tripwire magazine

This Article provides a collection of high-quality Photoshop smoke effect tutorials and brushes. Smoke effects can be useful in different types of design and artwork. Please drop a comment if you know a tutorial or brush set I have not listed.

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Using textures in web design have become quite popular. Textures are great for giving the design a more realistic look and feel but should be used with caution. Adding too much texture risk making the design too messy and it easily becomes a bit grunge’ish. I personally like simple textures or simply noise that break the colours a bit and gives depth and brings the design to life when used right. This post brings 25 sites with different use of textures for your inspiration. Drop a comment and share if you like some of them or if you know others I should add.

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Abobe Air may not get a lot of attention but maybe it should. The amount of good free applications available is rather surprising. Generally the applications are light weight, are easy to use and have good and intuitive user interfaces. This article list a very broad selection of useful tools based in Abobe Air. You will find anything from image editors, mind mappers, html editors, sql admin, snippet management, snapshot creaters etc. Please comment if you know a good Air tool that is not on the list!

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Typography is defined as the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyph. With Photoshop and the right skills and techniques at your disposal you can push the limits of Typography to the edge. This article is one of the largest categorized collections of Text Effect Tutorials will be able to find. All tutorials have large preview images and all links have been verified today. Don’t forget to bookmark, share and come back because I assure you this “elephant post” must be cut up and consumed in smaller slices! I you do so I bet your Photoshop skills will soon be hard to compete with…

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Lighting effects are often used in modern web design to give a site an interesting and different look and feel. There is something about strong lights and colours – used right the combination will catch our attention and affect our emotions in certain ways. Skilled designers know this and use it. Light effects are typically used on dark designs as they may the effects stronger – just like we are saving the best fireworks until darkness falls.

This article is a showcase of more than 40 sites using creative and inspiring lighting effects. Hope you like it and feel inspired and tempted to use some of the ideas for your own designs. Please drop a comment if you know any websites that you think should have made it on the list. If you’re ready to try out some light effects but not sure how to get started you should take a look at this post. 130+ Awesome Photoshop Tutorials – Light Effects, Drawing, Manipulation, Correction etc.

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The features, maturity,  and huge active community making Wordpress so popular for bloggers actually makes Wordpress a serious candidate for a quite large segment of traditional business websites. If you’re not already aware of it I can tell you that Wordpress is silently serving a lot of websites that I would not categorize as blogs. Of cause there are types of websites having loads of special and complex requirements Wordpress will never be supporting well but if you don’t have these needs Wordpress is worth considering… it’s free, the most popular open source platform to date, easy to use, fast to set up, there are thousands of good looking themes available… This post show you more than 20 websites using Wordpress for Non-Blogging purposes – hope this will inspire you!

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Tutorials on how to create Web designs in tools like Photoshop have increased rapidly in numbers recently and as always there are some that are better than other. I have previously created quantitative lists trying to list any tutorials available that is worth following fx. 185+ Web Design Tutorials using Photoshop, CSS, HTML etc. In this article I have put a significant effort into picking only a few but some of the best available. This should make your life easier and its not too overwhelming to plan going through them to sharpen your skills and be inspired. I have based my assessment on the quality of the design itself, appearance of interesting and useful tip/techniques  and on the detail and quality of the individual tutorial steps. Stay tuned as I will scan through more tutorials and provide more Web Design Tutorials you can’t resist trying out!

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Most websites and blogs follow same overall structure in their design. At the top there’s a header section with a logo and in some case a few ads and some kind af navigation. At the bottom there’s some kind of footer. Between the header and footer there are one or more column with content. Traditionally most space and focus have been put on the header and the content sections while the footer have been one or two lines with maybe some contact information and a few important links. Many websites still follow this pattern but there’s certainly a trend right now turning this completely around. Modern websites and in particular blogs offer footers that are significant design elements, that become essential for the usability and overall look and feel. Of cause footer contents varies quite a lot from design to design (some having article lists, contact forms, votes, bio, navigation, image feed etc.) but it’s interesting to see how designers prioritize their footer today. Looking at footers created by other designers for great websites and blogs is inspiring and it may help us get ideas on what fits will in our own footer sections. This article showcase more than 40 great looking footers and should be enough to keep you inspired. But I hope you will leave comment if you know about  a great footer we should all know about.

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Blog designs certainly can by complex, colourful and overwhelming and many free themes for Wordpress belongs to that category. Some bloggers on the other hand prefer simple and clean layouts for their blog leaving more space for the text itself to be in focus. If you should go for a minimalistic theme is really up to you to decide but if you’re considering this post will give you the inspiration needed and may help you find the theme you are looking for.

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There are indeed many ways in which designers can use typography to deliver a message and even though humans use many years in school learning to read and write images are still making larger and more instant impact on us and affect our emotions easier than plain text. As you know “A picture is worth a thousand words” and this fundamental principle is often used by designers combining or modelling typography into images illustrating or supporting the message provided in text itself. This is a very large showcase compilation providing you inspiration, ideas and some of the best typography artwork created.

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