Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!
Huge Improvements to Tuts+ Premium
As many of you know, Tuts+ is accompanied by an online educational membership called Tuts+ Premium. We’re very excited to announce that the membership has received a huge upgrade, including a new library of courses, 27 top-selling educational eBooks, member forums, and a completely redesigned UI.
You can check out all the changes here, and find out about all the fantastic new content available!
Our new premium website is a drastic improvement over the old system. It includes a slick and polished user interface and presents all of our tutorials the way that you would expect, from within your browser. We are now providing courses and ebooks from within Tuts+ Premium to make it even more valuable. So what are you waiting for? Head over to the new Tuts+ Premium site and let us know what you think.
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Create Detailed Vintage Typography with Illustrator and Photoshop
In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to customize a typeface in Illustrator and then use Photoshop to create a stunning vintage detailed typographic design. Let’s get started!
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Realistic Portrait Retouching With Photoshop
Today’s designers and photographers need to have a varied skill set that sets them apart from the pack. One common skill that both can use is portrait photography retouching. This tutorial will make you a more effective retoucher and help keep your portraits looking clean and realistic. Subtlety is – going too far will only make the results noticeable. The best comment you can get after presenting a final image is "I didn’t even notice you did that". Let’s get started!
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How to Paint Clouds With Photoshop
Photoshop is an excellent tool for manipulating photographs but it can also be used as a means to create stunning digital art. This tutorial is part of a 25-part video tutorial series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start producing digital art in Photoshop. Digital Art for Beginners, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak will begin by teaching you how to draw in Photoshop. At the conclusion of this series you will know all you need to produce your own concept art and matte paintings in Photoshop.
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How to Create a Sublime Text 2 Plugin
Sublime Text 2 is a highly customizable text editor that has been increasingly capturing the attention of coders looking for a tool that is powerful, fast and modern. Today, we’re going to recreate my popular Sublime plugin that sends CSS through the Nettuts+ Prefixr API for easy cross-browser CSS.
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Days to Learn HTML and CSS: a Free Tuts+ Premium Course
If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to build websites and web apps, HTML and CSS are the first skills you should learn. They are so fundamental that we believe everyone has the right to learn these skills for free.
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Dig into Dojo
Maybe you saw that tweet: “jQuery is a gateway drug. It leads to full-on JavaScript usage.” Part of that addiction, I contend, is learning other JavaScript frameworks. And that’s what this four-part series on the incredible Dojo Toolkit is all about: taking you to the next level of your JavaScript addiction.
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How to Create a Vector Stamp Set in Illustrator
In the following tutorial you will learn how to create a vintage, vector stamp set in Adobe Illustrator. Learn how to build a stamp illustration, shape by shape. We’ll construct the stamp border vector shape, highlight the edges, create the branding, and give the vector postage stamp a vintage texture, and final illustrator stamp effect. Let’s get started with making this vector stamp in Illustrator and then transform this into a vector stamp set.
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Create a Vector Bamboo Forest with Blends, Brushes and Profiles
In today’s tutorial you’ll learn how to create a bamboo vector illustration with the help of custom art and pattern brushes, blends and profiles on strokes in Adobe Illustrator CS5. Vector bamboo is an excellent element to use in your work to give a classic Japanese fine art print feel, for use as bamboo forest art background in a larger illustration, and to make your vector pictures stand out with stylish bamboo art. So let’s jump straight into it!
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Massive Collection of Vintage Vector Graphics: Floral Borders, Corners, and Frames
Welcome design rockstar, today you’re in for a real treat. We have a massive collection of vector graphics compiled for free download today. We’ve assembled vintage vector floral graphics that have antique floral borders, classic ornate corners, and decorative frames.
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Bring Your Forms Up to Date With CSS3 and HTML5 Validation
Let’s look at how to create a functional form which validates users’ data, client-side. With that done, we’ll cover prettying it up using CSS, including some CSS3!
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Design a Clean Launch Email for a Mobile App
During this tutorial we’ll be using Adobe Photoshop to create a unique and clean email, announcing the launch of a new mobile app. We’ll look at using smart objects, clipping masks, warping text, and even examine the psychology of our users.
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Financial Best Practices for Web Design Freelancers
A lot of web designers start their careers as employees for larger design firms. However, it seems inevitable that most designers will at least consider going out on their own as freelancers, either for side jobs or full time. One major key to any successful freelancing career, though, is to stay on top of your finances.
