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Beautiful Examples of Vexel Artworks and Tutorials

Vexel art is a digital art that is an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the vector graphics technique, but is distinguished from normal vector graphics or raster images. "Vexel" itself is a mixture of two words ‘Vector’ and ‘Pixel’. Vexel designs are composed by using multiple layered shapes. It can be done in Photoshop, but vexel designs are not limited to only Photoshop; essentially, it can be done with any image editing software that has a good Pen Tool.

Below are some truly amazing examples of vexel artwork and also some outstanding tutorials that will help you to master the technique or at least get some understanding of how this technique can be used. Feel free to explore further works of the artists presented below. Enjoy and be inspired.

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50 Excellent 3D Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

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.

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:

• Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
• Adobe Illustrator Tutorials: Best Of

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Scientific Designs and Tutorials That Will Inspire You

Art and science. The two are more known to be near opposites in the world. Yet, when creativity collides with a logically inspired motif, the results can be spectacular. With a mixture of creative graphics, illustrations, 3D models, trendy typography, photo manipulations and more, you are able to create some of the most amazing art.

Posters have many uses and come in different styles. They can be hung on the walls inside your home, your office, your cubicle. They can be used for print media advertising a special event or a product branding. Some are with typography and some without. The following poster art provides a perspective of science that can only be seen from the artistic side. Links to the profiles of the known artist or source has been provided so that you may view their other designs.

So sit back and let your imagination expand as you take a scientific journey through the the eyes of many artists.

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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.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials
• Best Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials

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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.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Drawing Inspiration From Creative Logos
• Beautiful And Creative Logo Designs For Your Inspiration

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The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials

CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements – particularly if you want to reduce your server load. And if you haven't heard of CSS sprites before, now is probably a good time to learn what they are, how they work and what tools can help you create and use the technique in your projects.

The term "sprite" (similar to "spirit," "goblin," or "elf") has its origins in computer graphics, in which it described a graphic object blended with a 2-D or 3-D scene through graphics hardware. Because the complexity of video games has continually increased, there was a need for smart techniques that could deal with detailed graphic objects while keeping game-play flowing. One of the techniques developed saw sprites being plugged into a master grid (see the image below), then later pulled out as needed by code that mapped the position of each individual graphic and selectively painted it on the screen.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without
• Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding
• 50 Extremely Useful and Powerful CSS Tools
• CSS Float Theory
• CSS Specificity

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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.

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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.

You may want to consider browsing through the following related posts:

• Retro and Vintage in Modern Web Design
• Celebration Of Vintage and Retro Design
• 35 Beautiful Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials
• Vintage and Retro Typography Showcase

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40+ Cartoon Character Illustration Tutorials

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.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials
• 35 Beautiful Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials
• Adobe Illustrator Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of

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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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50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

Photoshop’s text and layer tools can be used to create some really awesome effects. We’ve put together a list of 60 of the best tutorials we could find to help you stay up to date on the latest trends and techniques. You’ll find some really cool grunge and glass styles (plus a few surprises!) and learn how some of the best designers create their unique effects.

Instead of listing 100 plus tutorials that you'll bookmark never to come back, we've decided to take you through the basics of typography, hopefully inspiring and then teaching you. Typography is an art just like any other. You have to feel the form, admire the curves and connect with the flow.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials
• Beauty Retouching Photoshop Tutorials
• Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials
• Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects With Photoshop

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Ask SM: How Do I Create A Colorful Sitemap With jQuery?

We like to experiment with new ideas and concepts. We like to challenge ourselves and provide our readers with new formats. This post is the first in our "Ask Smashing Magazine" series, in which well-known developers from the web design community answer our readers' questions and suggest solutions to common problems.

Today, we are glad to welcome Chris Coyier, who you may know from his articles on CSS-Tricks, to our Smashing Magazine Editorial Team. From now on, Chris will regularly answer your CSS- and jQuery-related questions and present answers to the most interesting, useful and original ones in his articles on Smashing Magazine. Welcome, Chris!

