Hi! In this tutorial you will learn how to create an external Asus Lamborghini Hdd icon using some easy techniques, hope you`ll like it!

 

Step1: Create a new document

Begin by creating a New Document 500 px x 300 px.

Step2: Hard Disk shape

Use Pen Tool (P) to create the Hard disk shape

Fill the path created above with a lighten gray, i used #e6e6e6.

Step3: Adding Shadows

Create next selection using a selection tool (The main tool that we will use is Pen tool (P) to create selections, as it is a much more versatile tool than the lasso tool. It can be tricky to use the first couple of times, but with practice it turns into a very handy tool. I use 0.3 feather when creating selections, and have the anti-aliased button checked, so no jagged edges appear.)

Add some shadows in the selection created above using Burn Tool (O)t

Step 4

Make another selection using Pen Tool (P)

Use Burn Tool (O) and add some shadows in the selection

Strokes

Use Stroke Path technique and add a 2px white stroke like i did in the picture below.

Erase using Eraser Tool (E) to obtain a better effect

Step 5

Make next selection using a selection tool

Use Burn Tool (O) and add some shadows in the selection.

Step 6

Again, do a selection like i did in the next picture

Add some shadows using Burn Tool (O).

Step 7: Reflections

Now, we`re going to creating some reflections on our Hard disk icon, make next selection using Pen Tool (P)

Pick up Dodge Tool and add some highlights in the selection

Repeat the same techniques one more time.

Step 8: Hard disk sides

Select the side of our Hard disk using Pen Tool (P)

And add some shadows using Burn Tool like i did below

Noise

In the same selection, add some noise ( Go to Filter->Noise->Add Noise 1.5% )

Step 9: Strokes

Use Pen Tool (P) and create next path, then add a 2px white stroke

9a.png

Go to Filter->Blur->Gaussian blur and make the settings below

Make a selection like i did below and add shadows on it using Burn Tool (O)

Step 10: Bottom part

Into a new layer, over the background layer make next path using Pen Tool (P)

Fill the path

Fill the path created above a dark gray color, i used #10100e

Noise

Now go to Filter->Noise->Add noise and make next settings

Step 11:Ligths

Make next selection using a selection tool

In the selection created above add some light using Dodge TOol (o)

Step 12

Repeat the step 11.

Step 13:Decrease the opacity

Create a path like i did in the next image using Pen Tool (P) and add a 1 px white stroke

Lights, again

Erase using Eraser Tool (E) or decrease the opacity of the stroke for a better effect.

Step 14

Make next selection using a selection tool

Add some light using Dodge Tool (O) in the selection created above like i did in the picture below.

Step 15:Shadow of the hard disk

Into a new layer called “Shadow” make a path like i did using Pen Tool (P) and fill it with black color

Now go to Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur and make the settings below for a better effect

Final

Today we will be working on an inside page to our Short Print Booklet. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Part I be sure to do that now as you will need the basics of that to bring over to this design. We started Part I designing a simplistic and modern design for our Graphic Design booklet and today we will be featuring two different designs. Let’s get started!

Here is what we will be creating as our final piece:

Project Setup

Alright, so go ahead and open up the Part I PSD. Now go through and delete or hide every layer except our two background layers. Quick note if you are deleting the layers to save this as a seperate PSD file be sure to hit Save As and change the name. Too many times even the best of us designers will hit Save on a document and have to back track.

Now we are going to reverse our layers. What was white now becomes dark grey and vice versa. You can do this either with the paint bucket tool or a simple Color Overlay layer option. It’s your choice on which way you want to handle it and whatever you choose will not effect the remainder of this tutorial. This is what you should have so far:

Now, depending on how you are going about your design you may want to remove the rulers. We are saving ours as a seperate document so I removed any rulers that were not part of the original template as you can see. It doesn’t matter which way you go about it though as we will be adding our own rulers, you just have to be able to keep up with them.

Speaking of rulers we are going to be adding our first one now. Our work area is 1650 pixels so we will split it into two parts. We will be displaying two projects per page as they are one or two simple designs per project. If you have, for instance, a full marketing design project though you can keep just that one project on the page and use the full work area. This design is very flexible on how you want it to work. Anyway, we will be setting our ruler at 825 pixels in our work area like such:

Adding the Project

Time to begin adding the project. Because we are not giving you a specific project to work with we will not have specific sizes for our projects. Just go ahead and grab whatever files you are adding for your project and arrange them in the top left corner. We will re-align them later depending on how big your project is and what looks good with our margins.

This is what we have right now:

Now to add our information. Again this part will be pretty simple because we aren’t giving specifics here. For the header, being the name of the project, we are using Bebas, 45px, Sharp, #FFF for our font. You will want to center it using the edge of the grey and the “Bleed Zone” as that should be the end of our booklet.

Now add your description, centering it the same, using Delicious SmallCaps, 36px, Sharp, #FFF. This is what you should have so far for your text, or something like it as there are not specifics:

Now that you have your first project repeat the same process for the next project, lining it up with our ruler and the “Safe Zone”. Once you have done that you will have both projects added, like this:

Amazing right? Now go ahead and center your projects in the two work zones so they have some decent spacing and look a little better. We will also be centering our text with our project to make it look a little better as well. This is what we have as our final inside piece:

You can see that I went ahead and added a 1px white and dark grey spacer line. You don’t have to, but I thought it looked good for our specific projects. That’s the end of our inside page. Pretty simple right? Now finish desiging whatever projects you want to showcase and head on over to our partners at UPrinting and get your short run booklets printed up!

Today we are working on creating a short run booklet. When talking about graphic design you can use a booklet to showcase some of your favorite pieces of work, along with a description of them. When talking about clients and what a booklet can do for them the sky is the limit. So, let’s get started.

Needed Files

Template from U-Printing

Bebas Font – found on Google WebFonts

Delicious Small Caps – found on Google WebFonts

Getting Started

Below you will see the front of our booklet as well as what we will be doing in Pt. 2 of this tutorial.

Okay, now that you have the template downloaded go ahead and open it. we will be working within the template and it’s guides.

Now we get to work on setting up our background. We are going to be working with a very modern but simple design, as we are going to be working on a booklet setup for a graphic/web designer.

Let’s go ahead and change our foreground color to #383838. Fill your background with our #383838 color. Now make a selection that is 1075px wide and as tall as our entire document. Fill the selection with white so you have this:

Pretty simple start right? Don’t worry, it’s going to be a design that is very easy but looks absolutely amazing and versatile. Now, let’s work on the right side of our document to get it all set up nice and pretty. First grab your logo and center it on the document both vertically and horizantally. We can’t give exact measurements because everyone’s logo is different, but just make sure it’s centered.

Now, to add our contact information. We will be using #3b9ed8 for our color to match our logo and our font will be Bebas 34px Sharp. Go ahead and type out your phone number, and then in a new type layer type out your email address. You can put as much contact information as you want, but I have found that with a design like this you want to stick to the essentials. When you are done center all your information and then place it 50px from the bottom of our safe zone line.

So now grab your text tool again and change your foreground color to white (#FFF). We will still be using Bebas font again. This time we are using 60px and Crisp for our font options. Type out whatever slogan you want. For ours we used Design Inspiration and Creativity. Again make sure that your text is centered on the document.

As you can see we set up ruler guides on the top and bottom of our logo and centered the text in those. Now we are going to move on to setting up our last four pieces. Again we are working on a very modern simplistic design so we only need one set of instructions for all four remaining pieces.

To set them up you will need to grab your type tool and change your font to Delicious SmallCaps 41px Sharp. Type out anything you want. We are going to be typing out Business Card Design. Once you have typed it up move it over to the upper left corner and space it out 45 px from our safe point zone and 50px from the top.

My suggestion here is to use ruler lines for these because then you can easily line up the remaining pieces. Following the same principles as the first piece of information set up your other three pieces. Our four pieces of text are Business Card Design, Full Marketing Design, Full Branding Design, and booklet Design.

This is the very last step in the front of our booklet design. Once you have finalized those the front of your booklet is done and we are finished with this part of the tutorial. You will notice that it looks a little bit funny right now without the rulers but a lot of the extra on the sides will be cut off during printing. You can crop it at the bleed zone to see what it really looks like if you want. Without/before cropping it, however, you should have this as your final result.

We have partnered with UPrinting Booklet Printing on this 2-step booklet design so please stay tuned for Pt. II of this tutorial and be sure to show us your work because you never know what UPrinting and I can come up with for our favorites.

Hello there everybody and welcome to another design tutorial here on HV-Designs! Today you will be learning how to create a clean black and white-themed WordPress layout using some awesome Photoshop effects and tricks. You will end up with elegant design depends only on Black and White colors as main ones, and with a feeling like you draw this theme with a pencil! Using various gradients of both black and white colors as main …. So let’s don’t be late and get started now!

The Final result:

(Click on the image to see the full size)

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop
Version: CS5
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated Completion Time: 2.5 Hours

Resources you’ll need:

Ecqlipse 2 (.PNG) by chrfb

Mini Social Icon set by design deck.

Creating the Background and the General Design Look:

As usual, we’ll create new PS document by going to (File > New) “Ctrl +N”, our new work will be as the following:

Fill up your background with the color value: #e5e5e5:

Set the main guidelines as you see below, and notice that we’ll set the rest through the design process (I prefer this way):

Creating the Top Navigation Bar:

Select the “Rectangle Tool” (U) and set the color value to black #000000, then draw a shape like the one you see below with 58px as height, rasterize the layer and label it “top_bg”. Reduce the opacity of this layer to 4%.

Time to use “Type Tool” (T) and type the pages names, use the following character settings:

Font Family: Utsaah, Size: 5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #242424 (for active page) and #878787 (for rest (inactive)), Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Now, we’ll add email and phone number for quick contact, download the icon set listed above in resources (by chrfb) and add the following phone and email icons to your layout. Then use “Type Tool” with the following character settings to type phone number and email address:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 4pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #2f2f2f, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Note: Use “Ctrl +T” to get size handles around each icon and control its size.

Creating the Categories Navigation Bar:

Use the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px as radius and color: #e8e8e8 to draw a shape starting from maximum right side of your layout. Once finished, rasterize the layer then label it “categories_bg”. Make it with 79px far from top. Now apply the following “Stroke” layer style settings (Layer > Layer Style > Stroke):

Now, we’ll apply a nice trick to add smooth shadow under the bar, we’ll do that by creating new layer (label it “shadow”) and place it under the “categories_bg “ one then selecting “Elliptical Marquee Tool” (M) and draw a selection like that:

Fill up the “shadow” layer (inside selection) with black color: #000000, reduce the opacity of this layer to 38%, and then apply the following “Drop Shadow” layer style settings:

Well … it’s time to add icons and text. You can get the icons from the same icon set listed above (Ecqlipse 2), add them and use “Ctrl +T” to get handles and control the size … you should locate them like that: (and make sure to keep the same distance between the one and the other)

Add titles text by selecting the “Type Tool” (T) using the following character settings:

Font Family: Futured, Size: 4.5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #2c2b2b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Then, type some short description under each title with the same previous character settings, but you need to reduce the font size to 3%.

Creating Title and Slogan:

Use the “Type Tool” (T) to type the title “Black and White” using the following character settings:

Font Family: BankGothicic Lt BK, Size: 10pt, Weight: Light, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Then apply the following “Drop Shadow”, “Bevel and Emboss” and “Stroke” layer styles settings:

For slogan, type whatever description you like using the following character settings:

Font Family: Square721 Dm, Size: 5pt, Weight: Normal, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #a8a8a8, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating the RSS & Socials:

Let’s begin with creating bars (backgrounds). First, drop a guideline and set it at the left edge of categories bar, just so you can create the social one at the same alignment (You’ll see it in coming screenshots).

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px as radius and color: #e8e8e8, draw a shape with the following sizes (307px (width) and 70px (height)) then rasterize the layer and label it “socials_bg”. Make it with 182px far from top. Finally here, you need to apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for “categories_bg” layer (just go back to it and apply it for this layer too).

The same way we’ve created the shadow for “categories_bg” layer, we’ll just do it for this one and for the RSS coming one as well. Just go back to it and apply the same steps. You should get something like this:

Now, label the layers with “socials_bg” and “socials_shadow” then duplicate those both layers, you’ll get tow new layers, select them both and drop them horizontally (to right side) while holding the “Shift” key from keyboard for almost 20px then re-label them respectively with “rss_bg” and “rss_shadow”. This is what you should get:

The next step is to download the social icon set listed above in resources, and then add the following ones to your layout. To make sure that the icons is aligned horizontally with each other, select all icons layers then click on “Distributes Horizontal Centers” which can be found in the toolbar top panel.

