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40 Beautiful Grunge Photoshop Tutorials

Grunge is a popular trend that attempts to give designs a more organic and realistic look. It also provides a stark contrast to the simplistic, polished, and rigid "web 2.0" trend, opting instead for a less uniform and more elaborate form of design.

We've discussed grunge style in modern web design before, as well as the tips and tricks to achieving the grunge look. Now, it's time to put theory into practice by finding ways to infuse grunge thems into your artwork using Photoshop. In this collection, we present to you 40 excellent, high-quality grunge Photoshop tutorials. So fire up Photoshop and get ready to get your hands… dirty!

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Grunge Photoshop Brushes Set

In our previous releases we focused on icons and Wordpress-themes; however, there is a variety of further tools graphic designers need on a regular basis. For instance, Photoshop brushes. We have mentioned already that grunge is becoming a trend, so a set of grungy Photoshop brushes sounded like a good idea. You can find dozens of our further releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release Smashing Photoshop Brushes — a free set of 74 grunge Photoshop brushes in resolution 69 — 2463px. The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET too). The brushes were designed by Silvia Bukovac Gasevic, the creative mind behind graphics-illustrations.com, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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The Secrets Of Grunge Design

Shiny and glossy design elements are now officially outdated. Just like retro is becoming trendy again, grungy look appears to rapidly gain on popularity. And there is a damn good reason behind it. In our everyday environment we're unlikely to find ideal geometric forms or pretty shadow effects as they are manifested by glorious Web 2.0-designs. The reality is different, and Web is definitely not an exception here.

Therefore designers often tend to explore the less ideal and more realistic design solutions which reflect the world we're living in more accurately and precisely. Result: such elements give the design a more realistic, genuine look, a look one would actually expect in real life.

In such grunge designs dirty stains, torn images, "broken" icons and creased pieces of paper are as popular as hand-drawn elements and dirty textures. The main purpose of hand-drawn elements lies in their ability to convey a personality and an individual note. And dirty textures are often used as background images for navigation menus, photos and overall layouts. Usually these elements are regular objects from our daily life, replicated in their real form without any glossy effects.

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Grunge Style In Modern Web Design

Most design trends come unexpectedly, evolve over time, become pointless and finally disappear from the design landscape. This holds particularly for web design, which is — just as every other creative field — prone for over-hyping and over-usage of trends. Being used excessively (sometimes properly, but mostly without any reasonable purpose), trends lose their ability to communicate information, express something unique or innovative and consequently lose their visual appeal.

Web 2.0 style is an excellent example for this evolution in design. In the last months of 2007 we've observed a clear example of design abuse, as glossy buttons, colorful reflections, 3D-effects, rounded corners and xx-large font sizes could be found almost everywhere (and we've presented some examples a year ago). However, currently we've been observing a new step in this evolution. Web 2.0 elements start to disappear; they become more subtle, more user-centric, more content-oriented and less loud. Is it a sign for coming changes?

Below we've collected everything you would ever need for a perfect design in a grunge style — design examples, free fonts, icons, textures, brushes and even few tutorials.

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