Design Reviver » illustration

Creative Icon Tutorials for Photoshop

speckyboy — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:54:37 +0000

For today’s news round-up we take a look at whats new and cool in the world of icon design tutorials. We have picked four such tutorials which we feel are that good that we simply had to share them with our readers.

How To Create a Detailed Briefcase Icon

Follow this step by step guide to create a detailed briefcase icon, building the rough outline with basic shapes, then adding depth and definition with various Photoshop layer styles such as Inner Glow and Stroke. And finally bringing the icon to life by using real photographic textures to give a tactile leather feel to the icon.
How To Create a Detailed Briefcase Icon

Draw a Trophy Icon in Photoshop

Shiny Lock Icon Photoshop Tutorial

How to Create a Beautiful Guitar Icon

Learn how to start from scratch and draw your own guitar icon in Photoshop. This tutorial will show you how to create your own wood texture and create a guitar using the basic tools in Photoshop.
How to Create a Beautiful Guitar Icon

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Marvelous Logo Redesigns and Inspiration

speckyboy — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:28:41 +0000

In today’s news round-up we take a refreshing look at quite possibly the most difficult and challenging aspect of graphic design, which is logo design. We have some inspirational posts and some highly educational logo redesign round-ups which should stimulate all of your creative minds and inspire you in your next logo design project.

Fresh Photoshop Tutorials and Resources

speckyboy — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:12:16 +0000

Today we have a nice round-up of hand-picked and fresh articles and resources for all of the Photoshop fans out… that will pretty much everyone then! There are is a huge selection (50!) of tutorials for the latest and greatest CS5, a selection of trending lighting tutorials, 100+ Photoshop actions and finally an impressive selection of web layout templates. Hope you find them useful.

Brilliant Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials From 2010

40 Dazzling Photoshop Abstract and Lighting Effects Tutorials

40 Professional and Detailed Web Layout PSD Templates

100 Free Photoshop Actions (And How to Make Your Own)

In Defense Of Photoshop (Good Read)

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Awesome Resource: User Interface Design Framework

speckyboy — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:33:09 +0000

Today’s news focuses on only one single design resource… and what a FREE resource it is! It is The User Interface Design Framework from webalys.com, which is basically a huge design framework that consists of a complete GUI library, a set of of 260 minimal vector icons and a massive Illustrator style library. This is a must have resource for any professional designer.

License: The framework has been released as a complete web designer kit for free, even for commercial use.

You can download the UI Design Interface here: User Interface Design Framework
You can view the details of the framework below:

GUI Library

The GUI elements are based on common interface patterns (accordion, expandable panel, progress bar, tags, slide show…), that integrate usability good practices and are perfect for wireframes and interface design.

Vector Icons Library – 260 Minimal Icons for Free

This pixel precise icon collection have been created specifically for interface and web designers. They are based on a precise 16 pixels grid, which means that they stay clear and have a crisp look even at small sizes.

Graphic Styles Library

The Graphic Styles Library consists of 200 graphic styles for buttons, navigation menus or panels and 330 swatches harmonized with graphic styles for backgrounds, typography and other GUI interface elements.

You can download the UI Design Interface here: User Interface Design Framework

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Best Practices for Preventing Design and Code Theft

Joel Reyes — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:08:18 +0000

Design and code theft is an ongoing dilemma that we face as designers and or developers; it is something that is expected to happen eventually, as the internet is a worldwide accessed medium by many different types of people.

In fact, the most used medium for theft and fraud is the internet itself as it is the easiest way for such unwanted activates to occur at such a massive level. With that all said, we dive right into six tips to help prevent design and code theft that may otherwise be easier to occur.

Site Specific Illustrations or Graphics

One of the most common design thefts that occur is the theft of illustrations, graphics, or other artwork. Design thieves are not good at creating their own graphics or illustrations; hence, they search the net to find the best to steal. A great way to help reduce this type of theft is to make your illustrations, graphics, and or artwork specific to the website.

For example, let us say you are creating a mascot illustration for a new website design that you have made for a business card production firm. Try to incorporate what the firm offers into the mascot illustration such as a rather muscular man holding a of stack business cards with the firm’s name on the man’s clothing as well as on the cards.