By “Type Tool” (T), use the following character settings to type socials networks names under icons:

Font Family: Bauhaus Md BT, Size: 3.5pt, Weight: Medium, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #565656, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Let’s move to rss now, add the rss icon from Ecqlipse icon set and place it like you’ll see below, then type text that says “Subscribe to RSS” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Bauhaus Md BT, Size: 6pt, Weight: Medium, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #2c2b2b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Another text we’ll type now and it should be like that “Articles | Comments | All” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Utsaah, Size: 5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #888585, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5. This is the result:

Creating the Theme Posts:

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px as radius and color: #e8e8e8, draw a shape with the following sizes (734px (width) and 278px (height)), rasterize the layer and label it “rounded_rect”. It should be 295px far from top. Once you’ve happy with the shape, apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for categories, social and RSS BG’s layers.

Use the “Line Tool” (U) with the color value: #a0a0a0 and make one like below, you should get the following:

To type post title, make a text rectangle using the “Type Tool” (T) then type whatever title you like using the following character settings:

Font Family: BubbleBoy2, Size: 3.5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #595959, Leading: 6, Tracking: 10.

Now, we’ll make a holder rounded rectangle to surround the post thumbnail, just do it by drawing it using the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px as radius and color: #e8e8e8. Once finished, apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for categories, social and RSS BG’s layers. Next, Pick up some thumbnail, I choose nice one from “Design Darken and Impressive Coming Soon Page” tutorial, then used “Ctrl +T” to control its size to fit shape just like that:

Note: you can get the rounded corners for thumbnail by selecting the part you want from the main image then go to (Select > Modify > Smooth) then put the value you want then copy the selection.

Type some text as post content using the following character settings:

Font Family: Ebrima, Size: 3.5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #585555, Leading: 5, Tracking: 10.

Select the “Custom Shape Tool” (U) and choose the following comment bubble from toolbar (it’s default) with color: #e8e8e8. Once finished, rasterize the layer and label it “comments_icon” then apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for categories, social and RSS BG’s layers. Finally here, reduce the opacity of this layer to 75%.

Type some numbers using the following character settings:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #989696, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

With “Rectangle Tool” (U) and after set color value to #161616, we’ll draw a shape like the following one, then rasterize the layer and label it “readmore_bg”.

Next, select the “Pen Tool” (P) and make a bath like the following:

Click by Left-click mouse button on the shape then select “Make Selection” and let it be with 0 feather radius just like this:

Now fill up this new shape with same color value #161616 and click “Ctrl + D” to set the selection. This is what you should get:

Type a text that says “Read more” above the previous layer using the following character settings:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #e5e5e5, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

From Ecqlipse icon set, add the following icons for categories and tags (you can use “Ctrl + T” to make them smaller and fit your layout and guidelines to keep them aligned).

Add some text using the following character settings:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 3.5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #333333, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating Page Numbers Section:

The first thing is to make a smooth rounded rectangle using the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with color: #e5e5e5 and following sizes: 269px for width, 34px for height. Once you’re happy with it, rasterize the layer and apply the following “Drop Shadow” and “Stroke” layer style settings:

Type the page numbers by “Type Tool” (T) using the following character settings:

Font Family: Tahoma, Size: 4pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #333232 (for active number), #969696 (for inactive), Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

By “Custom Shape Tool” (U), choose the following shape from toolbar above and use the color: #696969 to draw a shape like below, then rasterize the layer and duplicate it. Now go to (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal) then drop the new one to the other side. You should get something like that:

Make the Single Post:

First, we have to hide the four posts groups and page numbers group. Then create a new one with the name “Full Post” (Layer > New > Group).

The same way we create the previous posts, we’ll just do now! So select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px as radius and color: #e8e8e8, draw a shape with the following sizes (734px (width) and 1206px (height)), rasterize the layer and label it “full_rounded_rect”. It should be 295px far from top as the first post we’ve created. Once it’s ok, apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for categories, social and RSS BG’s layers.

Use the “Line Tool” (U) with the color value: #a0a0a0 and make one like you’ve done before for the previous posts … the same settings for typing title and creating comments bubble as well.

The single post style, just as you see, is keeping the same main typing and style settings, we’ll do the images holders (rounded backgrounds) as we’ve do it previously …

Make attention to the sizes of second image holder, it’s 686px width, the height can be as you wish. (The main imaged is taken almost 669px as width; you can control these sizes as you want, of course).

For single post, I add text leading to author name, using the following character settings:

Font Family: Ebrima, Size: 3pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #acacac (and #6b6b6b for author name), Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Use the following icon from Ecqlipse icon set, and reduce the size using control handles … you’ll get a result like that:

At the button of the post, we’ll create category and tag links, just as we’ve done before but this time let them be at the right side like you see below:

The next step is to select the “Custom Shape Tool” (U), select the shape you see below (it’s default) then draw one with color value: #e8e8e8 at the right side, rasterize the layer and label it “right_arrow”. Once you’ve done, apply the following “Stroke” layer settings on you layer:

Duplicate this layer then go (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal) to get a new one with opposite direction. Now drop the new one down horizontally (re-label it “left_arrow”) while holding the “Shift” key from keyboard to be located just like you see:

Now, type two texts that say: Next Post, Previous Post using the following character settings:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 4pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: # 474141, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating the Search:

With “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) and after set color value to #e8e8e8, we’ll draw a shape with 272px as width and 44px as height, then rasterize the layer and label it “search_bg”. Then apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for categories, social and RSS BG’s layers.

Now, select the “Line Tool” (U) with 2px radius and draw a line like the one below, rasterize the layer and label it “separator” then apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for search, categories, social and RSS BG’s layers.

Add the following search icon from Ecqlipse icon set, and reduce the size using control handles … Now with “Type Tool” (T), type text (that says: search something …) using the following character settings:

Font Family: Utsaah, Size: 5pt, Weight: Italic, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #969595, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating “About the Author” Block:

With “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) and after set color value to #e8e8e8, we’ll draw a shape with 272px as width and 160px as height, then rasterize the layer and label it “author_bg”. Then apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve done for search, posts, categories, social and RSS BG’s layers.

For me, I add my personal logo “K” and place it at the left side, then type my name with “Type Tool” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Cf Kaveros, Size: 5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #4e4a4a, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

And the following ones to type some summery about myself:

Font Family: Cf Kaveros, Size: 3.5pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #797474, Leading: 4.32pt, Tracking: 5.

Type another text for reading more an it’s “more about me!” here using the following character settings:

Font Family: Cf Kaveros, Size: 4pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #338129, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Now, type the text “About the Author” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Berlin Sans FB, Size: 6pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #338129, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating Advertisement Block:

With the same font settings that we used for “About the Author” text, apply it again for “Check this out!” one (and notice that it will be apply for “Categories” text too). Then add some 125x125px ads images just as you see:

Creating the Categories Block:

As we mention previously, we’ll reapply the same font settings that we used for “About the Author” text on the new one here and it’s “Categories” … after that, use the “Eclipse Tool” (U) and draw a small circle with the color value: #c5c5c5, rasterize the layer then duplicate many times and drop copies down while holding the “Shift” key from keyboard. Then use “Type Tool” (T) to type some categories names and how much entries each one contain … use the following character settings:

Font Family: Bauhaus Md BT, Size: 4pt, Weight: Medium, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #605f5f, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating “Top Posts” Footer Block:

The title for the three coming footer blocks will take the same layer styles so I’m going to add screenshot for one time, so the first step is to type the text “Top Posts”, use the following character settings:

Font Family: Tycho, Size: 5pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5. It doesn’t matter about the color, we’ll apply some “Gradient Overlay” layer style setting on our layer, make it like this:

Add some posts thumbnails (73px width, 63px height) … Then use “Type Tool” (T) and make a text rectangle to type posts titles, use the following character settings:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 4pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #d6d6d6, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating “Flickr” Footer Block:

The same typing setting we’ve done for “Top Posts “ should be applied here for the title “From Our Flickr!” and once you’re finished add some flickr photos like below. I add 84px (width), 59px (height) photos … this is my result:

The next step is to add brilliant text that tells visitors to join your website flickr group! As usual, select “Type Tool” (T) and use the following character settings:

Font Family: Utsaah, Size: 6pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #7d7b7b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5. Now, apply the following “Stroke” layer style settings on your text layer:

Creating “Links” Footer Block:

The same typing setting we’ve done for “Top Posts “ should be applied here for the title “Links” and once you’re finished, add some other texts using the following character settings:

Font Family: Tw Cen MT, Size: 4pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #d6d6d6, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Conclusion

We’re done now! We’ve just created this black and white WordPress layout using Photoshop. I’ll be happy to see your comments below and know what you think, as well as see more results of applying theses simple steps.

 

“This post is written in partnership with PrintRunner, an online printing company which offers quality printing services.”

Hello all friends, another day and another tutorial here on HV-Designs! Today you will be learning how to create your personal elegant portfolio depending on only Photoshop amazing tricks and techniques. I’m proud to share this very detailed, step by step tutorial which will be divided into two parts with you exclusively on HV-Designs! This tutorial will let you practice on the basics of Photoshop through covering almost more than 25 amazing PS techniques! A lot of colors will be used to creating this portfolio with complete pages design as well, so I suggest you to don’t waste time and start designing with me now!

The Final result:

(Click on the image to see the full size)

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop
Version: CS5
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated Completion Time: 2 Hours

Resources you’ll need:

Mini Social Icons Set by design deck.

Twitter Icons PNG

Onebit 1 & Onebit 2

Abstract IV

Fonts Pack

Creating the Background and the General Design Look:

Open up a new Photoshop document by going to (File > New) “Ctrl + N” (That is Cmd+N on the Mac). and let it be with the following settings:

Now go to (View > New Guide), then apply the following 4 main guides as you see below:

The next step is to make a gradient using the colors values #e34a10, #fce700 … you can either use “Gradient Tool” (G) or apply “Gradient Overlay” layer style (Layer > Layer style > Gradient Overlay) just like below:

Now, make a gradient and label the layer with “Main Background” and create a new layer above it and label it “Smooth noisy light” then fill it up with white color: #ffffff, then go to (Filter > Noise > Add Noise) and give it an amount between 30-32% … then set the opacity on 25%.

Creating the Top Page Navigation Bar:

Let’s start making this nice red navigation bar at the top of our layout, select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and draw a shape like the one you see (69px height), use any color because we’ll change it in the coming step. But make sure to draw your shape inside the area that limited by guidelines … just as you see below:

Now, rasterize the layer and label it “topnav_bg” then apply these “Outer Glow”, “Inner Glow” and “Color Overlay” layer style settings:

It’s time to type some page titles for our portfolio, use “Type Tool” (T) and the following character settings:

Font Family: Caslon224 Bk BT, Size: 24pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #ececec, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Download the “Onebit” icon set (you can find it in resources above), then add the following icons to your layout and make sure to use “Ctrl + T” to get control handles around each one so you can control the size. The dimensions between text and its icon should be almost 15px.

What you have to do now is selecting all those layers together (topnav_bg, text layer and icons layers) to group them together (go to Layer > New > Group from Layers), name the group “Top”. This step will be repeated all over this tutorial, you’ll finally end up with tidy and organized PSD file.

Creating the Abstract Colored Breaks for the Top Page Navigation:

Now, we’ll goanna use “Abstract IV” brush set (download it from resources above) to add some abstract breaks behind the top navigation bar, the first thing to do here is hiding the folder we’ve already create it “Top” by just clicking on the eye symbol at the left side of it.

Make a new group (go to Layer > New > Group), I’ll label it “TopBackBreaks” then make a new layer (Layer > New > Layer or “Shift + Ctrl + N”). Select “Brush Tool” (B) and add the brush set you’ve downloaded to your Photoshop, pick up some color then select one of the brushes and make spot like that:

Repeat this step for several times, make sure to select different brushes and colors for each time and make a new layer for each spot as well, that will help you controlling with size and opacity of each one (you’ll see what I mean when you download the final PSD and take a look to this). Once you’ve finish doing this, close up the group and reduce its opacity to 56%.

Now, you’ll get colorful breaks just like that:

Note 1: To add PS brushes set, click on the small arrow at the top tool bar, then open up the menu by clicking on the other one (shown below) and select “Load brushes”, you’ll get a window which allows you to add the new brushes easily by choosing the required brush set then click “Load”.

Note 2: You can merge all of the abstract colorful breaks layers into one after you find them well and happy with the final look; select them all then press “Ctrl + E”.

You can show the “Top” group again, by re-clicking on the eye symbol to get the final result:

Creating the Title and Short Description:

Create a new layer then use the following smooth brush (with size 250px, white color: #ffffff) and make a spot like below, then reduce the layer opacity to 44%.

