template for Sketch

These days, a necessary tool of the trade for both professional and amateur visual artists, such as graphic designers, web developers, photographers, digital artists, etc., is an online presence; and that is usually achieved with a personal or professional portfolio site. So today we are bringing you a selection of powerful, usable, free WordPress portfolio themes that are all highly customizable for experienced coders, but also just as usable as they are for non-coders. Portfolium Neat and flexible grid-based theme for WordPress, Portfolium can be used on portfolio websites or blogs. Take full advantage of Portfolium's fresh, minimalistic design that is perfect as is, or as a foundation for your custom design.

So you're a pretty great web developer already. You've got some killer CSS chops (cross browser even), perhaps you've been a Photoshop expert for years, and you've got enough jQuery knowledge to make almost any chained animation go smoothly. But certainly you ask yourself, what's next? In fact, one of the most asked questions about web development is, "how do I stay on the leading edge?" Chris Coyier recently presented a fantastic talk on the subject, and there are sites fully dedicated to staying up to date on the latest web design news. Addy Osmani's roundup on becoming a better front-end engineer sets some great content out on the board for you to consider on the subject; needless to say, a lot of smart people are thinking about this very subject, so you're headed in the right direction.

WHAT ARE CSS TRANSITIONS? Well, transitions smooth out value change by allowing elements to gently change from one style to the next; it's adding an effect to the change. Take for instance a link, where you set its style to have a pink background on hover. What typically happens is that, on mouse over, the colour rapidly changes to pink and rapidly changes back on mouse out. With a transition, the processes can be smoothed out so that the colour change faces in and out.

The week is coming to an end and that means it is time for us to look back on the week that passed, the best design news, resources and other goodies. This week we look Adobe programs, how to optimize your website, as well as how to make you app design stand out and much more. 6 Creative Ways to Use Evernote There's a reason the Evernote logo is an elephant. Because when used correctly, this helpful, versatile, free app will make sure you never forget anything ever. Just like an elephant. If you're unfamiliar with Evernote, the app utilizes "notebooks" - basically a system of folders and subfolders that become increasingly helpful as you create more. Greater organization makes it easier to recall exactly what you need at a later date, across any platform.

If you have tried Googling web designer resources you will have noticed that there is a gazillion different resources, however sometimes you just want to kick back and read a good old-fashioned magazine. If you are looking for a print publication that covers topics that web designers and developers are interested in then here is a list of 10 publications that you might find interesting. If you feel we have forgotten any then just leave us a comment below! .net Magazine Not only is .net one of the best online resources for web designers and developers, however their magazine is packed with practical advice on everything from design, development, sales, marketing, usability to accessibility, information architecture, security, copywriting, advertising and much much more.

Retro and vintage has been a trend in web design for some time now, and shows no signs of going out of fashion. It therefore follows, that this style is also trending in logo design. There is a lot of skill involved in designing logos, the designer is expected to create a 'feel' in a very small piece of art and/or text, and to convey the message the company wants to put across to their existing and potential customers. In this round-up we have selected 60 retro and vintage logos that have been beautifully designed, some of which have been designed for companies, others have been created for practise or for portfolios.

Photography is a beautiful form of modern art. A static picture says so many words, and opens up imagination beyond boundaries. Light has always been a favorite subject for photographers, be it natural or artificial. Light bulbs have also been photographed many times. The tungsten filament in a bulb, when lights up, gives us light, and the very mechanics of a bulb are fascinating.

Back in the days, trains were the primary land transportations that first transported goods, then after a few years the passenger trains. For these vehicles to reach one destination to another, it required railroads to guide the train to its proper track. Today, only a few railroads are being actively used by trains. Nevertheless, they can still be appreciated as wallpapers for our everyday screens. For our next article, we share to you 30 Astonishing Free Railroad Wallpapers for Your Desktop. In this collection, we have included some of the loveliest railroad wallpapers which you can download for free. Enjoy as you scroll down through our list. Come, Take a peek, and choose your pick.

Landing page is considered to be the most viewed page of any website. It usually serves as an intro section that consists of brief information about your business, including such essential stuff as logo, menu, welcoming photo-based or illustration-driven mascotes and, last but not least, tagline. The latter is mainly associated with opening headline which duty is to: Clarify what your agency does; emphasize difference between you and your competitors; encourage users to explore your website further; give a glimpse of your brand; promote your potential; show benefits; build emotions; establish proper atmosphere; add creativity. It's also imperative to take into account psychological side of the issue while choosing emotional background of your headline, since funny and serious statements can reflect on users differently.

High-quality usability has been the center of discussions in the industry in the past ten years, as it becomes more and more important for users. Good usability can also help build brand awareness and can generally improve a user's opinion of a website and even a company. There is so much focus on usability today because big and small companies showed how important a good usability strategy can turn out to be. Good usability has been in the past couple of years at the heart of successful start-ups. Simple ideas are most of the time the most innovative and this is mainly what usability is about: making a feature or a product easy to use, while still keeping the product quality at a high level. Today's article comes a lot down to common sense. It seems that after years and years of discussing this issue, web designers still have a hard time understanding it. Usability is not a joke anymore and the advices below should be printed out and pinned on the wall in front of your desk.

PHPUnit has hinted at parallelism since 2007, but, in the meantime, our tests continue to run slowly. Time is money, right? ParaTest is a tool that sits on top of PHPUnit and allows you to run tests in parallel without the use of extensions. This is an ideal candidate for functional (i.e Selenium) tests and other long-running processes.

Unless you are really HTML-savvy, writing articles directly using HTML is not ideal. First, you have to wrap the content properly with the tags in order to format it, and secondly you will have to go back and forth from your code editor to the browser to see how it looks. If you are a frequent web writer, I think it's better for you to write using Markdown. Markdown allows you to write content in plain text that later can be translated into a valid HTML format, and with the help of a tool, you can instantly see the output.