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!
Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials
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Draw a Retro Gameboy From Scratch in Photoshop
Attempting to replicate real life objects in Photoshop is great practice. In this tutorial we will explain how to create a realistic, retro Gameboy device using Photoshop’s powerful feature set. Let’s get started!
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Create a Stitched Denim Text Effect in Photoshop
In this tutorial, we will explain how to combine Photoshop filters, brushes, and vector shapes to create a stitched denim text effect using Photoshop CS6. Let’s get started!
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Create a “Two-Faced” Digital Painting in Photoshop
Creating a nice character painting in Photoshop can be a difficult but rewarding task. In this tutorial, we will explain how to create a classic Batman villain in Photoshop. Let’s get started!
Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials
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Meet Bower: A Package Manager For The Web
As the web platform has matured, the tools for managing our projects, too, have matured. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce you to one of these tools that makes managing the dependencies of your project considerably easier: Bower.
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Make JavaScript Testing Fun With Testem
JavaScript testing is a sensitive subject. Some developers are huge advocates of it (including myself), while others don’t see the need or benefit. One huge barrier is the simple fact that it can sometimes take a considerable amount of setup to get up and running. The longer it takes, the more likely it is that the developer simply won’t bother. That’s why Testem is so fantastic; it makes testing as effortless as possible, and, more importantly, fun!
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Test Driven PHP Session
Let’s be honest: the PHP community hasn’t been as quick to the test-driven development scene as other communities, such as those around the Ruby and Python languages. We hope to help change that on Nettuts+! In this session, you’ll learn both why and how to test-drive your applications using the fantastic PHPUnit. Ready?
Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials
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Stop Making Bad Logos
There’s article after article on websites that talk bout how to make a great logo. But If you’re a logo machine, and you’ve been doing it for a long time, chances are that you’ve developed some pretty awful habits. How do I know this? Because I suffered from some of the same habits I’m about to talk about. A true master of logo creation will refine their work on every project, forcing themselves to get better with each design. It all boils down to a few key things to avoid when you’re creating a logo. While you can take a stab at selling generic logos on places like GraphicRiver, you’ll do your best work when you deeply understand your clients and their company.
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How to Create a Self Portrait in a Geometric Style
In this tutorial we are going to talk about how to create an illustrated self portrait in a geometric based style. We are going to work from a photograph of ourselves as the base of the illustration, then drawing the sketch and to the final piece, so lets get started.
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Creating Paisley Graphic Styles with Scatter Brushes and Recolor Artwork
In today’s tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a series of Paisley inspired Graphic Styles using Scatter Brushes and the Appearance panel. Once done, I’ll show you how to create additional styles simply by using Recolor Artwork. This is a great tutorial for beginners as there is no Pen Tool (P) involved. So let’s begin!
Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials
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Best Practices for Increasing Website Performance
It’s a no-brainer: well performing websites enjoy higher visitor engagement, retention and conversion. Given how fickle users can be, plus the fact that mobile devices are very significant these days, never before has the speed of websites been so important! In this article I’m going to highlight ways in which you can improve the performance of your own sites.
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How They Did It: Build Windows
Today, we’ll dive into the Build Windows site and look at the practical code philosophies, tools, and strategies used by this highly trafficked, highly praised conference landing page. We’ll get into the nitty gritty, but we will also be covering some things from a mile-high perspective.
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Quick Tip: Easy CSS3 Checkboxes and Radio Buttons
Ever wondered how to style checkboxes and radio buttons, but without JavaScript? Thanks to CSS3 you can!
Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials
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How to Make Fantastically Fun Jack ‘O Lantern Photos
“Trick or treat!” Halloween is knocking on the door. It is a very popular holiday in many countries. It brings the spirit of mystic, fear, magic and fairy. Halloween can be a great inspiration for shooting some beautiful lights -” all those jack-o-lanterns and candles.
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How to Create a Sense of Depth to Your Photos
Today we will take a look at how to add some sense of depth to your photographs and thus make them become alive and more interesting to the viewer. By making use of some simple but very effective factors that can be applied at the time of exposure, you can make a your picture pop. Today, we’ll talk about perspective, depth of field, and framing.