Now, due to the mascot being far too specific to the firm, the thieves will be less inclined to steal it, as it will be rather difficult for them to modify the illustration to apply their own name on it. However, if the mascot did not contain any firm specific notions on it, thieves can easily take it and apply to their own use for their own gain without struggle.

Difficult Gradients and Patterns

Another great way to reduce the amount of theft of your designs or illustrations is to add some gradients and patterns specific to each object. For example, let us say you created an illustration of a battery meter measuring how much battery life is remaining for a mobile device.

Incorporating a pattern from your website design onto this battery illustration makes it absolutely difficult to be undone with modification as a pattern can be very difficult to remove from any object. Therefore, if thieves are still going to attempt to steal and hinder your work for their own gain, at least you have made it quite difficult for them, which cause many of them to fail.

Screenshot and Image Theft

Many of our designs will contain screenshots of the product the site was created for, or if the website is geared towards wildlife, you definitely do not want your images to be used elsewhere without your consent or permission. With that said, using a basic prevention method, you can at least receive credit for your images or screenshots that have been stolen.

Watermarks are a great solution to this method. Sure, they may be a bit of a nuisance, but your images would be protected. I am not talking about watermarks that hide in a corner, but more so, a light watermark spread over the entire image, one that is not obtrusive to the image, but rather visible if one is to focus on the image.

Your watermark can be as simple as being your logo or even plain text mentioning your website. With a watermark like that, thieves become less inclined to taking the image as it can be easily pointed out as an act of theft, however, if they do end up taking your images, at least they will be spreading the word for you about your website via the watermark, and chances are, you will soon enough know about the theft to be able to take care of it.

Legal Notices and Trademarks

Leaving legal notices on your website about content theft can sometimes deter theft; however, if your illustrations or other works are very valuable to you, getting your items trademarked is the way to go. By trademarking your mascot or logo, you are reserving the rights to your creations and can be defended to the fullest extent of law.

When design thieves know your illustrations or other objects are trademarked, they will less inclined to utilize the trademarked items to prevent any legal issues in the future.

PHP Code Theft Prevention Methods

There are a couple of methods that can be utilized to help prevent PHP code theft when distributing or providing your scripts to specific groups or the general public.

Encrypting or Encoding

One of the most popular methods to prevent code theft is utilizing PHP code encryption systems. These encryption systems are external libraries that must be installed on any server the script will be utilized on in order to properly function. What they do is obstruct the code into a string of random characters that cannot be understandable unless decoded.

Due to the encrypter and decrypter being external libraries to PHP, your code is rather secure when encrypted or encoded. However, as mentioned earlier, the only drawback to using such a tool is the requirement of having the encrypter or encoder library on each server the script will be used, but if encrypting your encoding your code is a definite must, the benefits are worthwhile.

Obfuscation

Obfuscation is the process to obscure your code to make it difficult to read through. This is a simple method used to make novice code thieves think twice about stealing your code, however, it is readable and can be easily hindered with. Using obfuscation is a good method to transfer code from one user to another over a network to prevent your code from easily being read during a transfer, however, it should not be a permanent solution to code theft.

To obstruct your code easily, there are many tools that will do it for you when you complete a project. This not only saves you time obstructing the code yourself, but it also provides the flexibility to work with understandable code as you are developing or modifying your script.

Fresh Creative Logo Inspiration

speckyboy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:33:20 +0000

In today’s news round-up we have a collected a selection of articles that focus on logo inspiration. From the collection below there are well over 150 logos, covering many different styles (ambigrams, music, business…) and all have one thing in command: They are all creative and inspirational.

35 Creative Ambigram Logo Inspiration

30+ Music Inspired Logos

30 Fresh And New Logo Designs

Creative Logo Design Ideas for Companies

45+ Creative Logo Designed With Text

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

A Collection of Fresh Illustrator Tutorials

speckyboy — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:00:12 +0000

We do focus a lot on Photoshop resources here at Design Reviver, and as such, in today’s news round-up, we would like to highlight tutorials from its much prettier and flexible sister, namely Illustrator. Below you will find a small collection of our favorite Illustrator tutorials from recent weeks.