It’s time to use “Type Tool” (T) and type a title for the portfolio; I’ll just type my name using the following character settings:

Font Family: CF Charlemagne, Size: 36pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #544014, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Once you’ve happy with the text, apply the following “Outer Glow” layer style settings:

Keep selecting the “Type Tool” (T) and type some description about yourself (the portfolio owner), using the following character settings:

Font Family: CF Colosseum, Size: 14pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #544014, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

This is my result:

Creating the Twitter Widget:

Show up the guidelines (if it’s not) by pressing on “Ctrl +;” then select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and color value: #ffffff (white), draw a shape like the one you see (435px as width, 91px as height, 54px far from top navigation bar) considering the right guideline. Once you’ve happy with the shape, rasterize the layer then label it “twits_bg” then apply the following “Stoke” layer style settings:

Now, reduce the opacity of this layer to 40%. This is what you should get:

Download the Twitter Icons PNG from resources above, then add the following on to your layout, you can use “Ctrl + T” to get control handles so you can get the size you want. Then select the “Type Tool” (T) and type your twitter username using the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial, Size: 16pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #2c2b2b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

You should get something like that:

Again with “Type Tool” (T), type some twits using the following character settings:

Font Family: AXtMashtour, Size: 14pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #1e1e1e (and #10b7c7 (for links)), Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Finish this part by grouping all layers together into one group, label it “Twitter”.

Creating Summery about the Portfolio Owner:

We’ll start up here with making new guide by going to (View > New Guide) and make horizontal guide with 518px, like following:

Type text that says “Hello there!” with “Type Tool” (T) using the following character settings:

Font Family: Vani, Size: 72pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #8a6d0a, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 200.

After that, apply these “Outer Glow” layer style settings on your text:

It’s time to type some summery about yourself (portfolio owner), just use the “Type Tool” (T) to make a rectangle text then paste the summery you want inside it, using the following character settings:

Font Family: Vani, Size: 24pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #725a0a, Leading: 32pt, Tracking: 10.

Apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings you’ve do it for the previous text “Hello there!” on this text as well. You should get a result like that:

Now let’s begin making the “Download my resume” button. First, make a new layer (Layer > New > Layer or “Shift + Ctrl + N”) then select the following two brushes (make sure to set the color on white #ffffff) to make something like that:

Label this layer with the name “Light” and then reduce its opacity to 55%.

Next, select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and whatever color (we’ll goanna change it later), draw a shape like the one you see (230px as width, 47px as height) considering the far from the right guideline which is 44px. Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and label it “download_bg” then make some styles by applying the following “Inner Glow”, “Gradient Overlay” and Stroke” layer style settings:

With “Type Tool” (T) type the text “Download my resume!” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Alberta, Size: 17pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #37731f, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Note: notice that we keep the far between the guideline we’ve created at the beginning of this section and the download button about 42px.

Creating Works Block:

We’ll begin here by making some colorful breaks just as we’ve done previously for download button, so select “Brush Tool” (B) and make some abstract breaks and use different colors for that and be sure to let every single spot on its separate layer so you can get more control options, you may need to reduce the opacity of some layers (as you’ll see in my final PSD at the end of this tutorial).This is how my result:

Note: I apply some “Gradient Overlay” styles on some of the abstract breaks to get high styled result.

Now, we have to set new guidelines for locating the main works container inside them. As usual, go to (View > New Guide) then make 548px horizontal one and repeat that to make another one with 771px, like following:

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and whatever color (we’ll goanna change it later), draw a shape like the one you see considering all guidelines (the shape should be located inside the four guidelines. Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and label it “Works_bg”.

Apply the following “Outer Glow” and “Color Overlay” layer style settings:

It’s time to add our works screenshots, but after that let’s make some holders for the screenshots; I believe it would be nicer like that!

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and white color: #ffffff, draw a shape with 272px (width), 149px (height). Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and apply the following “Stroke” layer style settings:

Reduce the opacity to 15%, then duplicate this shape twice, you should get tow more copies from it, locate them like below.

Note: to be sure that those shape are aligned well together, select them all then go to the top tools options bar and click “Distribute Horizontal Centers”.

Now, add the screenshots you want (it should be 257px as width and 135px as height), I’ll just add some of works here.

The next step is to add some text under each work that tells to know more about that works or visit the related website (if it’s exists). Select the “Type Tool” (T) and use the following character settings:

Font Family: Bitmap Police, Size: 14pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #f0f8f8, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0. When it’s done, reduce the opacity of these texts to 35%.

Now, we’ll goanna make the rounded selected circled down the main container, set the color on value: #ce5a20, then select the “Ellipse Tool” (U) and draw circles like the ones you see below, rasterize the layers once you’ve finished. You’ll need 5 copies from the main circle, duplicate it and drop the new copies one by one horizontally while you’re holding down the “Shift” key.

Apply the following “Outer Glow” layer style settings on all circles layers:

And the following “Color Overlay” layer style settings (plus to previous “Outer Glow” one) on the first circle which is the active one:

The result:

Creating the Special Quotes Block:

Again, use the brush set (from resources above) to make new abstract breaks using different colors. For me, I made three ones just like below:

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and any color, draw a shape with 726px (width), 66px (height). Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and apply the following “Outer Glow” and “Color Overlay” layer style settings:

This is what you should get:

Now, select the “Type Tool” (T) and type the title that says “Special Quotes” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Calisto MT, Size: 24pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #2c2b2b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

And the following ones for “… That I Love” text:

Font Family: Calisto MT, Size: 18pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #2c2b2b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

And the following ones for the content text:

Font Family: Comic Sans MS, Size: 16pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #edceb6, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Note: notice the far between the main container for special quotes and the main works container, it is 116px.

Creating the “Keep in Touch” Footer Block:

First, we’ll goanna make a new guide, go to (View > New Guide) and set the horizontal value 1074px as you see below, we’ll use this guide to set the title for this section:

Let’s begin doing this by selecting “Type Tool” (T) and type the title “Keep in Touch” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Centaur, Size: 30pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #a33e1b, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 25.

Once finished, apply the following “Outer Glow” layer style settings:

Now, add your phone number and email id using the following character settings:

Font Family: Acropolis, Size: 16pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #a7430a, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Once finished, apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings that you’ve already done for title text.

It’s time to download the Mini Social Icons Set and add the following icons to your layer:

Type the links of your socials using the same previous character settings (that we’ve done for phone number and email), but with small font size here, 14pt. As well as, apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings that you’ve already done for title text, phone number and email.

Creating the “Skills” Footer Block:

As we’ve done before, we’ll goanna make a new guide, go to (View > New Guide) and set the horizontal value 1042px as you see below, we’ll use this guide to set the title for this section:

Type the title by selecting “Type Tool” (T) and using the same character settings that you’ve done for “Keep in Touch” text, but with font size: 30.55pt. Then apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings that you’ve already done for “Keep in Touch “title text.

Add the icon you see near the “Skills” text from Onebit Icon set (download from resources above), you can use “Ctrl + T” to get control handles and control the size.

Now, set the color on value: #95542c, then select the “Custom Shape Tool” (U) and choose the following shape from options above (it’s default). Draw a small shape like below and once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer then duplicate it several times (as much as skills you want to add), and this is my result:

Select the “Type Tool” (T) to type the skills you want using the same character settings you’ve done for title text, phone number and email, but with small font size here, 16.08pt, as well as apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings that you’ve already done for title texts, phone number, and socials links.

Creating the “Send Message” Footer Block:

As we’ve done before, we’ll goanna make a new guide, go to (View > New Guide) and set the horizontal value 1008px as you see below, we’ll use this guide to set the title for this section:

Type the title by selecting “Type Tool” (T) and using the same character settings that you’ve done for “Keep in Touch” and “Skills” texts, with font size: 30pt. Then apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings that you’ve already done for “Keep in Touch “and “Skills title texts.

Add the icon you see near the “Send Message!” text from Onebit Icon set (download from resources above), you can use “Ctrl + T” to get control handles and control the size.

The next here, is to make some abstract breaks just as we’ve done before, this is my result:

Now, let’s begin creating the contact form by selecting the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 5px radius and color value: #87ba36, then draw a shape with 189px (width), 28px (height). Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and apply the following “Stroke” layer style settings:

Label this layer “name_bg” then reduce its opacity to 50%.

Note: notice the far from right edge of the layout, 221px.

Duplicate the “name_bg” layer and re-label the new one with “email_bg” then drop it down while you’re holding the “Shift” key for almost 16px, you should get something like this:

With the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U), 5px radius and color value: #87ba36, draw another shape for message, it should be 260px (width), 97px (height). Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and apply the same “Stroke” layer style settings that you’ve applied for “name_bg” and “email_bg” layers, label this one “msg_bg”.

Add some icons from Onebit Icon set (download from resources above), you can use “Ctrl + T” to get control handles and control the size. Once finished, reduce the opacity of all these icons to 58%. This is what you should get:

Now, type some text with “Type Tool” (T) and using the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial, Size: 12.54pt, Weight: Italic, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #fce7d9, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Reduce the opacity of all these text layers to 60%.

With the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U), 40px radius and color value: #87ba36, draw the send button, like the one you’ll see it below. Once you’ve happy with it, rasterize the layer and apply the following “Stroke” layer style settings:

Now, type the word “Send” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial, Size: 16pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #fce7d9, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Reduce the opacity of this text layer to 73%.

Next, add the following alert icon from Onebit Icon Set, and then type text that says “your message has been sent!” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Acropolis, Size: 12pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #954416, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Then, apply the same “Outer Glow” layer style settings that you’ve done before for title texts, phone number, and socials links.

Conclusion

The first part of this tutorial has done now! We’ve just created the home page for our complete portfolio, so don’t forget to follow the coming parts which we’ll continue designing the other pages and of course exclusively on HV-Designs … I’ll be happy to see your comments below and know what you think, as well as see more results of your work.

Download Source Files

Download the free PSD for this tutorial that is licensed under the Creative Commons license. Of course, attribution is required and appreciated.

Hello HV-Designs friends! Today I’ll be showing you how to create a cool darken coming soon page design. As you will see in the final result show, the design depends on “Black” color as primary one and use nice colored Adobe products icons as pendulous, secondary background (you may use this layout for designing site or something related to Adobe!). Let’s see how to do that …

The Final result:

(Click on the image to see the full size)

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop
Version: CS5
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

Resources you’ll need:

CS4 Mini Icon Set by Bobbyperux (deviantART).

Mini Social Icon set by design deck.

Metal Mesh Patterns by Axertion (deviantART).

Any email icon you like. (This is nice one from (GraphicsFuel)

Fonts Pack

Setting up the Photoshop Document and Creating the Background:

Create a new document (Ctrl + N) with the sizes 1200 x 600 pixels and fill it up with the color value #0a0a0a. Label your layer “Background”.

Duplicate the layer “Background” (Layer > Duplicate Layer), then go to (Filter > Noise) and add the following noise settings:

Reduce your layer opacity to 14%. Don’t forget to label this layer with “Background Noise” just to keep our final PSD file organized and tidy.

The next thing we have to do is setting some guidelines, so we can keep our final result as exactitude as possible. Go to (View > New Guide) and set your guides as the following:

Creating the Main Container:

In this, we’ll goanna make a nice container to put all content inside it.

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 10px radius and the color value: #101010 then draw a shape like the one you see below (try to use guidelines):

Once you’ve happy with the shape, rasterize the layer (click on it by the right mouse button and chose “Rasterize Layer”) then apply the following layer styles “Color Overlay & Stroke” settings (go to Layer > Layer Style):

Now, I’m going to add smooth texture to this layer, make sure to download the textures set that I mention in resources above.

Make a new layer (Shift + Ctrl + N) and fill it with the following pattern you see below by selecting “Paint Pocket Tool” (G) then choose the option “Pattern” from the bar above then add it to your Photoshop.

Now we’ll going to make cool trick now, make sure to place the pattern layer above the container one, next go to the layer “Container” (I mean make it active) then right-click on it while you’re holding down the “Ctrl” from keyboard, you should get a dotted selection around the container just like the one you saw above in the previous screenshot.

