Category "Tutorials" on Smashing Magazine

Category: Tutorials

New techniques, fascinating effects, print design issues, icon design, Programming, Best-of tutorials, Adobe frameworks and 3D Inspiration for your projects – the Smashing Tutorials section covers numerous technologies, programmes and techniques. See what we have to offer: Smashing Tutorials, Hand-Picked Photoshop Tutorials, 50 Excellent AJAY Tutorials

The Ultimate Motion Graphics Tutorials Round-Up

Although static graphics is obviously much easier to scan and therefore can be easily perceived, motion graphics brings dynamics and life into otherwise static content. Animation can help designers to convey a deeper meaning with the use of various video-techniques. It can also provide a better data visualization than the static graphics. How and where you use it in real-life situations is totally up to your talent and your abilities to express yourself.

Motion graphics are not only created using digital techniques; also traditional animation and special effects techniques are used. However, digital techniques help to minimize production costs and achieve nice results with less effort. For example, the Juno opening sequence was a hand-made motion graphics which took painstakingly long time to finish.

A couple of weeks ago we presented Best Tutorials For Cinematic Visual Effects. In this post we present a collection of useful Tutorials for motion graphics – created with the use of digital techniques. These tutorials focus on the designing skills of a motion designer and not on the modeling or the animation. You can use these techniques to create stunning motion graphics or improve upon these ideas and come up with your own creative ideas that will be truly remarkable. Most of the tutorials are from similar sources, because of its quality and usefulness.

Best Tutorials For Cinematic Visual Effects

It doesn't matter whether you are a designer, a developer, an artist or an amateur learner – at some point you need to improve the quality of the original picture or video. You may want to retouch and enhance his or her photographs and videos, make it look better, more spectacular and more original. It could be for personal or commercial use. Most of us know how to edit and enhance the digital photographs using our favorite image editing software. But when it comes to videos, the techniques are completely different from that of classic image editing.

In this post we present best tutorial for visual video effects that will (hopefully) teach you how to create impressive videos which can be used for your presentations or websites. Visual effects are used in post production which involves integration of live-action footage and computer generated imagery. You can use it to enhance or manipulate videos, just the way you usually do with image processing tools.

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60+ Beautiful Logo Design Tutorials And Resources

When we talk about a famous brand, the first thing that comes to mind is its logo. The logo is the most essential component of any personal brand and also the hardest part to execute. A logo must be appropriate, aesthetically pleasing and a reflection of the company’s credibility. Furthermore, a logotype should be synonymous with the company or product it represents and should penetrate people’s minds as a selling agent.

An amateurish logo design can more likely make your business fail for a number of reasons. A logo is of great importance in creating brand identity, and you should be very careful in selecting one for your business.

Today, we present some outstanding logo design tutorials to give you a head start when it comes time to creating an amazing logo for your own business.

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50 Incredible Photography Techniques and Tutorials

Over the recent months we've been presenting various showcases of photography – while many readers hated the showcases, most readers found them inspirational and perfect for a lousy workday's morning. However, what we should have done in the inspirational posts is not just provide you with some inspiration for your work, but also present useful photographic techniques which can help you to achieve optimal pictures for your designs. And as requested by many of you, now it's time to correct our mistake.

In this post we present useful photographic techniques, tutorials and resources for various kinds of photography. You'll learn how to set up the perfect environment and what techniques, principles and rules of thumbs you should consider when shooting your next perfect photo. This round-up isn't supposed to be the ultimate one – please feel free to suggest more useful articles in the comments to this post.

Among other things, we cover high-speed photography, tilt-shift photography, black and white photography, motion blur, infrared, night, smoke photography, macro photography, HDR, panoramic photography, RAW processing and others. Hopefully, you'll find many of the listed tutorials and how-tos useful for your regular work.

5 Simple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs

There's just no escaping light and shadow -- it's everywhere you look. Everything you see reflects light and casts some sort of shadow. Visually, light and shadow help us make sense of what we see and help us understand texture, dimension and perspective.

So, as we try to make our designs on the Web more natural, moving and intuitive, a good understanding of light and shadow is pretty important. Here are 5 ways to better use light and shadow to polish your page designs and make them stand out on the screen.

Retro Rainbow Tutorials and Design Showcase

Although often used in the wrong context, the motif of ’70s Retro Rainbow designs seems to occur in many modern designs – from products designs to posters and web designs. The rainbow colors are particularly eye-catching and lively; they may provide the design with a dynamics and help to vividly convey the message of the graphic work. In past few months I came across to many artworks and new concepts of retro designs which gave me a thought to gather few for this inspirational post.

Below you'll find a showcase of beautiful Retro Rainbow designs and resources. They range from popular Flickr photos to unconventional sources of inspiration, from helpful tutorials to useful related tools. Share your favorite sources of inspiration in the comments.

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40+ Cartoon Character Illustration Tutorials

By Aquil Akhter
April 16th, 2009
Avatars, Cartoons, CG
55 Comments

Everybody likes cartoon characters. They make us happy and keep our mind tension-free. We present here beautiful and mind-blowing Cartoon Illustration Tutorials for you. This article contains a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials. Some are intermediate level and some are advanced tutorials that include coloring processing, character sketching, pen tool tricks for tracing line art sketches, shapes processing, vector conversions and much more.

We are sure all of the tutorials in this post will be a great help to you. We have made sure to include illustrations that will guide you step by step to easily learn how to create cool cartoon characters in Illustrator and Photoshop. You will also learn the basic skills required to create your own interesting and attractive characters. We also feature some powerful tips, tricks, tools and other resources that may help you make a variety of cartoon character illustrations.

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Handy Tweaks To Make GIMP Replace Photoshop

GIMP is the favorite graphics editing program of many designers and graphic artists. It is free and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux (the two big reasons for its popularity). It has a wide array of features, as well as plug-ins, filters and brushes. Documentation is primarily available in online communities, as well as through extensive add-ons.

GIMP was never designed to replace Photoshop, yet with every release, it comes a little closer to being able to do so. It can be used to author graphics, create logos and edit photos, as well as make short animations (using GAP). Despite these features, the open-source app is a foreign world for many users switching from Photoshop. Familiar tools are missing, menus are laid out differently and tasks must be accomplished in unknown ways.

This article discusses eight tweaks to make GIMP a more serious Photoshop replacement option. Version 2.6 was used to test the following tweaks, but past versions of the app should work as well.

45 Apple-Inspired Photoshop Tutorials

For years, Apple has had a huge impact on designers and graphic artists across the globe. The simplicity and sharpness of the Aqua interface in Mac OS X strongly influenced the way new products were being presented and designed. It's not only the design of products that makes Apple's products different, it's also their appearance on the Web and in print.

No other company has managed to come up with such a crisp and brilliant style of presenting its recent designs as a new breakthrough innovation that will change our lives for a long time. Apple has found an extremely effective way to deliver its message to a wide audience, and Apple's look and feel has played a major role in shaping that way.

In this post, we present a collection of beautiful Apple-inspired Adobe Photoshop tutorials. We collected them not because we are religiously in love with Apple, but because you may find these tutorials useful; for instance, if you are developing a new Mac or iPhone application or designing a concept for a new product. In these cases, you may want to consider Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and our Designer's Guide To Icon Design For Mac OS X. Please feel free to suggest further tutorials in the comments to this post.

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