Of course, you can send any CSS- and jQuery-related question you want. To ask a question, you can do any of the following:

1. Send an email to Chris at ask [at] smashingmagazine [dot] com with your question,
2. Post your question in our forum, putting "[Ask SM]" in the thread title (yes, the forum is not officially launched yet, but it is running!),
3. Or, if you have a quick question, just tweet us @smashingmag or @chriscoyier with the tag "[Ask SM]."

Please note: Chris will do what he can to answer most questions, but he will certainly not be able to answer all of them. However, we hope that our forum may help you to solve your problem in case Chris couldn't help you out.

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50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials

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).

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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60 Beautiful Christmas Photoshop Tutorials

Christmas is a holiday of love and family. It is the time of year when people come together to celebrate, when they realize that some things are more important than others. So why don't you impress the people who are important to you with some unique Christmas cards or beautiful personal desktop wallpaper?

In this post, we present 60 beautiful Christmas Photoshop tutorials. You'll learn how to design Christmas trees, snow globes, snowflakes, Christmas candles, Christmas balls and much more. Some designers go even further, taking the time to draw Christmas illustrations or replace old icons with festive ones. Often, designers will draw Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and friends or create a Christhmas theme for their website layout.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Christmas Wallpapers
• Christmas Icons and Christmas Wordpress Themes
• 50 Beautiful Winter Wonderland Photos

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50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for digital-image editing and graphics creation. Photoshop's versatility makes it a popular choice among Web designers, graphic designers, digital media artists, print designers, photographers and other professionals in design and image-editing. Whether you're designing a business card or website or digitally enhancing an image, you can rest assured that Photoshop will give you the necessary tools to get the job done.

In this article, we focus on tutorials on digital photography. You'll find an assortment of top-notch tutorials that deal with applying post-production techniques and effects, color correction, enhancement and photo retouching. So fire up Photoshop and try out some of these wonderful tutorials on your own photos!

Without further ado, we present you with 50 Excellent Photoshop Tutorials for Digital Photography.

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Photoshop Tutorials To Improve Your Modeling and Design Skills

You have to use Adobe Photoshop for a really long time to understand its potential completely. There are many things you can do using its endless features. You need to discover them and decide how to use them in new and innovative ways to create the creative, beautiful and realistic digital art. In this article, we look at Photoshop in a different way: as a tool for designers to create realistic objects and 3D models.

Below you'll find over 50 Photoshop tutorials that teach you how to create beautiful realistic objects and 3D models. Let's see what it takes to turn Photoshop into a design workspace.

We also have plenty of tutorials on using Photoshop to improve the quality of your images:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials
• 50 Photoshop Tutorials For Sky and Space Effects
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects

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ExpressionEngine Developer’s Toolbox

While open-source CMS options like WordPress get a lot of attention from bloggers and designers, ExpressionEngine is a powerful, robust choice that many designers and clients would find more suitable to their needs. And as with the other CMS options, there are plenty of online resources for designers and developers who are working with ExpressionEngine. In this article you’ll find a helpful collection of resources to aid you in your work with EE.

For more CMS Toolboxes, see:

• WordPress Developer’s Toolbox
• Drupal Developer’s Toolbox

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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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50 Excellent AJAX Tutorials

AJAX provides Web developers with plenty of opportunities to enhance the user experience and improve the performance of their websites. There are countless ways that AJAX can be used, and fortunately there are plenty of good and useful AJAX tutorials out there to help you with your own implementation.

This post serves as a collection of useful tutorials on working with AJAX in a wide variety of ways. You’ll find tutorials on working with forms, building shopping carts, creating chat features, working with log-ins and usernames and much more.

For more on AJAX see:

• 80+ AJAX Solutions for Professional Coding
• 60 More AJAX and JavaScript Solutions for Professional Coding
• 40+ Tooltips Scripts with AJAX, JavaScript and CSS
• Tutorials Round-Up: AJAX, CSS, PHP and More

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35 Beautiful Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials

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.

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