On the working space (layout), be sure to select “Rectangular Marquee Tool” (M) and the layer of pattern is activated, left-click by mouse then chose “Select Inverse”, now press the “Delete” key from keyboard … then reduce your layer opacity to 5%. You should get a result like this:

Creating “Hours”, “Days” and “Weeks” Rounded Squares:

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 10px radius and the color value: #171717 then draw a shape with almost 198px (width), 107px (height), rasterize the layer (click on it by the right mouse button and chose “Rasterize Layer”), this is the result:

Apply the following layer styles “Outer Glow, Inner Glow & Stroke” settings as we’ve done before:

This layer will be used for weeks; we need two more copies of it for days and hours. Just Duplicate it twice and drop each new layer to be located like this (the distance between the one and the other is 35px):

With “Line Tool” (U) draw a line with 2px radius and the color value: #728c24 (or you can apply it through “Color Overlay” from layer style. Be sure to locate the line layer under the number ones later to get something like this:

Duplicate the line to get two more ones and drop them horizontally … you should get something like this:

It’s time to use the “Type Tool” (T) to add the some numbers; we’re going to add them with the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial Rounded MT Bold, Size: 82pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

The color doesn’t matter now because we’ll goanna change it by applying this “Gradient Overlay” effect:

The same way, type other texts for days and hours, as well as apply the same layer styles. This is my result:

Keep selecting the “Type Tool” (T) and add the words “Weeks”, “Days” and “Hours” using the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial Rounded MT Bold, Size: 30pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Apply the following “Outer Glow, “Bevel and Emboss” and “Color Overlay” layer styles on each text layer (you can use copy & paste layer styles by clicking right-click on required layer):

This is my result:

Typing Some Welcome Text:

A big, wonderful “Hello” word will be adding now with “Type Tool” (T) and using the following character settings:

Font Family: Andrew Gothic (get it from resources above), Size: 82pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0.

Then apply the following “Outer Glow, “Gradient Overlay” and “Stroke” layer styles:

Now add the text you want to tell visitors about the site or encourage them to wait for launching! I use the following character settings for mine:

Font Family: Arial (it’s default), Size: 24pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5, Color: #a0a0a0.

Once you’ve happy with what you type, apply the following “Stroke” layer style, then give you layer the opacity 58%.

Creating the Email Notification Form:

Select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 10pt as radius. Then draw a shape like the one you see below to be the email notification. Keep the far 329px from the left.

Label you layer “email_notification_bg” then apply the following layer styles “Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Color Overlay and Stroke”:

Add any email icon you like (I prefer to use the white color for it) then add it and reduce its opacity to 65%, then use the “Type Tool” (T) to add the text “your email here …” inside the rounded email notification rectangle with the following character settings:

Font Family: BenguiatGot Bk BT, Size: 18pt, Weight: Book Italic, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #414141, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

The next step here is to make an obvious text that can be clickable when converting this layout into working XHTML/CSS template, and it’s for insure visitors’ requests and get them notified when the site goes live.

Use the “Type Tool” (T) to add the text “notify me!” with the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial Rounded MT Bold, Size: 18pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #414141, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5, then apply the following layer styles on your text layer “Outer Glow”, “Gradient Overlay” and “Stroke”:

Once you’ve finished that, reduce the opacity of this layer to 52%.

Use the “Line Tool” (U) with 2px radius, color value #3c3d40 to draw a line under the “Notify me” text then apply the following “Outer Glow” settings:

Creating the Social Networks Links:

Download Mini Social Icon Set by design deck from resources above then add facebook and twitter icons (of course you can add whatever you want), control the size by using “Ctrl + T” and locate them like below then add your facebook page and twitter id using the following character settings to type:

Font Family: Arial Rounded MT Bold, Size: 14.24pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #f5f5f5, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Creating Title and slogan:

Ok … it’s time to type our site title and slogan! I think this is will be the easiest thing ever! Of course it’s our “HV-Designs” and its pretty slogan. Use the “Type Tool” (T) to type the name “HV-Designs” with the following character settings:
Font Family: Century Gothic, Size: 40pt, Weight: Bold, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5 (just use any color).

Apply the following “Outer Glow”, “Gradient Overlay” and “Stroke” settings on your text layer:

For slogan, we’re goanna use the following character settings:

Font Family: Arial, Size: 16pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #8e8e8e, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 5.

Adding Adobe Icons for Back:

Download “Adobe CS4 Mini Icon Set” listed in resources above, then add some of these nice icons to your layout and use “Ctrl + T” to control size and make some rotation and locate them above each other for both the two sides. I think this is easy step, I’m sure you won’t find any problems. Be sure to group all layers (as usual) in one group and do the most important thing for this! It’s to locate this group exactly above the “Background” one, i.e. let it be under the container, which will make you get impressive show of specific part of each icon without doing any more steps to hide the other parts.
Also you can see how my PSD File is organized … I hope you keep yours like that too.

Conclusion

Ok … we’re done now! I wish you’ve found this tutorial useful. Feel free to share us your opinion and comments below.

Download Source Files

Download the free PSD for this tutorial that is licensed under the Creative Commons license. Of course, attribution is required and appreciated.

Hello all! Generally everyone needs a card whether if he/she was a web designer, developer, coder, trade business professional …etc. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to design your own print-ready business cards just in some amazing and easy steps. Put in your mind to have an idea of what your final card should look like, that imagination will help you determine every little thing in what you do! Don’t forget to download the PSD file at the end of this tutorial, it’s free! Now let’s get started!

Final Result

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop
Version: CS5
Difficulty: Easy
Estimated Completion Time: 30 minutes

Resources you’ll need:

Grungy Asphalt Icon Set

SEM Labs Icon Pack

Used Fonts Pack (RIGAfont, Franklin Gothic Book, Segoe UI)

Used Texture (Fabric Patterns)

Setting up the Photoshop Document:

We’ll start by opining Photoshop and make a new document with the following sizes:

As you see, keep making the resolution 300 pixels per inch and set the color mode to 8-bit CMYK and label the document as you wish, it’s “Hiba_Personal_Card” here.

Now, set up some guides to help you placing the content by going to (View > New Guide) then make tow for vertical and tow for horizontal according to what you see in screenshots below:

The space you’ll get between the four guides is where we’ll work on! You must let all card content locate inside this area so you can finally get more successful result.

Creating the Back Side Background:

Create a new layer (go to Layer > New > Layer) and label it “Background”, select the “paint Pocket Tool” (G) then fill up the layer you’ve already create with the color: #4a2308. You may have the following result:

Now create a new layer (make sure to place it above the “background” one) and label it “Texture”, remember to download it from resources above. Use the “paint Pocket Tool” (G) and set the option “Pattern” then click to fill up the “Texture” layer with this pattern. Reduce the opacity of this layer to 40%; this is what you should get:

Select the “Brush Tool” (B) and the following soft round one with the size you see below:

From the color palette, set color on the value of white: #ffffff.

Create a new layer, and then click (with “Brush Tool” (B)) almost at the middle of your card to get the required light, label this layer “back_light” then reduce its opacity to 20%:

Download the “RIGAfont” font from recourses above, and then use the “Horizontal Type Tool” (T) to type your name or just any other name you want. For me, I’ll type “Hiba Hammad” as a name with the size: 14pt and color: # 614126. Here is our result:

Now, apply the following “Outer Glow” and “Stroke” layer styles (Go to Layer > Layer Style):

Note: To get the downloaded font inside Photoshop, all you need to do is copy it and paste it inside the folder “Fonts” that located in “Program Files > Windows”. When you open up Photoshop you’ll find it ready at the font list. I’m sure you won’t face any problems.

Creating the Front Side Background:

In this step, we’ll goanna design the foreground card side, and this is where we’ll add the information we want to let world know about us! Let’s start by hiding the old layers (Back side layers), you can easily do that by clicking on the eye symbol near each layer and folder, then create a new layer then label it “Foreground” just like you see here:

Fill up the color with the value: #f4f4f4 then use the “Paint Pocket Tool” (G) to give your layer this color, you should get a result like that:

With the same way we used to create the “Texture” layer, we’ll create a new one and label it “Texture2” then set the opacity on 20%:

Entering the Card Information:

Type the name you want, as you saw I type “Hiba Hammad”, of course, using the “Horizontal Type Tool” (T) with the size: 10pt and the same layer styles settings that we applied before on “Hiba Hammad” background text layer. Now give this new text layer the opacity 56%.
You’ll get a result like that:

Use the “Horizontal Type Tool” (T) to type “Production Manager” or your own job title under the name of you/your company just like you see:

Keep selecting the “Horizontal Type Tool” (T) to type some contact info (like email, phone number … etc) by using the “Franklin Gothic Book” font (get it from resources above) and the following character settings: Size: 4pt, Weight: Italic, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: #797979, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0. For me, I’ll type an email and phone … You should get something like this:

Now use the Grungy Asphalt Icon Set and add the following ones to your layout at the left side of both email and phone text layers:

Creating the summary block:

Set the color on value: #f4f4f4 then select the “Rounded Rectangle Tool” (U) with 10px radius, draw a shape like the one you see below, then give it the opacity 32%.

Use the “Horizontal Type Tool” (T) and type a text says “Who am I?” Use the “Segoe UI” font (get it from resources above) with the following character settings: Size: 8pt, Weight: Regular, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: # 9b8876, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0. Give this layer the opacity 70%. Here is the result:

Now, use the SEM Labs Icon Pack (get it from resources above) to add the following female PNG to your layout (you may use other PNG’s, there’s male ones too). Be sure to place it at the left top from your “Who am I?” text layer. Also set the opacity of this layer on 70%.

Note: you can use (Ctrl + T) to get handles around any shape (like the icon we’ve already add) and control its size as you want.

Use the “Horizontal Type Tool” (T) to make a rectangle then type short summary so you can describe yourself / your company and tell people what you can do! Use the “Segoe UI” font (get it from resources above) with the following character settings: Size: 4pt, Weight: Italic, Anti-aliasing setting: Smooth, Color: # 9b8876, Leading: Auto, Tracking: 0. Here is the result:

The final result for this:

Conclusion

That’s it, my friends! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something from it. Feel free to share your comments; I’ll be ready to respond to all of them!

Download Source Files

Download the free PSD for this tutorial that is licensed under the Creative Commons license. Of course, attribution is required and appreciated.

Hiba_Personal_Card (1.06 MB, ZIP)

 

Today we will be working with the most basic tools in Photoshop and creating a very simple illustration, to practice using only the most basic effects. We have now made it over to part two of our tutorial, designing our awesome burger. If you are ready to start design, let’s get started.

Alright, start out with a new document 600px x 600px and fill it with #89c3db. Now grab your rounded rectangle tool and set the rectangle radius to 25. Change your foreground color to #e4bf84 and draw out a rectangle that is 510px x 80px. You are gonna wanna space it somewhere near the bottom. Right now there are no specific pixels for spacing yet. We will worry about the spacing once our hamburger is done.

Now, grab your pen tool and choose the Add Anchor Point tool. Add an anchor point at the center of your rectangle and pull it down to give our bottom bun just a little bit of a rounded feeling.

The Burger

Ok, now we are going to create our simple burger patty. To create our burger patty we are going to change our foreground color to # and then we are going to grab our rounded rectangle tool again. This time I want you to draw out a rectangle that is 550px x 95px.

Now grab your Add Anchor Point tool again and give the top and bottom a slight curvature as well.

The Condiments

We are on our way, now we just have to give our burger that little extra something to make it look delicious: the condiments. We will start out by adding the cheese to our burger. To do this you can either use your polygonal lasso tool or your pen tool. In either case you will want to create a new layer above your burger layer and change your foreground to #f3ad53.

Now make a selection that looks like the cheese is curving over the burger. It’s basically a rectangle on the sides and top, with a triangle at the bottom. This is what we got for our selection:

Now fill your layer and you have your cheese.

Now to draw out the next condiment, our lettuce. Depending on how detailed you want to get with it you can use your pen tool, but I found an easier way to make some nice lettuce. Grab your freeform pen tool so you can just draw out some nice lettuce shaping. If you have a tablet to draw on now is a great time to use it, but you can do it with your mouse as well. I have never seen a perfect piece of lettuce on anything, so why make ours look perfect?

This is our shape, on a new layer and filled with #56b861:

Now for the tomato, my favorite piece of a sandwich. The tomato is made up of another simple rounded rectangle with a little curve to them. So, grab your tool again and choose 10px for the radius and #ca4a4a for your foreground color.

Drag out a new rectangle that is 535px x 65px. Again we want to grab our add anchor point tool and give the tomato some curvature to it. We want to add a little more of a curve to our tomato than anything else.

Oh yea, the condiments are all finished. Now to finish off our burger with the top bun.

The Top Bun

Change your foreground color to #e4bf84 and drag out a circle that is 545px x 300px. It will overlap the rest of our design, which is fine for now. We are going to take care of that in the next step.

Now, buns all have a little curve to them, so we will add that in now. Go ahead and rasterize your layer and then grab your elliptical marquee tool and draw out a large selection with the same curvature that you would like your top bun to have.

Once you have your selection, right click and hit Select Inverse. Once you have the inverse selected you will want to hit your delete key, and that is your top bun curvature. You may need to play with it a few times to get it exactly how you want.