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Amazing Animal Photos
Animals are, without a shadow of a doubt, a fascinating photography subject. They’re at their most intriguing when they’re unpredictable and wild, allowing you to capture something of their very nature. This collection is a look at some outstanding shots of animals, of every kind, in the hope that it inspires and encourages you in your endeavors to immortalize something of the creatures with which we share our existence.
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The Best Way To Learn Sports Photography
Whether you’re a sports fan or not, it’s hard to deny the huge popularity of sports in modern culture. In today’s tutorial, instead of giving you tips about directly shooting sports, we’re focusing on giving you tips on learning how to shoot it. We hope you enjoy this new approach.
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The Camera Swap Survival Guide
In photography circles, you run into two types of people. Those who love their gear and those who would just as soon forget about. I love making photographs, but I also love cameras and the other gear used in the process. Therefore, I love camera swaps and flea markets. The variety of tools available for our craft is astounding and frankly overwhelming. But I’m here to help. I’ve been going to swaps for 12 years. I’ve been ripped off more times than I care to admit, but after all this time, I’m finding more treasure than fool’s gold. So today, I’ll guide you through the jungle that is the camera swap.
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Facial Animation With Morph Targets In Cinema 4D, Part 1 – Cg Premium Content
In this new two part Premium tutorial, Aleksey Voznesenski will give you an introduction to mesh animation in Cinema 4D, in this case a face with the use of the pose morph tag. We’ll also actually model the character, add materials, do some lighting, Faking GI is always fun, and then animate the little bugger.
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Making Of: The Abandoned Lobby in Maya and Mentalray, A Lighting & Rendering Overview
In this overview tutorial, author Pratik Gulati will give you valuable insight into Lighting and Rendering a scene in Maya using Mentalray. Using his “Abandoned Backyard Lobby” image as a basis, Pratik will discuss how he approached the Lighting setup and walk you through the render settings for achieving a very realistically lit interior scene with Mentalray.
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Quick Tip: Creating A Simple 3D Puzzle In Maya
In this quick tip, author Abed Ibrahim will show you a great way to create a simple 3D puzzle in Maya. Although simple in approach, this valuable technique can be used in a variety of projects, ranging from very simple puzzles to extremely complex scenes, or even animations.
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Design A Fantastic Floating Card Logo Reveal – AE Premium
In this tutorial we’ll break down a project I created called Motion Cards. We’ll create 3 scene’s in which we’ll animate some falling customizable placeholders that will be re purposed using Trapcode Particular for a dynamic logo reveal.
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Regenerate Like A “Time Lord” From Dr. Who
In this tutorial, we’ll be creating a regeneration effect, inspired by the Doctor Who TV show. I say inspired by, because it’s not screen-accurate, but we’ll be using AE’s built-in tools, alongside some stock footage, VCP’s Optical Flares and Trapcode Particular to pull off a pretty convincing regeneration.
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An Apple Box At Its Core
In today’s video, I’ll talk about the Apple Box… a rectangular multi-purpose block used on production sets dating back to practically the beginning of film. This video is for exposure more than anything. A year ago, I didn’t even realize those boxes had a name, and now I end up pretty much using them at least once on every shoot I do. Hope you enjoy it.
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Why You Should Use Metering Tools while Mixing and Mastering
Last AES convention I met a manufacturing rep for a very prestigious equipment company. He was demoing a piece of equipment for me, showing me all the great knobs and buttons that it had to offer. Then he said something along the lines of, ’We don’t include a screen for these things since you’re supposed to mix with your ears.” That’s when I took my exit stage left. I think imposing a viewpoint like that is just plain wrong.
Obviously, you’re supposed to mix with your ears, but I don’t think looking at meters is going to destroy your mix. -
Adding Flavor to Chords -” Sixth Chords -” Basix
Today we are going to cover how to add some flavor to your chords and compositions using sixths in both major and minor. Just like the 7ths chord tutorial, we will approach this chord concept from the ground up and look it from all possible angles. If you have heard of these types of chords but never knew exactly how they were constructed then this tutorial is for you. We will cover everything from basic structure to different voicings of the chords and try to apply them in a creative context. The sixth chords are waiting, you ready?
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Podcasts that Musicians Should Subscribe To (And Why!)
