This category includes articles and tutorials on designing in Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks. Free icons, textures, PSDs and other similar resources are featured here, as well as showcases of photography, video and wallpapers. This section also hosts our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series.
Popular tags in this category: Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Wallpapers, Freebies, Photography, Videos, Textures, Logo Design, Tutorials.
Saving repetitive tasks as Photoshop actions can save you a lot of time, allowing you to automate your work and improve workflow efficiency. A Photoshop action is a recording of a sequence of commands and operations that you can save and access later on.
We've searched for the most useful Photoshop actions that can help you improve your workflow and perform complex techniques with the push of a button. In this collection, you'll find more than 350 free hand-picked Photoshop actions that you can use to speed up your graphics creation.
Note: It's important to check the license of each action set you download and use.
Read more...Among all different types of photography showcased on the Smashing Magazine, underwater photography is probably one of the most difficult ones. It requires a very specialized equipment and the knowledge of some advanced techniques to get a perfect picture. Underwater photos offen suffer from loss of color and contrast when taken on some significant depth. These photos are always adjusted with color balance to help offset the blueish tint of the water.
Since underwater photography is a specialized art, relatively few photographers attempt it. But it offers many exciting and rare photographic opportunities for fresh and truly different vivid images. More often photographers use a traditional film or digital camera which is covered with watertight housing. Professionals prefer to use special underwater cameras.
Below we present over 50 beautiful examples of underwater photos — created by artists and professional photographers. All works featured below are linked — the links lead to artist's and photographer's portfolios or web-sites. At the bottom of this post you'll fine some links to Flickr groups where you can find more similar and exiciting photos.
Also consider our previous showcases:
In the realm of digital art, so many wonderful and playful genres exist that stimulate the imagination, but so few do it with the intricate style of fractal art. Fractal art is achieved through the mathematical calculations of fractal objects being visually displayed, with the use of self-similar transforms that are generated and manipulated with different assigned geometric properties to produce multiple variations of the shape in continually reducing patterns. Sounds extremely technical and not that artistic, true, but these equations create some of the most mesmerizing and inspiring artwork to emerge from the digital art arena.
In this post we look at awe-inspiring examples of the dynamic digital art sensation that is fractal art with 35 Phenomenal Fractal Art Renders. Setting across the vast sea of cyberspace to find these works was such an amazing task as so many fantastic pieces surfaced. Here are scaled-down versions of some of the most breathtaking ones that were uncovered, though the full-sized versions (linked through the image) offer a much more spectacular view of these mathematical masterpieces.
Read more...Today is the Blog Action Day. Today bloggers all across the globe are uniting and publishing posts related to poverty. We want to raise awareness, start a global discussion and add momentum to an important cause. Smashing Magazine strongly believes that together we can make a difference by informing people about the problem and donating money to charitable organizations.
We considered various options for this post: we could showcase designs or posters related to poverty, or we could scour the Web for poverty-related icons and wallpapers. But we decided to do something different. We decided to prove that each of us can help make poverty history.
For this purpose we collected beautiful portraits of children who lived in poverty but are now supported by charitable organizations. These photos were shot by photographers, photojournalists and organizations who have tried to improve the conditions of children in poor countries. The money these organizations raised gave these children hope, a future, something to rely on and something to believe in. There are millions of children out there who need your help. And you can help them by donating to the Global Fund and donating to Kiva.
Read more...With the recent post on retro and vintage in modern web design, it's time to put the theory into practice. We've scoured the Web to find some impressive Photoshop tutorials that can help you achieve an "old-fashioned" look-and-feel in your designs.
In this post, we go back to the 1900's all theway to the 1980's to showcase a variety of vintage- and retro-inspired designs that involve poster art, collages and graphical elements. Whether you're into print design or web design, you'll find something you can use or build upon.
Without further ado, we present 35 high-quality vintage and retro Adobe Photoshop tutorials that may help your design... well, travel back in time.
Read more...Movie posters are art and, unfortunately, the forgotten one. In the early years of cinema history, they were used just like advertising material. Displayed in theatres only, movie posters had the same function as a menu in a restaurant: what feast can I enjoy this evening? Nowadays, movie posters play a big role in cinema memorabilia collection. They have lost the "informative" tone to wear a more artistic and decorative dress. We want to change it with this post.
Made in many different sizes and versions, and released in different moments all along a movie's life, posters immortalize in one static image the feeling and the atmosphere of a motion picture. Some posters can be dark or try to frighten the audience, others bedazzling with bright colors; some can be someway informative, while others can be fully teasing and may provide you only the date when movie will be released, even if you may not know what the movie is about.
In this post we present you a showcase of 50 beautiful movie posters. We went through different decades of movie history and different genre, different graphical approach, colors and style. Movies the posters are about may be famous or not, this is not the point.
Movie posters put together the love for for two different visual arts: cinema and graphics. Enjoy!
You may also want to take a look at the related posts:
Read more...It's been about 7 months since the original Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of was published, and in that time there have been many more noteworthy tutorials released. With all of that new content , it's only appropriate to put out a second edition of the best Illustrator tutorials. In this post you'll find some basic tutorials on getting started with certain aspects of Illustrator and some of its specific tools. You'll also find more advanced tutorials that deal with all of the potential that Illustrator brings to graphic design.
Many of these tutorials have been developed by some of the best in the business, so you're sure to find plenty of new techniques and tricks to take your graphic design skills to a new level.
Read more...It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.
This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.
For a good corporate design, we need to be aware of two main elements, which can be further broken down into a total of seven “ingredients”: design, as in artistic representation (logo, typography, colors), and design strategy (brand, quality, community, culture).
Read more...Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty.
In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. At the bottom of this post are some links to tutorials on creating your own smoke photographs, as well as other resources on the subject.
Read more...
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