You will notice that the tomato is barely showing, which is what we wanted. The top bun still feels just a little to much like a circle so enter into free transform mode (CTRL+T) and just shrink the buns height a smidge until you are satisfied and enough of the tomato is showing.I shrunk ours down to 95% height to get the right feel that I wanted.

What is our burger missing? Well the top bun is sure missing its sesame seeds and then the burger still feels to be lacking something….grease. Let’s get started on the sesame seeds first as this is one of the easiest steps.

Change your foreground color to #FFF and grab your ellipse shape tool. Now drag out a simple ellipse that is 25×4 and place it on your document. Now just duplicate your layer over and over, moving them around and rotating if you want, to give yourself the sesame seeds.

And to add the grease simply grab your Blob 1 Custom Shape Tool and draw out some grease shapes with #f0a45a set as your foreground color. Be sure your place them underneath your burger layer and there you have it, your grease!

Our burger looks great. Now, you can start playing around with some effects and textures to really get a nice looking illustration. We added a few shadows, some texture to the burger, and an overlayed noise layer and get another version.

Conclusion

We now have our drink and our burger for our Illustrative Poster. Next we will be creating the fries and fry basket and then will put them all together with some simple text to create our poster. Be sure to check out the article that spawned this tutorial series and Part One of the series.

Want to share your results? Go ahead and post them to our Flickr group, Facebook, Twitter, or just post them in the comments for us to see.

Today we will be working with the most basic tools in Photoshop and creating a very simple illustration, to practice using only the most basic effects. There will be three phases to this tutorial in order to get our final product. Today we will start out by designing a simple glass illustration, using only shapes and the paint bucket tool. Let’s get started…

As always let me show your our final product. Below is the full version of what we will be creating over the next week. Today we will be working on creating the beer glass.

To get started create a new document that is 600px by 600px and fill it with #89c3db

Setting Up Our Outline

Alright let’s get started by drawing out the outline to our glass. Go ahead and change your foreground color to #a1a1a1 and grab your Ellipse Tool. Drag out a circle that is 355px wide by 90px tall. You are going to want to center it horizantally and space it 60px from the top of our document.

Now, this will be the only time we open up the layer styles and that is just to reduce the fill and make it a solid outline circle. If you have your shape styles set up you can just choose a stroke only ellipse to draw, but in case you don’t apply the following:

Awesome! Now you are going to want to duplicate your layer and bring it down 310 pixels. You can do this by selecting your move tool and holding down the ALT key, moving down and duplicating your layer all at the same time.

Now let’s enter into free transform mode, CTRL+T, and shrink our circle to 75%.

Ok, now go ahead and rasterize your layer for your small circle because we aren’t going to need the full circle for our design. Once you have the circle rasterized grab your rectangle marquee tool and draw out a 240px rectangle, drag it down just a little over the top line of your circle, and hit the delete key.

Now, grab your line tool and draw out a 4px line that is 395 pixels tall. Enter into free transform mode again and now we are going to rotate our object to give us one side of our glass. Hold down your SHIFT key and rotate it -7 degrees and line it up with our glass.

Now simply duplicate your layer, enter into free transform and flip horizantal, and line it up on the other side of your glass. Now we have the outline for our glass and it’s time to move onto the next step, the actual creation of the glass.

Creating the Glass

Alright, now comes the glass creation. The first thing you want to do is make a selection that just barely goes beyond our glass and change your foreground color to #c7c7c7. My selection is 367px(w) by 480px(h). Create a new layer above your outline layers and fill it with our foreground color.

Awesome, now unselect your image and move your layer down below your outline. To make things easier you might want to Group together your outlines, that way you only have to bring it below the group instead of the other layers. Now for the very tedious part. Hold down the CTRL key and the SHIFT key and begin selecting each of your layers to have a full selection of your outline.

Now, right click and hit select inverse. Grab your eraser tool and begin erasing away the extra from our grey layer. You will want to really zoom in on the document so you don’t erase any of what we need. This will definitely take some time. Make sure you are letting go of the eraser tool every once in a while just in case you have to go back you aren’t going back too far.

When you have finished lower the opacity of our layer to 50% and you have the makings of the glass.

Create the Beer

Now it’s time to really get going on this baby. Change your foreground color to #eed7a0. Grab your rectangle marquee tool again and create a selection that is 355 by 330 and space it 35px from the top glass spacer and fill it with our foreground on a new layer.

Now, select the thumbnail of our glass layer (holding down ctrl and clicking the thumbnail) so you have a selection of your layer. Now we need to shrink our layer. Go to Select–Modify–Contract and choose 15px so you have a selection. Now select inverse and hit delete. It should look like below-

Awesome, now change your foreground color to #dcd6c0 and grab your ellipse tool again. Drag out a circle that is 305px by 85 px at the top of our glass. Depending on how high you want your foam you can line it up directly at the top, but we kept it down a little bit and showing some of the corners from the beer.

Looks funny right? Well now we are going to be creating the next layer of foam. Duplicate your circle and nudge it up 3px. Change the color to #ece5cb. Now, duplicate your circle one more time and nudge it up 7px. Change the color to #f5f1e4. If you want more foam you just add more spacing and a few more of our last layers. We are sticking with small foam though.

That there could be your beer, if you wanted to go for the most basics, but we are going to add just a few more things to make it look more realistic. We want to add some bubbles to our beer so we are going to grab our ellipse tool, change the foreground to #d5cca7, and draw out some random bubbles, rotate them, to whatever your hearts desire.

Now we want to give a few subtle glass highlights. To do this we are going to create a new layer, change our foreground to standard white, and lower our layers opacity to 45%. Make a selection of our glass layer and fill it with white. Contract the layer by 15, using our earlier method, and then delete the inverse selection. Shrink it down a little bit to get the right reflection for whatever you are doing.

Do the same with the top of the cup, using only our top circle for selection, instead of the full glass. This time when you do your selection you will also want to move your selection down 15px so all you are left with is a line type shape. Lower the opacity to 25% and your are finished!

Conclusion

We now have a super amazing glass of beer without effects. The next stage will be creating our fry basket, continuing with no effects. If you want to take your glass to the next level start playing around with colors on your outline, giving your glass layer more shadows and highlights, different style bubbles, and play with the foam to give it more feeling. Starting out with no effects can really get you the feel that you are looking for and then you can start adding in the additional details to get something really fantastic. Watch our Dribbble feed for what you can turn this glass into.

Today we will be designing a simple log in screen for an iPhone/Android App. Apps are the newest rage and as a designer chances are you will be asked to design some kind of screen for an app or at least to change up the design for an app, so we decided that we will start doing more app tutorials, as well as other tutorials. Now, let’s get started…

We will be building our application screen at a 960×640 pixel resolution, but will be keeping in mind that screen size will change all the time, so we want our design to be functional as a fluid design, as well as a static design so when the app would be implemented on anything but the iPhone it is easy to bring over. Anyway, let’s get started with our design.

Open up a new document in Photoshop at 640×960 (obviously). Create a new layer and fill it with #343434 and then go download the Carbon Fibre pattern from Subtle Patterns (http://subtlepatterns.com/?p=22). Go into your layer style options and apply the CF pattern we just downloaded, changing the scale size to 55%.

Alright, now let’s start with our logo implementation. In a normal design process you will already have a completed logo ready to use on the app, but for now we are going to just be using a text filler logo with some basic metallic styling. Grab your favorite font and type out whatever you want for the logo. We are going to be using the Carbon Block Font, 110px, #e6e6e6. You will want to horizantally center the text/logo on your document and space it 110px from the top of our document. (If you are following our guide then the left and right margins are 202px)

Now to give it a metallic look you will want to apply the following texture, if you are following our color scheme.

Now, just underneath you will want to add your site tagline if you have one. We are using an #e6e6e6 30px Caviar Dreams for our tagline, Photoshop Tutorials.

Amazing! Now let’s begin to work on the sign in form for our log-in screen! We want to use the two main aspects of a log-in, username and password, as well as the obvious submit button and then a recover p/w option as well as a Register feature.

Because this is a mobile app I am going to diverge away from the standard label to the left or top and we will be putting the label into the actual input field. With such a limited space and the fact that users are using this on their phone you want to keep the information as readily accesible as possible.

We will start our by changing our foreground color to #efefef and grabbing our rounded rectangle tool. Set your radius to 10px and drag out a rectangle that is 510×75 pixels, horizantally center it, and space it 65px from the bottom of your site tagline or logo (If your logo is a little smaller then you may want to add some additional padding between the logo and first input area).

Now to make it look just a little bit better we are going to add in some simple styles that will give it that extra pop.

Now to add in the label. Grab your text tool and choose whatever font you want. We are using Comfortaa, a free font you can find and download at Google Fonts and is safe for Web Use, but you may want to use a safer font, such as Tahoma or Arial. Whatever font you choose pick a size that is relevant to the image below, and use #979393 for the color. Type out whatever label you want, ,such as Username or Email Address, and space it 20px from the left and vertically centered.

Now grab our two layers we just created and duplicate them to create our second input field. Space our second input box 60px from the bottom of our first one. I recommend using rulers to keep to the left and right side grid so everything remains pixel perfect.

Alright, now lets get to work on our two call to action buttons, cancel and log in. We will start work on the Cancel button, using very simple layer styles and effects to create an amazing button. Grab your rounded rectangle tool again and set the radius to 5px this time and your foreground color to #a31313. Drag out a rounded rectangle that is 150×70 pixels. Line it up with your left hand ruler and space it 65px from the bottom of our last input box.

Now to give our button a little bit of style, apply the following layers:

Now, I played around with what I wanted to do with our cancel button a lot before finally deciding. At first I wanted two small buttons with just icons in them, but it just didn’t look right on the screen. I decided that I would just go with the standard text, but again it just didn’t look right. Finally I decided to try them both and it turned out excellent.

First we are going to want to create our icon. Grab your custom shape tool, go to all shapes, and choose the x icon, easy to find as it’s the only one. Change your foreground color to #530a0a and draw out a shape that is 16px by 17px. Vertically center it and space it 15px from the left of the button.

Now we want to apply a very basic drop shadow to our icon to give it a letterpress style effect.

Now grab your text tool again and choose a very bold font. We are going to be using Delicious Heavy at 34px. Whatever font you choose should be a little bit taller than our icon and #530a0a. Center your text vertically and space it 15px from the right side of our icon.

Now apply the following layer styles:

Amazing! Our button is almost finished but we have just one more step. Change your foreground color back to #FFFFFF and grab your rectangle marquee tool. Create a new layer and make a rectangle shape around our button, about halfway down the button and fill it with white. Select the thumbnail of our button, select the inverse, and hit your delete key. Now change the opacity to 20% and you have an awesome, and finally finished, button.

Now, for our log in button all we are going to do is duplicate our layers and change some colors around. The button bg color is going to be #30a012 and the color for the icon and font is going to be #13530a. You can use whatever icon you want, but we are using the standard checkmark icon that comes with PS, same sizes as the x icon.

Looking amazing, right? We could stop there, but what about people that don’t have an account? What if you can’t remember you password? To keep with the simplistic feel of our app design we will just use simple text links, with a standard line underneath them. We are using 16px Tahoma for our font on both lines. Our first line color is #a9a9a9, same with the line underneath, and for our forgotten password line we are using #a41919.

The first line is spaced 80px from the bottom of our buttons and the password link is 25px from our register link.

There we go, we are all done with our sign-in screen. You might notice that there is a little bit of extra space at the bottom. We left that space there so if the menu key is up the design won’t interfere with the log in screen (a design we will get to later on) and also because our forms will be pushed down a little bit with validation issues, if present.

If you feel like something is missing you can always add in a button for the registration instead of a standard link or even a simple gradient on our patterned background would look nice. This is our final product:

and here is our final project with a few personalized changes.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and we look forward to bringing you more App Design tutorials in the near future. Let us know what you think in the comments or continue the discussion over on our Facebook Page.

Today I will be showing you how to create a simple coming soon page in Photoshop. We will be using Adobe Photoshop CS4 and will be using the very basic tools of Photoshop to create this tutorial.

First we start off with a new document. This document needs to be 1280 x 768 and filled with Black.

For the next step you will need to download these Fibre Styles from DeviantArt.

Now access the Blending Options of the main background layer and add the following styles.

Now we are going to create a rounded rectangle to host our information. Drag out a rectangle, with an radius of 20px, our to 1135 pixels wide by 350 pixels tall. Center the rectangle vertically and space it 35 pixels from the left of the screen.

It is now time to style our rectangle. We will be giving it a simple gradient overlay (as shown below)

Now to add our character to the Coming Soon Page. You will need to download THESE icons.

We will be using the singular green character for our coming soon page, though of course you can use any of them.

Place your green character on the screen 143 pixels from the top of the screen and 17 pixels from the right (measuring from the tentacle).