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Dealing With Foliage: Green and Yellow Saturation
I’ve noticed around the internet that a great many people struggle with foliage. A large number of people don’t even seem to notice that there’s an issue, which is unfortunately falsely backed up by the legions of commenters trying to be nice rather than truthful. The problem persists for all levels of photographers, from year one amateurs to multi-year pros.
Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials
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Creating The iPhone 4S In 3D Studio Max, Part 4 Texturing & Rendering with V-Ray
In the fourth part of the iPhone series we’ll begin creating textures and the many shaders needed for our model. While most will be procedural materials, a few of the elements do require image based textures, so we’ll first tackle the uvmapping on these elements. We’ll then move on and construct a studio lighting rig using V-Ray lights and introduce image based lighting to the scene. Along the way we’ll rely heavily on the power of V-Ray’s RT engine to fine tune our materials, lighting and render settings to balance the scene and achieve the look we’re after for our final render.
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Creating an Ice Cream Bar Animation with Maya, RealFlow And AE – Part 1
Hey folks, in this three part tutorial spanning both Cgtuts+ and Aetuts+, we are going to create liquid chocolate pouring over a branded ice cream bar. To achieve this we will use Maya for mashing and rendering. RealFlow for the chocolate simulation. And finally in After Effects we’ll create the chocolate chunks and glow streaks swoosh, as well as the final compositing.
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Create a High Impact Faux Energy Drink Ad with 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D & AE – Tuts+ Premium
In this tutorial we are going to create from start to finish an interesting short four shot ad cut for a fake energy drink ’Envato Energy”. This will give you some guidance on how to create something similar for a real life project.
Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials
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Create A Ground Breaking Pavement Crack Simulation
In this tutorial we will learn how to properly create a good workflow between After Effects and Cinema 4D. In the process we are going to take a look at how to create your own custom ground cracking overlays for compositing.
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How To Use The Amazing Free New Preset “Cover Flow”
Cover Flow is a preset for AE to create the classic flowing cover effect best known from iTunes. On top of that it has several options to change the result like adding randomness to the position of the layers, adding blur to fake a depth of field and so on. Today we’ll walk you through how to install and use this tool.
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Illustrator to After Effects Relation-tips – Batman Vector Animation
This the first tutorial of a four part series where we are going to show some of the most common and widely used effects for After Effects.
Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials
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How to Enhance a Live, Out-of-the-Mixer Concert Recording
I was playing at a concert recently where I had the fortune on getting my hands on a 2-track recording out of the FOH mixer. I playing at a festival and all the stages recorded the acts, giving them a CD at the end of their set. Usually, a recording such as this is done straight out of the L/R OUT of the mixer. All the channels of the mixer are fed to the stereo out that’s fed into a stereo recorder. The recording is then burned onto a CD for the bands to listen to.
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Essential Subtractive Synthesis: Envelopes
This is a series of basic synthesis workshops. We assume you’re not entirely new to synthesizers, but you’re not an expert either. Today we look at envelopes.
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Essential Listening – Getting Critical
Welcome back for another round of Essential Listening. Last time we took a look at some of the big albums of all time and how the mixes were so different, but at the same time all great. And while we will certainly revisit looking at some classic songs and albums from an engineering standpoint down the road, today is all about improving your critical listening skills.
Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials
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WANTED: WordPress Professionals With a Passion for Education. Enquire Within.
Are you an experienced WordPress professional with a desire to educate others on standards and best practices? If so, we’d like to speak with you about writing for Wptuts+ 1-4 times per month. We’d like you to submit at least one article a month, and you’re free to choose your topics, as long as they appeal to our audience. This is a paid job. If you’re interesting in helping educate others in The WordPress Way, read on.
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Building a Simple Announcements Plugin for WordPress
Let’s say that you’re a launching new product, giving away freebies or organizing an event. How do you deliver the message to your readers? Popular choice is to display a modal dialog in a lightbox, thus forcing the user to take notice. But there’s another, less obtrusive, yet still effective way, to get a user’s attention. In this tutorial we’ll be creating a plugin that displays custom site-wide announcements across the top of the page, with the ability to schedule messages to appear between two given dates.
