Smashing Magazine ~ we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.
Smashing Magazine we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

  • 50 Excellent 3D Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

    By Ronald Bien, June 16th, 2009 in Tutorials | 63 Comments

    Adobe Illustrator is one of the best applications for making graphic artwork like logos, print designs and Web pages. As time goes on, more and more Illustrator techniques are introduced by talented designers and artists in the industry who achieve some of the best results on the Web. One hot trend nowadays is 3D effects. So, we've gathered together some 3D tutorials to give you an idea of what Adobe Illustrator offers and how to use its 3D features. This list mixes tutorials for beginners and experts.

    Screenshot

    Here then is our round-up of 50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials for 3D artwork. You'll learn a lot of techniques and good practices.

    You may also be interested in the following related posts:

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  • 60+ Amazing Poster and Advertisment Tutorials

    By Aquil Akhter, June 1st, 2009 in Tutorials | 95 Comments

    Everyone in the business world knows the importance of posters and ads in advertising for specific products. Posters are an integral part of advertising. An eye-catching, attractive poster that conveys a professional, compelling message about a product, service or event will invariably hold the user's attention.

    In this article, we have collected a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials related to posters and advertisements. You will find some are intermediate and some are very advanced, but they'll all give you a lot of direction with photo composition, illustration, coloring processing, typography techniques, pen tool tricks, shapes processing and much more.

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  • 20 Time-Saving Tips to Improve Designer’s Workflow

    By Michael Shelton, May 26th, 2009 in How-To | 81 Comments

    Want to save some time? Of course you do! You are probably always looking for ways to do this faster and make that easier, it's human nature! One of the best ways to save time is experience. The more experience you have, the more comfortable you are working, the more you have developed your own best methods, and with experience you know how to better avoid mistakes and disasters. So always stay hard at what you do and you will definitely save more than "just" time!

    File with common graphic elements

    However, regardless of your experience level, there are ways to speed up the common design tasks. You should find some of these not-so-well-known tips and strategies listed below very helpful for your workflow. And please feel free to suggest more ideas in the comments to this post!

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  • 50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials

    By Jacob Gube, January 4th, 2009 in Tutorials | 76 Comments

    Adobe Illustrator is the industry-standard when it comes to the creation of vector graphics. Though a very robust tool - the learning curve involved in mastering it can be high. Thankfully, there are abundant resources on the web that allows you to "learn by doing". Video tutorials (in general) enable the learner to witness - step-by-step - how a particular technique works. We often learn best by seeing how things are done and following along with the instructor (much like in a classroom environment).

    Illustrator - screen shot.

    In this article, we present to you 50 excellent Adobe Illustrator video tutorials. We've broken down the video tutorials into several categories that include creating objects, effects, and general tips and techniques.

    So fire up Illustrator, watch a few of these videos, and hopefully you will have learned a tip or two by the end of your adventures into these Illustrator video tutorials!

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  • Swirls Vector Illustrations Set

    By Smashing Editorial, November 12th, 2008 in Freebies | 71 Comments

    Today we are glad to release Swirls Illustrations Set, a sets of 10 high-quality vector illustrations, created with Adobe Illustrator and available as .eps source files. These illustrations were created by Designious.com and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

    Swirls Vector Illustrations

    You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

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  • Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of: Part 2

    By Steven Snell, October 8th, 2008 in Tutorials | 91 Comments

    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.

    blueprint text

    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.

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  • Designing Websites In Photoshop Illustrator?

    By Smashing Editorial, August 14th, 2008 in Events | 192 Comments

    So you have done some initial sketches for the look of your new design. Now it's time to develop these ideas. So let's jump into Photoshop. Stop! Wait just a minute. What about Illustrator? That can do web-design stuff too, can’t it?

    Screenshot of Illustrator

    For the “its time to develop these sketches”-stage of designing a site it's worth giving Illustrator a try. You’d be surprised. Sure you can create precise finished results in Photoshop; yet Illustrator excels at generating loads of designs quickly. Comparing designs is easy — just spread them out all over your canvas. It's faster to move things around. It's easier to resize things. It's not that Illustrator is better. It's just different.

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  • Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of

    By Smashing Editorial, February 5th, 2008 in Tutorials | 232 Comments

    Over years Adobe Illustrator has become the standard application when it comes to illustration design. Artists, illustrators and graphic designers use Illustrator to create vector-based graphics which — contrary to raster-based editors such as Adobe Photoshop — can be easily rescaled without the loss of quality. E.g., Illustrator is often used to quickly transform hand-drawn sketches on a sheet of paper into lively and colorful digital images.

    However, to master Adobe Illustrator isn't easy; and the creating process of professional illustrations requires both time and patience. Therefore tutorials can turn out to be real life- and time-savers as they show exactly what needs to be done in order to create professional illustrations and how masters of illustration actually manage to do their magic. One year ago we’ve presented a hand-picked collection of Illustrator tutorials. Now it’s time for a fresh portion of healthy and creative Illustrator material.

    Illustrator Tutiorials Screenshot

    In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers. The new selection isn't enormous, but big enough to provide you with some good starting points.

    Please notice that

    • we've selected only those tutorials which haven't been featured last year or were released after the article was published.
    • you might also be interested in Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of we've presented few weeks ago.

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  • RSS: Best Design Practices And Icons

    By Smashing Editorial, November 2nd, 2007 in Design Showcase | 161 Comments

    RSS is extremely simple and yet so powerful. Not only does every weblog need it for content syndication; the number of RSS subscribers is a metric for weblog's popularity and its success in the blogosphere. However, although millions do use RSS, hundreds of millions don't. That's no good news, since RSS offers a bunch of advantages that can boost your productivity and improve your information consumption in a quite elegant and easy-to-use way.

    In this article we give an overview of what RSS is and present best design and usability-practices for design and placement of RSS-buttons on a web site. We also showcase dozens of free RSS-icons and provide you with references to related tutorials and how-tos.

    Screenshot - RSS

    Please notice that

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  • Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

    By Smashing Editorial, February 3rd, 2007 in Tutorials | 128 Comments

    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.

    Read more...



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