Now we need to remove the coloring between the eyes and mouth to make the character look more friendly. Use the magic lasso tool to select the purple coloring for the eyes and mouth.

Click the delete key on your keyboard to remove the selection. Use the eraser tool to get rid of any extra coloring that was not deleted. You should have only the background of the rectangle now instead of the purple and teeth.

Now we will use the magic lasso tool again to remove the white shadow underneath our character. Select the shadow and press the delete key to remove it.

Now select your magic lasso tool again. Select the space in the eyes and mouth one more time. When you have them selected, choose the rounded rectangle layer and hit the delete key so that only the background is showing through the eyes and mouth.

Now use the eraser tool, still selecting the rounded rectangle tool, and erase the extra pars of the rectangle, below the tentacles.

Now its time to add the content. For the first part of the content we will be using the font face Cooper Black and size 72pt. For the remainder of the content we used the same font face but used a 30pt size. This is our content, which you can use, or add your own. Be sure that, if you are adding your own, you leave enough space for the sign up bar.

Now its time to add our sign up bar. We will be using the rounded rectangle again, this time with a 10px radius using White. Draw the rectangle out to be 548px wide by 63px tall. You need to space it 33 px from the left side of our black rectangle and 20px from the bottom. Now we are going to add some styling to our sign up bar. Use the following styles.

Now using the rounded rectangle again, with a 5px radius. Space it 22 pixels from our sign up bar. Drag it out to be 154px wide by 48px tall. Now lets add some styling to our sign up button. Use the following styles:

Now using the font face Eras Bold ITC, at a size of 30pt, and using black for the color. Type out the word Sign Up and center it, both horizontally and vertically, on your button.

Now, using the basis from THIS tutorial we are going to place our Social Navigation on our page to finalize the tutorial. You are dong with your photoshop document of the Coming Soon Page. You should have something like this:

Now, using the basis from THIS tutorial we are going to place our Social Navigation on our page to finalize the tutorial. You are dong with your photoshop document of the Coming Soon Page. You should have something like this:

Today I will be walking you through the process of creating a simple nature scene in Adobe Photoshop. I will be using CS5 to do this tutorial, but it will work in any variation of Photoshop without too much changing. As always this is what you will be creating:

Getting Started

Start out by creating a new document 1010*790. (If you would like to use this as a background you can make it bigger).

Leave the background white for now as we will be working in various stages of black and white before adding color.

Our Tree

First start by creating a new group and naming it “Tree”. Create a new layer in photoshop and grab your Custom Shape Tool. Choose the group “Shapes” and grab the full black triangle tool.

Now drag out a triangle that is 325*185 anywhere on the document for now. (make sure your foreground is set to black).

Now duplicate your shape layer and drag your new shape under your first triangle. Hit CTRL+T (CMD+T on Mac) and drag out a triangle to be 475*200. Now drag it down so you get a layer effect like this:

Repeat the process again but this time make your triangle 600*242 and arrange it to give it the final step of our tree. Like this:

Now select all the shape layers and choose “Merge Layers” from your menu. Now you have just one layer that you can name “tree body”.

Time to start on our tree base. This will be a simple rectangle, using the rectangle tool. Drag out your rectangle to be 105*130. Now bring that layer under the other layers and line it up so it is flush with the bottom of our tree.

Now our tree looks good but it is pretty boring right? Let’s go ahead and add a simple layer style to our Tree Body layer.

Now go to your Tree Base layer (our tree trunk) and add this layer style to it:

Now create a new layer and grab your rectangular marquee tool and make a selection of half our document, right down the center of our tree.

Fill this layer with White so that you will only see half the tree now. Use CTRL+Thumbnail to select both our TreeBody and our TreeBase layers (You will have to hold down the Shift key to select both thumbnails).

Now right click, choose select inverse, and hit the delete key. Change the layer mode to Soft Light and the Opacity to 20% so you have this:

Alright, now duplicate your Tree Group and rename it to Tree Small. Hit CTRL+T and choose to shrink it to 53% by 66%.

Now duplicate our original tree group again and rename this one to Tree_Skinny. Hit CTRL+T and choose to shrink its Width to 65% leaving the height the same.

You should have three trees that look similar to this:

Alright hide all three groups. It is time to get started on our hillside.

THE HILLSIDE

Grab your Ellipse Tool, make sure your foreground is black. Drag out three circles and make them look like hills.

I wanted a little hill to be in the background but the rest to just appear a little distorted. Go ahead and select all three shape layers now and hit “Merge Layers”. Rename this layer “Hillside”.

Drag your hillside layer beneath all three tree groups and apply the following layer styles:

The Road

That’s our hillside. Now grab your rectangle tool, making sure you have shape tools selected, and drag out a rectangle that is xx wide and a little taller than the hillside. You can use white or black for the color as we will be applying styles later on.

Alright, now grab your Add Anchor Point tool and place an anchor point on the middle left of our rectangle.

Grab the top point of your anchor point and give it a slight curve.

Repeat the same process for the right side of the rectangle.

Now hit CTRL+T again and choose Prespective for the transformation. Drag down the top left corner of the document to give the road the appearance of going away.

Rasterize your shape layer. Now use CTRL+Thumbnail to select the thumbnail of our hillside. Right click, select inverse, and hit delete so your road stops at the hillside.

Now apply the following layer styles:

The Mountain

Alright, now it is time to work on our mountain. Grab your triangle tool again and draw out a triangle 570*525. Make sure your foreground is black. Now drag your new shape below our Hillside and road layers. Center it on your hillside and make it so the tip is just under the top of our document.

Now apply the following color overlay

Alright, now grab your rectangle tool again and draw a white rectangle the covers about a quarter of the mountain.

Now zoom in on your document because we will need to be very precise here. Grab your anchor point tool and place four anchor points at these areas.

Now grab your convert anchor point tool and click on the two middle anchor points we placed. Grab your anchor point tool again and drag one up and one down so you have this

Now rasterize your layer and use CTRL+Thumbnail of your mountain layer. Right click and choose select inverse and hit delete.

This will bring it about 1px inside our mountain so you will be able to see a tiny blue line, this is good. Go to your background layer and fill it with #01ddc6 so you have this.

The Clouds

Alright, I will be walking you through the process to create one cloud. I have four clouds on my document, using the same process, but you can have as many as you choose.

Hit the “D” on your keypad to revert to your original colors and switch it so white is your foreground. Grab your ellipse tool and draw out an oval.

Now draw out three smaller ovals and place them over our first to make a cloud shape. Play around with them until you have a nice shape that you are happy with.

Repeat the process a few more times, adding more or less circles so you have a few different looking clouds. This is what I have:

The Trees

Alright, we are ready for our trees now. This phase is entirely up to you how you want to create your forest of trees. Do you want a lot of trees? A few trees? Unhide your tree layers, making sure they are your top layers, and place them through your document. You will need to resize them to make them look good.

Remember that we want to give the appearance of the mountain being far away so the trees should get smaller the closer they get to the mountain.

This is what we have:

Finalizing

 

Now you are finished! There is so much that you can do with this scene it is amazing. A thinner forest, make it seasonal, turn it into a calendar for a month, anything you can think of.

Here are a few variations that I have done:

Download The PSD File

Alright, now our document is almost finished, but I feel like our mountain needs just a little bit more. Grab your rectangle marquee tool and drag out a selection that is half of our mountain, horizantally. Fill it with black. Use CTRL+thumbnail and choose the mountain and hillside, choose select inverse, and hit delete.

Today’s tutorial is brought to you by the motion picture (fancy name for movie) Desipicable Me.  This tutorial was inspired by my 6 month old son who can, believe it or not, sit through the entire movie at least twice a day without any form of unhappy faces or noises. He laughs at the movie (yes laughs), and is just awestruck by it. Since it is such a vital tool to getting through the work day (wonders of a freelancer) I wanted to dedicate a quick tutorial to the cute little guys. Enjoy!

As always this is what we will be creating:

Getting Started

Create a new document 900×900 and leave it as a transparent bg. Put your foreground color as yellow

The Body

Now draw out our rounded rectangle 345px wide and make it go below the document.

Now grab your Add Anchor Point Tool and put it in the center of our rounded rectangle.

Now grab your Delete Anchor Point tool and remove the anchor points to the left and right of the point we just added.

Grab your Add Anchor Point tool again and drag the anchor point you added upward to give us a nice, round top.

Now drag your guy down a little bit so he is not so close to the top. Apply the following styles to our guy:

The Eye and Goggle

Alright, let’s get started on the eye. Grab your ellipse tool. Draw out a new circle, filled with white, 175×175. Center it horizantally on our minion and 70px from the top of his head.

TIP: You can rasterize your layers because we are not trying to keep this layer vectorized.

Grab your ellipse tool again, this time with black selected, and draw out a circle that is 95×95. Center it, horizantally and vertically, with our white circle since this is the our pupil.

Now grab your rectangle tool, with white as your foreground, and draw out a small rectangle 20×23 tall. Hit CTRL+T to rotate the document. Hold down shift and rotate 3 times, moving your mouse to the right. Place the rectangle at the edge of our pupil.

Alright, our eye is finished but now we need to work on the goggle. Create a new layer.Grab your ellipse toll again and use #9f9f9f as your fill color. Draw out a circle that is 222×222. Center the circle horizantally and space it 45px from the top.

Now use our CTRL+thumbail of our white circle to make a selection and hit delete to make our grey selection the proper size we need it to be.

Apply the following layer styles:

Now to set up our goggle straps. Create a new layer, just above your main character layer.Grab your rectangle marquee tool and drag out a selection that is 380×85 and fill it with black. Center it horizantally on our eye piece, making it just a bit lower than exactly center.

Now we will give it the illusion of wrapping around in a minute but first we have to delete the excess. So hold your CTRL key again and this time click the thumbnail of your character layer. Don’t hit delete yet, go to select—modify—expand and choose 1px for the space. Now you can right click and choose select inverse and hit delete.

Now apply the following layer styles to give it the wrap around appearance.

The Pants / Coveralls

Alright, we will be doing his pants now. Grab your rectangle tool again and draw out a rectangle that is 385px(w) by 75px(h). Place it directly at the bottom of our document. Do Not Rasterize Yet

Grab your Add Anchor Point tool and place an anchor in the center of your rectangle. Drag it down to give it a nice curve.

Now go ahead and rasterize your layer. Hit CTRL+the thumbnail of our main character, select inverse, and hit delete.

Now make a selection like this:

And hit the delete key to remove the selection.

Repeat for the other side:

TIP: I created a new layer and filled it with white for the other side. That way the selections were the same.

Now add the following layer styles:

Simple Arms

Now grab your rectangle marquee tool and draw out a rectangle that is 60px(w) by 130px(h). Create a new layer and fill your selection with #e6d522.

Drag your layer to be just above our main character layer. Now hit CTRL+T to free transform. Move your rectangle to the bottom of your document and rotate it until it looks like a good arm.

Now duplicate that layer, flip horizantal, and place it on the other side.

The Mouth / Smile

Now, for his mouth. You can use anything you want for the mouth, but we will be walking you through the process of creating a simle smiling mouth.

Alright, grab your rectangle tool again and draw out a rectangle that is 165px(w) by 45px(h). Center it horizantally with your goggle.

Now zoom in on your document and grab your Add Anchor Point tool. Place an anchor point in the middle of your top line and drag it down to make a smile shape.

Hold down the shift key and add another anchor point below our first one. Get it pretty close to the exact same area and holding the shift key will make it exact for you.

Before you move that one down we need to delete our left and right bottom anchor points. To do this grab your delete anchor point tool and take out both of those anchor points. This will automatically make the angle of the smile the same.

Now you just need to drag the anchor point down to give our guy a wider smile.

Now change your fill color of the shape to black and then rasterize your layer.

Alright, we are going to be creating the tongue again. Grab your eclipse tool and draw out a shape like this. The fill color is #f6abab.

Hit CTRL+click the thumbnail of our mouth layer. Choose select inverse and hit delete.

Now grab your rectangle marquee tool and create a selection like this:

Create a new layer above our tongue layer, and fill it with white.

Now, do the same CTRL+thumbnail trick that we did for our tongue to make the teeth.

Conclusion

There, you are done now! You can add some hair to him if you want, and you may want to use the burn tool to give him a little more of a rounded look, but this is our base character.

Added Styling

You can do quite a few more things with this simple guy to just by using the burn and dodge tools and a brush. This is my final character:

I do hope you have enjoyed the tutorial and as always would love any comments you guys have and to see your work.

Yep, another new tutorial author has joined the team here at HV-Designs and his first tutorial is awesome! Josh will be walking you through some simple Adobe Illustrator techniques on creating vector shapes and bringing them to photoshop and then applying some photoshop techniques to bring it all together. Let’s get started!