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The Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Actions and Filters
When it comes to professional WordPress development, it’s imperative that developers understand both actions and filters – that is, it’s important to understand WordPress hooks.
Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials
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Working with the iPhone 5 Display
This tutorial will review the steps necessary to ensure that your iOS apps will continue to look great when displayed on the new iPhone 5 screen.
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Smooth Freehand Drawing on iOS
This tutorial will teach you how to implement an advanced drawing algorithm for smooth, freehand drawing on iOS devices. Read on!
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Build an ASCII Art Editor: Interface Setup
The Android platform offers a wide range of storage options for use within your apps. In this tutorial series, we are going to explore some of the data storage facilities provided by the Android SDK by building a simple project: an ASCII art editor.
Gamedevtuts+ — Game Development
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Create a Glowing, Flowing Lava River Using Bézier Curves and Shaders
Most of the time, using conventional graphic techniques is the right way to go. Sometimes, though, experimentation and creativity at the fundamental levels of an effect can be beneficial to the style of the game, making it stand out more. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create an animated 2D lava river using Bézier curves, custom textured geometry and vertex shaders.
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How to Learn Unity
Unity is a feature rich, fully integrated development engine for the creation of interactive 3D content. You want to make 3D games? Unity’s got you covered. In this article we’ll share books, tutorials and suggestions for getting to grips with Unity.
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How Heavy Rain’s Narrative Is Strengthened by Its Gameplay
Heavy Rain received immense critical praise for being an experience that elevated video game storytelling to a new level. In this article, we’ll look at why that is and what we can learn from it.
Mactuts+ — Mac & OS X
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Ways to Make Your Mac’s Desktop Better with GeekTool
GeekTool is an amazing free app that is a bit like Dashboard for the super nerdy. It allows you to place functional widgets, called “Geeklets,” right on top of your desktop, so you can always see them. Implementation can be a little tricky though so this tutorial will walk you through five different ways to use Geeklets to enhance your desktop experience.
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How to Set Up and Use VoIP on Your Mac
With the advent of faster broadband, the viability of using your data connection for voice communications has become increasingly reliable. VoIP has lower startup and ongoing costs than traditional, fixed-line telephones and has a wealth of flexible features that are often additional cost options from your dinosaur-era fixed-line phone network. If you are a freelancer, a business owner, or even just home user who requires a separate telephone from your home number, then VoIP is for you.
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Quick Tip: Trick Out Your Mac with Terminal
The Mac OS X operating system is already really sleek, but we’re going to look at how to use terminal to activate some cool hidden settings that will make your Mac even better. The terminal tricks I’ll be showing you range from adding spaces to your dock to freeing your Dashboard widgets from the Dashboard. So let’s get started!
FreelanceSwitch — Freelance Jobs & Information
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How to Raise Your Freelance Pay Rates in the Next 60 Days
Freelancers interested in earning big should always be looking for opportunities to raise rates. Luckily, if you’re reading this in the fall, you’re at one of the easiest times of year to get a raise.
I’ll explain why in a minute.
But first, let’s talk a little economic reality about why you need to get aggressive about asking for a raise. -
How to Set Up Your LinkedIn Profile: A Freelancer’s Guide
LinkedIn makes sense for professionals, but what about for freelancers?
In my experience, LinkedIn is an important tool in my marketing toolbox. Being on LinkedIn allows me to showcase my skills and experience. Additionally, LinkedIn is a networking platform, which makes it perfect for finding prospects, hooking up with new clients or reconnecting with past clients. -
How to Write an Effective Freelancer About Page
The most visited page on most websites is the about page. That holds particularly true for freelancers — on my site, almost half of my visitors wind up there. That’s because a client looking to hire some help wants to know exactly who he’ll be working with.
When he’s found you online, he’s not going to have a sense of who you are and why you’re worth your rates until he’s found out more. Your about page is the easiest way to do so.
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