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

Adobe Flash Tutorials – Best of

Although usability evangelists often consider Flash to be a usability nightmare, used properly, Flash can provide users with a rich and interactive interface which would be impossible otherwise. Today Flash is the de-facto standard for interactive elements on the Web as most users install Flash plug-in by default. And in fact, there are many paths creative designers can take to create a more interactive and user-friendly interface.

Searching for 'flash tutorials' via Google & Co. won't provide you with the results you expect. Not that you won't find any relevant results, on the contrary — you will be directed to a large number of Flash repositories which offer everything: sometimes useful, but mostly not. Besides, browsing through these repositories isn't that much fun — as you sometimes need to figure out whether a link you see is a hidden AdSense-block or the actual tutorial. And it's really hard to find something "refreshing" and new simply using some standard keywords.

This article provides hand-picked professional Flash tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. We've tried to select most interesting and useful tutorials. Most sources can serve as the entry point for further tutorials.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – Best Of

When it comes to graphic design, Adobe Photoshop is usually the first option to consider. However, the software itself is a quite tough nut to crack — and definitely extremely hard to master. For instance, the concepts are not always intuitive and it's not always clear when to use what tool and how to use it effectively. In fact, in Photoshop it usually takes pretty much time to achieve something you have never done before.

However, you don't need to muddle through numerous Photoshop features and extensions for every design problem. You can use professional suggestions instead, e.g. professional step-by-step tutorials which provide excellent results and thus can save you a lot of time.

One year ago we've presented a hand-picked collection of Photoshop tutorials. Now it's time for a fresh portion of healthy Photoshop learning material. This article provides professional Adobe Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. Although the authors of the tutorials rarely provide the information about the used version, we tried to pick only those tutorials that can be used with both CS 3 and older versions of Adobe Photoshop.

Corporate Identity Manuals & Guides

The protection of visual identity is probably one of the most important issues when it comes to developing concepts in which corporate identity (CI) is used. Both in web design and in print - corporate identity manuals are supposed to give designers precise guidelines on how logotypes, colors and typography should be used. Basically for one simple reason: to promote the visual identity in the most convenient, consistent and efficient way and make sure no mistakes are done. E.g. the logotype remains readable and the whitespace around the logo gives it the space it needs to breathe and be effective - throughout various projects.

Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials

With the growing popularity of CMS, Wikis and Weblogs, WYSIWIG-editors lose their users. However, many of those editors offer many advantages, such as Integration of SVN, FTP Clients, Developer's extensions and programming environments. Using them, you can save your time and increase your efficiency. Not every code has to be written in Notepad, not every problem has to be solved manually. Therefore some good starting points for improving your WYSIWYG-skills can be useful.

In the list below we tried to cover some of the most useful references, tutorials, ideas and sketches related to Adobe Dreamweaver (initially called Macromedia Dreamweaver).

You might be willing to use at least some of them for your next projects. Particularly video-tutorials are amazing, don't forget to check them out.

PS: You might also be interested in

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Web 2.0 Tutorials Round-Up

Web 2.0 can be beautiful. In fact, many designers manage to create really amazing, particularly dark and fresh web-designs, which are visually appealing and make a great first impression. However, if you are planning on designing a web 2.0-project, you probably should know how and where to start from. Badges, Gradients, Mirror and Shadow Effects as well as Shiny and Glassy buttons are trendy. But do you know exactly how to design them?

We've collected over 65 tutorials, references and related resources, which are supposed to help you to create graphics in Web 2.0-Look. It's nice to have them ready to hand if you need them. It's nice to be able to look at them if you need a source of inspiration.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

As a vector-based drawing program Adobe Illustrator has nowadays become the standard for illustration design. This tendency can be noticed in the Web as well as in Print Design. Few weeks ago we've selected some of the best Adobe Photoshop tutorials we've found on the Web so far; now it's time for Adobe Illustrator. Below you'll find a list of hand-picked Illustrator tutorials you can use to achieve some special visual effects in your designs.

Tutorials Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, PHP and More

By Sven Lennartz
January 26th, 2007
AJAX, CSS, JavaScript
42 Comments

Coding or designing a page, it's always nice to have some basic templates you can quickly modify or adapt to your needs. However, at least once you have to know, how to create this "universal" template. In this case tutorials prove to be an ultimate solution, particularly if you just want to get an idea how something works and where to start from. In fact, you don't have to re-invent the wheel all the time - you can use existing solutions, modify and improve them and publish them as well - just the way other people did it for you.

In this post we've covered over 200 Ajax, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, RSS, XML as well as ASP, C++, Perl, Python and Java tutorials. You can also check out our list of Photoshop tutorials we've published before.

Hand-Picked Photoshop Tutorials

By Sven Lennartz
January 12th, 2007
Photoshop, Tutorials
26 Comments

Adobe Photoshop is a powerful tool for designing various visual elements one can use for web-pages. However, sometimes it's important to know what to do in order to achieve some effects. In such cases, step-by-step tutorials can provide help and save a lot of time you would have to spend on finding a solution otherwise. Let's take a look at some of the best Adobe Photoshop tutorials we've found in the Web so far. Links checked: June/17 2008.

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