Getting Started

Quick video showing the sketch of our icon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7zpE4clH48

Now that we know about what we want to achieve, lets head over to Adobe Illustrator to get started. When designing an icon, its best to work in a vector based program to achieve the utmost in detail, and the ability to resize without quality loss.

Step 1:

Open a new document in illustrator, 600px wide by 800px high.

Step 2:

WIth your blank document open, choose a dark colored stroke. We will change this color later, but it ensures that we can easily see what we are working with while we are drawing the outline of our cup.

Step 3:

Choose the Ellipse tool (Shortcut: ‘L’), and draw an oval shape as shown. This will represent the bottom ellipse of the cup.

Step 4:

Create a new layer. I always feel separating pieces into layers makes life easier later. You can always merge layers if necessary.

We are going to create the outer edges of the cup.

Choose the Pen tool (Shortcut ‘P’), and stay with the dark stroke color, no fill color.

Choose a point at the top of the cup (it will be right under the lid), and select a second point toward the bottom of the cup. If you notice, we didn’t select a point that joins the line to the bottom Ellipse, this is because there is actually a small vertical line where the bottom of the cup has extra support for holding in drinks (I suppose), so then finish the line by connecting it to the bottom ellipse with a short vertical line.

Step 5:

Next, select the line we just drew in Step 4, copy it, and paste it on the same layer. Next, go to ‘Object –> Transform –> Reflect’, and choose ‘Vertical’. Now, move it into place on the opposite side of the cup.

Step 6:

Next we work on the lid. Make a new layer. Choose the Pen tool (‘P’), and select a point slightly beyond the left side of the cup. Choose a second point in line with the first on a horizontal plane, and slightly outside the right side of the cup. Set up guides if you must. Next, without letting go of the mouse button on your second point, drag your line to give it a very slight curve.

Step 7:

Now we will work on the contour of the outer edge of the lid. First, make a new layer in your layers palette. Next, With your pen tool selected (‘P’), draw the outer edge of the lid.

Step 8:

Next, select the outer edge of the lid that we just drew, and copy it, and paste in front (Command + F). Next, go to ‘Object –> Transform –> Reflect’, and choose ‘Vertical’. This gives us an identical replica of the lid edge. Now move it to its respective location.

Step 9:

Now, using the Pen tool (‘P’), connect the top of the lid, and upon choosing the second point, hold your click and drag to give the top of the lid a light upper curve.

Step 10:

Now that we have the outline complete, lets work on some shading. Since our cup is mainly white, lets set up a darker background so we can see what we are working with. Choose the Rectangle tool (‘M’). Also, choose a darker color (we are using Pink), and set the stroke to empty. Make a rectangle the size of the canvas. Next, cut the rectangle (Command + X), and paste in back (Command + B). With the rectangle selected, let’s lock the selection. Choose ‘Object –> Lock –> Selection (Command + 2). You’ll also want to make sure this is placed in the lowest, or first layer (most likely layer 1).

Step 11:

Next, we will change the fill color to white. Select all of your paths with the Selection Tool (‘V’). Just drag a square around the cup outline. This is why we locked the Pink layer. Then, in your tool palette, change the fill color to white. This probably will leave the center empty still. No problem. Go to to toolbar, and choose ‘Object –> Path –> Join’ (Command + J). This should give you something that looks much more like a coffee cup

Step 12 / 13:

Next, we shade. Make a new layer just above the Pink rectangle layer. Draw an ellipse with a fill of #777777 and no stroke. Make sure it is set behind the Cup.

Then, we will add a Gaussian blur to the shape. With the Ellipse selected, go to ‘Effect –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur’. Put in something like 45px, and hit ‘Ok’. Adjust as needed.

Step 14:

Next, selecting the Gradient mesh tool. It is so hard to explain how this tool works. Play around with it until you find a desired result. As you see in the image below, we went very light with the shading. Our next step is moving to Photoshop because personally, I find some shading techniques easier there.

Step 15:

Select your entire cup, shading included. Copy it. Open a new document in Photoshop. Paste it as a smart object. Hit enter.

Step 16:

Since it will paste as one layer, using the Elliptical Marquee tool (‘M’), make a short and wide selection to ‘cut’ the top off of the cup.

Cut the seleciton, and paste to a new layer. This allows us to overlap the ‘Lid’ ontop of the cup base. You’ll see why next.

Note: You may have to rasterize the layer in order to edit the ‘Smart Object’. This is ok, since the Icon is so large at this point, we won’t need to make it any larger.

Step 17:

Next, with the lid layer selected, Control-Click on the layer, and select blending options.

On the left tab, click ‘Drop Shadow’ and see the image below for the specific settings. Choose your own, or use the same as we did. Feel free to play around with the settings.

Step 18:

Now that we have our drop shadows down, lets work on shading the lid. On the tool bar, select the burn tool. This is a great way to add subtle shading. Make a new layer in the layers palette. Go to town with some subtle burning. Use a 75px soft edged brush.

Step 19:

Make a new layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool (‘M’), make multiple ellipse shapes to define the highlights. Too add to a selection, hold in the ‘Shift’ key while you make a new selection.

Fill this selection with a light color. Maybe a tad darker than white, with a yellowish tone. Try #f9faf9.

Step 20:

You’ll notice the highlight overlaps our lid. No problem. Take the lid layer, and duplicate it. Next, Control+Click to bring up the Blending Options. Go down to color overlay, and choose something, anything. White is fine. Make sure the drop shadow and any other options are turned off. Hit Ok.

Next, choose the ‘Magic Wand’ tool (‘W’), and select the white colored overlay. Next, go to the menu bar, and choose ‘Select –> Inverse’. Click ‘Delete’ on that layer. Overlap gone. Next, drop the opacity to your liking, as well as adding a slight Gaussian Blur.

Then, create a new layer in the utmost background, and fill it with a color a shade yellower than white.

Step 21:

Next, we’ll add some darker shading to show come curvature on the lid. You can achieve this in many ways, either the Pen tool, or make a selection and fill it, etc. I used a combination of both, along with the burn tool.

Step 22:

We can go in and do some cleaning up with the dodge, burn, and eraser tools. Play with opacity and shading to add the finishing touches. Its nice to add a highlight around some of the edges to help it roll into the shadows and give curvature to the edges.

If there are any areas where the drop shadow or shading went over the edges of the cup, feel free to duplicate a main layer (cup or lid), color overlay, select, select inverse, and delete.

Step 23:

Now its time to add some of the finishing touches. Lets add a logo.

Find or make one you’d like to use, and paste it in a new layer.

Now we have to add some contour to the mark. With the layer selected, go to ‘Filter –> Distort –> Spherize’. Tweak until correct.

Place where you think it looks best. To handle the overlap, turn off all layers but the ‘Cup’ layer. Select the negative space. Now select the ‘Mark or Logo’ layer, and delete the overlap. Take the opacity down a hair to inherit some of the shadow.

Step 24:

Next, create a rectangle using the ‘Rectangle Tool’ to represent the checkboxes. To do so, select an empty fill rectangle in the top tool bar, and give it a 1 point stroke in a dark color. Duplicate the rectangle layer until you have 4, space them accordingly, and merge all the layers together into 1.

Using the ‘Skew’ tool (‘Edit –> Transform –> Skew’), play with the checkboxes until you feel they look as if they are flowing with the curvature of the cup.

Move the checkboxes until you are satisfied with their placement.

Step 25:

Play around with the background, and voila. You have yourself a coffee cup icon, or a ‘Zohf-ee’ cup icon

Thanks for following this tutorial. Hopefully it was helpful.

 

Hey guys, I know its been awhile since we have released a new tutorial. That is partly my fault as I have been super busy lately but I did get an awesome freebie to release for your guys today. Thanks to our friend Dominic Wood we have this amazing Milk UI Kit for you to download. Several pieces of this UI Kit have been featured on the popular page of Dribbble, admired by other designers, so Dom and I decided we would release them to you guys. Anyway, feel free to download.

 

Download PSD FIle

 

 

 

 

Enjoy.

Today I am proud to bring you guys Pt. II of the HV-Tumblr Theme Series. This episode in the series is the PSD file for our last tutorial, but it also includes the layout for “Single Post Page” and the Modal Window for the images on single post page. If you are going to continue to follow the series be sure to download this PSD as we will begin coding up the HTML version of our pages in PT. III.

Download PSD FILE

 

 

 

Enjoy.

 

I know you guys have waited forever for this tutorial but it’s finally here. In today’s tutorial I will walk you through the first step of creating a Tumblr Theme, designing up the bad boy. Because I want you guys to grasp all the aspects of creating a Tumblr theme from scratch our theme will be using every available call for a Tumblr home page. This is Stage 1 of a 5 stage tutorial that will walk you through creating your custom Tumblr theme. So, let’s get started shall we?

As always, this is what we will be creating:

Resources

Francois One Font by Google Webfonts

Free Pretty Little Ribbon by Orman Clark

Superhug Landscape Stock Images

Music Album Cover by 365PSD

Ribbon Texture by Designmoo

Tweeties by Designmoo

Getting Started

Start out by creating a new document that is 1024px by 2110px and fill it with #cecece.

Please note that I will be zoomed in at 100% for most of the duel so we will not be seeing the full length of the document.

Alright, now grab your rectangular marquee tool and drag out a rectangle that is 1024px by 75px. Create a new layer and fill it with #222333.

Alright, now be sure to open up the ribbon texture that we downloaded earlier from Designmoo. Now make a new selection that is 1024px by 15px and line that selection up with the bottom of the block we just created. Create a new layer and fill it with black. We will now lowere our fill to 0% so that nothing is showing up on your layer.

For the next step open up your blending options and choose pattern overlay. Choose the pattern that you downloaded earlier and leave all the values at their default.

Now, when you fill the pattern it will look a little bit funny. You simply need to move the pattern around so that it looks the way it should. Like this:

Awesome, now we just need to give it some color. What you are going to do is right click your Layer 2 and choose “Convert to Smart Object” and then right click again and choose “Rasterize Layer”. Awesome, now we can add a blending option to our layer.

We are going to add a color overlay with the exact same #222333 color that we used earlier. You should now have a flowing ribbon style for your header and its looking pretty spiffy.

Now the next step is to right click your Layer 2 again and choose “Merge Layer Down”. This will merge the two layers, obviously, but it will also allow us to add a subtle bit of noise to both layers and let it flow smoothly.

To add noise go to Filter–Noise–Add Noise and choose .58%, Gaussian, and Monochromatic for your settings.

Awesome, now we have the background for our header. Sexy right? Well let’s get moving then. Go ahead and grab your text tool and choose the Francois One font that we downloaded earlier. Set your font size to 32pt and have the color be #a2d9ff.

Now type out whatever you want for your header. I am going to be using HV-Designs for my header text. Space your header text 55px from the left of your document and 28px from the top of your document.

Alright, now that’s all that we are going to do because other than @font-face I want this tutorial to create a design that is easily rendered in all browsers but if you wanted to add a shadow to the text or other features you are more than welcome to.

And now to add our final piece to the header. Tumblr has an awesome feature that allows someone to ask you questions and you can respond to them so I figured we would include that in this tutorial, and what better way to include it than with an awesome freebie? Open up the ribbon that we downloaded earlier from Orman Clark. Now change the text on it to whatever you want. I removed both stars and simply added a question mark instead.

Once you have that finished you can drag over the whole ribbon group from the PSD file to our document. Now hit CTRL+T and drag your ribbon layers down to be 45px by 70px. A quick but important note, the transform box will not only include the ribbon and that is fine, that is what my scale is set to as well.

Now bring the ribbon over and place it on your document. The ribbon is a little bit too tall for what we are after so you will want to drag the excess of the screen until you have a nice, even spacing between the question mark. It is also spaced 55px from the right of our document.

And there you go. The ribbon comes with a nice shadow already attached to it, which fits perfectly in our design already so we don’t need to make any changes.

Now, you should have this for your header so far:

and this is what your document will look like at full size:

Pretty boring so far at full size but you are now done with your Header and its time to move on to making our first post!

Post Area

Alright, now let’s get started creating our post area. The first thing that we have to do is set up a few rulers. You will want to set up your first ruler at the 40 mark and our second at the 110 mark.

We are going to be using this 70px width of rulers we just set up for our post ribbons. Now, let’s get started on our first ribbon. Set up another ribbon at 135 and another at 170. The 35px height that we just set up will be the height for our ribbon.

Now, grab your rectangle shape tool and set your foreground to #222333. Drag out a rectangle that fits in between the rulers we just set up.

Now grab your pen tool and choose the Add Anchor Point tool, within the pen tool. Add an anchor point in the exact middle of our rectangle. Don’t do anything with it yet but add the anchor point for right now.