Cubism Inspired Logo using Illustrator and Photoshop

Due to its accessibility, Cubism, an art movement founded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, is making its way to our artworks, allowing us to create stylish logos that have a specific visual pleasure in no time. This is a simple, pen-drawing, Illustrator tutorial with just a touch of Photoshop.
Cubism Inspired Logo using Illustrator and Photoshop

Create a Laptop Icon with Illustrator

In this tutorial you can learn how to create a super sleek laptop icon. Once you’ve created the basic shapes, it’s very easy to continue with the other components.
Create a Laptop Icon with Illustrator

Illustrate a Colorful Hippie Peace Van

This tutorial is for all you groovy, peace-loving people, and a tribute for those good old times. Quickly learn how to create a stylized hippie van using some simple illustration techniques and Illustrator’s new drawing modes.
Illustrate a Colorful Hippie Peace Van

How to Create a Medieval Paper Scroll

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a medieval paper scroll with the 3D Extrude & Revolve tool. Using texture, you will also learn how to make an object look old and how to map artwork to a 3D Vector object.
How to Create a Medieval Paper Scroll

How to Draw a 20s Chick Using Adobe Illustrator

In this tutorial you will be guided through the process of drawing in Adobe Illustrator CS4 a vintage girl from the 20s, mainly using the Pen Tool (P) and Direct Selection Tool (A) and bold colors.
How to Draw a 20s Chick Using Adobe Illustrator

How to Illustrate a Marvelous Violin Icon

This tutorial covers how basic shapes and a solid understanding of perspective and volume work together to quickly build a successful icon.
How to Illustrate a Marvelous Violin Icon

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Comic Book Inspired Artwork

speckyboy — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:54:48 +0000

Whether you are a fan of American style comic books or not, putting the story lines aside, the artwork alone justifies its popularity. The genres style is clearly distinctive and uniform, yet still allows for loads of room for unique creativity and originality.

For today’s news round-up we have some beautiful and creative Comic Book inspired art work showcases. Hop you enjoy them.

Inspired Artwork: Wonder Woman

View the rest of this gallery

Marvelous Artworks of the Incredible Hulk

View the rest of this gallery

Comic Book Artwork: Iron Man

View the rest of this gallery

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

A Round-Up of Fresh, Creative and Original Wallpapers

speckyboy — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:39:32 +0000

For today’s News Round-Up we have collected ten wallpaper compilation articles to help freshen up your desktop. We start of with a collection of Valentines day wallpapers for all you romantics out there… and for all you cynics we have the usual and expected range of walls (retro, high resolution, Widescreen, abstart… you get the idea) only all of these are fresh, creative and original!

85 Free Saint Valentine's Day Wallpapers

37 Gorgeous Space Wallpapers

70+ Super Creative Wallpapers "About Design"

49 Free HD Widescreen Wallpapers

28 Superb high resolution green wallpapers

25 Beautiful Abstract Wallpapers for the iPhone

21 Fantastic WordPress desktop wallpapers

32 Incredibly Stunning Abstract Wallpapers

45+ Free Retro Wallpapers for your Desktop

30+ Breathtaking Dual Monitor Wallpapers

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

5 Well Designed Icon Tutorials

speckyboy — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:11:07 +0000

Graphical icons offer an opportunity to project to the user an instantly recognizable message – that is something that would normally take an entire paragraph of words. Of course the icons need to be well designed in the first place to successfully convey your message effectively.

In today’s news round-up we have five fresh tutorials that are both easily recognizable and certainly well designed.

How To Create a Detailed Apple iPad Icon in Photoshop

The Internet world exploded with the news of the Apple tablet launch last week. Named the iPad, it’s set to bring yet another revolution to the way people access and browse the web. An iPad icon would be a sensible addition to any web designer’s resources toolbox, so let’s fire up Photoshop and create our very own detailed iPad icon graphic.

How To Create a Detailed Apple iPad Icon in Photoshop

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).