Rather than listening to music as I drive, shave and garden, I regularly listen to podcasts. That way Im not just being entertained, but educated as well. In this post we introduce you to the Top 20 podcasts musicians should subscribe to.
A podcast is like a radio show, only distributed via RSS over the internet. Some are professionally produced, but many are done by amateurs. Most are about a particular interest or topic. And there are a ton of them on music and recording -” some featuring indie music, others exploring music technology, and many explaining techniques for playing and recording music. In this article we’ll focus on the podcasts that teach you about producing music, and not the ones that help you discover new music. Maybe we’ll cover those in a future post. -
TimelineLite Ultimate Starter Guide: Introduction
TimelineLite is the ultimate tool for creating elaborate and precise sequences of scripted animation. It is an integral part of the GreenSock Tweening Platform that allows you to make the most of TweenLite and TweenMax. This series of screencasts will walk you step by step through everything you need to know to take your AS3 tweening skills to the next level.
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Getting Started With Scoreoid
Games are becoming ever more popular, especially casual games on mobile devices and tablets. In these games, the importance of leaderboards is multiplied – and game developers need a simple cross-platform solution for this. In this tutorial we will cover Scoreoid and how it can help you with game development.
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Effectively Organize Your Game’s Development With a Game Design Document
Have you ever dived right in to developing a game, but found yourself having to constantly change aspects of the design or the gameplay due to a lack of planning? You should consider using a game design document: a guiding vision of the game as a whole, pulling together ideas and plans for the design, development, and business sides of your game.
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Cardinal Sins of WordPress Theme Development
We talk alot on this site about tips and tricks for getting what you want out of WordPress… but today we’re going to take a step back from the technical stuff to look at some practices, bad habits, and coding faux pas that would be better left in our past. So, forgive the heavy-handed post title (haha!), we’re about talk bring up 5 surprisingly common practices that are blemishes on the platform.
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DIY WordPress Framework Part 4: Using the Framework as a Boiler Plate
Last time we used our framework as a child theme, creating a totally new theme that depends on the framework. Today we’re going to use our framework as a boilerplate, copying the folder and making edits right to it.
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WordPress Monthly News: November 2011
For some, WordPress is a livelihood whereas, for others, it’s just for fun. Nonetheless, anyone involved with WordPress needs to stay on track with the latest developments in the blogging world. This is our monthly article covering the latest developments in the WordPress world from news to the latest new kick-ass themes on our marketplaces.
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jQuery Mobile 1.0
The official release of jQuery Mobile 1.0 was recently announced, and this tutorial will provide you with an overview of how this popular framework can assist you in your cross-platform and web based app development!
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Building a Caterpillar Game with Cocos2D
In this series, we will be recreating the popular Atari game Centipede using the Cocos2D game engine for iOS. Centipede was originally developed for Atari and released on the Arcade in 1980. Since then, it has been ported to just about every platform imaginable. For our purposes, we will be calling the game Caterpillar.
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Android SDK: Using the Text to Speech Engine
This tutorial will teach you to give your applications a voice with the Android SDK text to speech engine!
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10 Free Apps for Working with Video
Video has become a must-have for every website or blog aiming to enhance its presence online. It’s a common practice that video-related orders are often assigned to freelancers, and these are not only simple video editing tasks, but the preparation of how-to’s, demos, screencasts, video embedding and distribution as well.
Here is a roundup of the most popular video software and services recommended for freelancers’ everyday use.
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30 Top Facebook Apps for Business
Facebook is a good place to communicate with friends and get new job offers. Freelancers should not miss an employment opportunity on Facebook. The social network app section is a real treasure box with multiple handy applications.
These are some of the best Facebook applications that help freelances boost their productivity, enhance their business pages, show off their portfolio and attract new contacts. Since many freelancers work with social media as experts, account managers and analysts, the list below has both apps for personal profiles and Facebook pages.
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The Latest Google Update is Fantastic News for Freelance Writers
On November 3, 2011 Google published a new article on their blog informing readers that fresh new content is now being seen as highly valuable on their blog or website. This “freshness update” is a new addition to Google’s “Caffeine web indexing system”.
Now blog owners who update their sites regularly will be rewarded with a higher search engine ranking. Let’s look at how freelance writers can put this new update to use in their business.
Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials
Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials
Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials
Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials
Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials
Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials
Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials
Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials
Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials
Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials
Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials
FreelanceSwitch — Articles and Resources for Freelancers
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