Now, in your pen tool area select the convert anchor point tool. Go ahead and click on anchor point we just created and convert it. Now grab your add anchor point tool again and move that anchor point back 12 pixels.

Now, grab a web safe font that you want to use. We are using Oswald, which can be found on Google Webfonts. Set your color to #a2d9ff and user 14pt as the size. Type out a filler date and center it both vertically and horizantally on your menu.

Great! Now go ahead and duplicate your two layers and space it 20px from the bottom of your first ribbon. Now change the text to say xx Notes and change the color to white and size to 11px.

Depending on how you went about changing things you may have to recenter the text, but that’s not very hard so I will leave that up to you guys.

Anyway, our post ribbons are done now and we need to move on to creating our main conent area. Grab your rectangle tool again and change your foreground to white. Drag out a rectangle that is 510px wide by 415px tall and line it up with the very end of our ribbons.

Now move your white box up 30px and to the right one pixel. Now apply a 1px stroke to the box and use the color #c0c0c0. Now everything should line up quite nicely.

Now open up whatever stock image that you chose from Superhug and crop/scale the image down to 480px wide by 315px tall and give it a 1px inner stroke, black. Now drag over your image and space it 15px from the left and 15px from the top, not including your stroke, of your white box.

Now grab your text tool again and choose standard black for your foreground color. Choose whichever web safe font that you want, I am going to be using Verdana, at 14pt. Drage out a text area that is 480px wide by however tall you want to fit in, I am using 40px tall. Since this is a photo post most of the captions are not very long so we are typing out just a quick two sentences.

We want to make sure we cover our basis so we are going to add a link state in the text as well. Just select whatever text you want to use and change the color to #de5400.

Now space it 15px from the bottom of your image and 15px from the left of your content area.

Alright, now time for our tag icon. You could just use a tag icon from one of the millions of icon sets, but I wanted to create our own little icon for this because its pretty easy. Grab your rectangle tool and change your foreground color to #c0c0c0. Drag out a rectangle that is 20px wide and 15px tall. Space it wherever right now because we will be moving it after we are finished.

Now grab your add anchor point tool again and add two points to the rectangle. The top point will be 5px from the top and the bottom 5px from the bottom.

Now convert those points with the convert anchor point tool and then drag them up 5 pixels. This gives us that nice tag icon.

Now go ahead and rasterize your layer as we don’t need this icon to be vector. Grab your ellipse marquee tool and create a perfect 3px circle and space it 2px from the left end of our tab. Hit delete to remove the selection and then you have your tab.

Now hit CTRL+T to enter Free Transform mode and rotate your tag three times while holding the shift key to give it a nice angle.

Now grab your text tool again and choose #c0c0c0 for your color. I am again using verdana at 12pt for the tags. Type out whatever tags that you want to use and then space it 5px from the bottom and 15px from the right.

And there we go, that’s our post area. Now to create more posts you can just duplicate your layers, you may want to group them first, and then resize the post content area to fit whatever you need. The colors are all used the same, so by the preview you can see what we are using.

The font sizes are as follows:

Quote: 18pt Bold

Quote Source: 18pt Bold (same color as ribbon)

Text Header: 30pt Bold

Link: 18pt Bold

Link Source: 16pt

Video Header: 24pt Bold

To achieve the subtle background for the quote just type out a quote and give it a huge size and lower the opacity. Really, that’s all you do to get that super awesome background.

About Me Area

Sweet! Now let’s move on to our sidebar. We need to set up our sidebar spacer really quick. Grab your line tool and change your foreground color to #c0c0c0. Set your size to 1px and drag out a line that is 1950px tall. Space it 35px from the right side of your post area and 25px from the bottom of your header.

Now grab your rectangle marquee tool and drag out a perfect square that is 85px. Create a new layer and fill your selection with #212232. Move your layer over so it is space 25px from your spacer.

Now give it a nice 5px inner stroke with the color #FFFFFF. Yea, it’s white.

Now grab your text tool and choose Francois One, 24pt, and use #212232 for the color. Type out your name and space it 3px from the top of your photo and 25px from the left of your photo.

Now, grab your text tool again and choose Verdana for your font, 12pt for your size, and #1da3ff for your color. Type out your description of yourself. Line it up with your name and space it 10px from the bottom of your name.

Sweet, now open up those awesome icons by Rogie that we grabbed earlier and choose the four icons that you want to use. We will be using the facebook, gowalla, twitter, and wordpress icons, all resized to 20px by 20px. You will want to space your icons 5px from each other, 15px from the bottom of your description, and center them on your description.

Now grab your ecpliticle marquee tool and drag out a perfect circle that is 2px with #b3b3b3 for your color. Duplicate your layer 35 times and space them 5px between each other to create a nice spacer. Space it 35px from the bottom of your icons.

This is what you should have so far:

Links Area

Now grab your text tool and choose #b5b5b5, Francois One for your font, and 18pt as your size. Type out whatever you want for your “links” and center it on your spacer, and 15px from the bottom of your spacer.

Now duplicate your spacer layer and space it 15px from the bottom of your link. Repeat the step as many times as you want for however many pages you want to show in your PSD file.

Search Area

Now, create a new layer. Grab your rectangle marquee tool and drag out a new rectangle that is 285px by 45px and fill it with #afafaf. Space it 15px from the bottom of your spacer and if everything was done right it should be the same length as your spacer and line right up. Duplicate your spacer layer and space it 15px from the bottom of the search bar you just created. For the final touch grab your favorite Magnifying Glass icon, change its color to #9a9999.

Twitter Area

Now, we are going to follow the same principle for our twitter area. Grab your favorite icon for twitter and drag it over. Then set up your tweet header, and tweet area. Our font for the header is Francois One, #1da3ff, 22pt and is a standard Verdana, Black, 12pt for the actual twitter area. The only differences in the spacing is we are using 10px spacing between each of our tweets instead of 15 so it’s not too spread out.

Following Area

Now, for the final piece of the puzzle. Grab your type tool again and use Francois One for the font, #222333 for the color and 24pt for the size. Type out “I’m Following These Guys” and line it up with your spacer and 15px from the bottom of your last spacer.

Grab your rectangle marquee tool again and drag out a perfect square, by holding the SHIFT key, that is 35px by 35px. Create a new layer and fill it with #222333. Now give your layer a 3px white inner stroke to finish it off. Space your layer 15px from your header and line it up on the left with your header. Now duplicate your layer so you have two rows of eight (8), spaced 8px from each other.

And that is all you need to do. To finish off your theme duplicate your top layer, flip it horizantally, and move it to the bottom. You may want to make it a little bit smaller, but the exact size is up to your preference.

Conclusion

As alwaysI hope that you enjoyed the first part of this tutorial. In Part II we will be designing the actual pages themselves before moving on to converting the theme to HTML, and then of course to Tumblr! I would love to see what you guys come up with for the tutorial. At the end of the series you will be able to purchase the entire tutorial series source files from the HV-Shop.

Round emblem styled logo’s seem to be cropping up all over the place at the moment, blogs, magazines, design communities such as Forrst, just to name a few. The reason why? Stating the obvious you might say but they look feakin’ sweet!

So, I thought to myself, why not create my own little emblem logo with my own style in there and share it with you guys here at HV-Designs. Here’s a look at the finished article that we will have achieved by the end of this tutorial.

About the pretty background

I’m not going to get too deep into creating the background here with you guys as I want to focus more on creating the logo itself. What I will tell you is, the colour used is that of #00b8d4 which is a nice shade of blue, with and overlayed diagonal patten to give us those nice stripes.

Getting your hands dirty

With that done and said, let’s make a start. Create a new document around 500px by 500px and using your marquee tool make a circle roughly in the center of the page and fill with a shade of grey, I’ve used #373737.

Look good eh? Well not really, no. Let’s give the circle a border of 5px, positioned inside the circle with the colour #292929.

Create a new pattern

We’ll need to create a new pattern to use as the background of our emblem, so go ahead and create a new document at 10px by 10px. Using you pencil tool set at 1px, draw a nice square pattern like so.

Once you have something that looks like this, we need to define this as a new pattern. So locate the toolbar and click “Edit” > “Define pattern…” and name your new pattern, square will do!

If we now go back to our document which contains the emblem logo, hold crtl & click the circle layer to highlight the contents of the layer. With the circle outlined create a new layer and locate the toolbar again and click “Edit” > “Fill..” and fill with your new pattern. Now set the opacity of the patterned layer to 25% and hold ctrl + E to merge with the  emblem layer bellow.

Playing with fonts

For the “Lee Grant” part of the emblem I’ve used a sweet, bold font named Bebas Neue. Using this font, set the size to 40px and write something like your name. We’ll give this a drop shadow to give the text some depth.

Create a new layer named “line” and using the rectangular marquee tool draw a 1px high line horizontally across the logo, making sure its the same with as your text. Your logo should now look something like this.

Another sweet font I use now and then is Caviar Dreams which fits well with the style of this logo. Go ahead and grab this font, once installed, use this font and write  tagline like “web designer” at the size of 19.3px and coloured white (#ffffff).

Whoo, stars!

Let’s temporarily set our logo layers to invisible so all we have is our background, select the pen tool and draw yourself a star shape like so. change your foreground colour to white and right click the star and fill selecting “Fill path”, fill the path with your foreground colour.

All we need to do now is resize the star by clicking “Edit” > “Free transform..”, and duplicating the layer 3 times, positioning 2 stars at the top and 2 stars at the bottom.

A little shadow

It’s starting to look pretty neat now, but without a shadows it’s resembling a sticker more than a logo. Let’s create a new layer named shadow and add a shadow by creating an oval shape using the rounded marquee tool, then selecting “Filter” > “Blur” > “Gaussian blur” and choose about a 5px radius.

The finale!

Look’s like you’ve made it through to the over side and hopefully you learned a thing or two. This is just my spin on creating an emblem logo, there are plenty of styles and different ways to do this, which I would love to see. So if you’ve got a cool looking emblem you’ve created or adjusted from this tutorial go ahead and post them up in the comments section.

Happy photoshopping!

 

 Download Source

 

 

 

Enjoy.

Today we have the pleasure of presenting our readers a freebie from the very talented Hillary Hopper, exclusive to HV-Designs. This log in form is a fully layered PSD with easily customizable options. Today’s freebie is free to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. So, what are you waiting for download the freebie already!

Download PSD FILE

 

 

Bub Bye

 

Today we are going to be using basic layer styling and some basic tools in Photoshop to create the open version of our Nintendo DS. In this tutorial you will learn to create the open view of a DS from scratch, using nothing but basic tools and filters. Now, let’s get started. As always this is what we will be creating:

Alright, to start out creating the open version of our Nintendo DS you will need to create a new document that is 1200px by 1100px and fill it with white.

Now grab your rounded rectangle tool and set the radius to 15px and choose #232323 for your foreground color. Drag out a rectangle that is 530px (w) by 260px (h).

-insert image-

NOTE: These are the same settings that we used for our closed version of the first Nintendo DS tutorial. We will be using a lot of the settings from the first tutorial so if you haven’t followed it you should.

Now apply the following settings:

You should have something like this:

Grab your rectangle marquee tool and drag out a rectangle that is 250px by 185px. Create a new layer and fill it with white. Now center your rectangle horizantally on your rounded rectangle and space it 25px from the bottom of your rectangle.

You should have something like this:

Now to finish it off we need to apply a few layer styles.

Awesome! Now we are ready to move forward to adding our joystick. Our joystick is going to be a mixture of simple elements and shapes, with a few layer styles added in for depth.

Grab your rectangle marquee tool and create a selection that is 28px (w) by 74px (h). Create a new layer and fill it with straight black. Now duplicate your layer and enter free transform mode (Ctrl+T) and rotate the rectangle to be horizantal instead of vertical. The two shapes should create a cross for our joystick and be spaced 40px from our screen. Like this:

Now apply the following Bevel and Emboss Layer style to give it some depth.

Alright, time for a little more depth. Grab your ecliptical marquee tool and create a perfect 25px circle in the center of your joystick and create a new layer. Fill it with #232323.

Alright, now lower your layer opacity to 40% and apply the following layer styles:

For the final part of joystick we are going to be using our line tool, with 2px for the size. Set your foreground color to #e5e5e5 and draw out a 15px tall line, four times. The lines need to be placed at the beginning of our circle we just drew on each of our four sides.

Really quick we need to set up a ruler for the next part. Drag your ruler down to be in line with the top of your joystick. If your rulers aren’t activated just hit Ctrl+R and drag down a ruler.

Sweet! Now we need to start on our buttons. Grab your ecliptical marquee tool and drag out a perfect 28px circle. Create a new layer and fill your selection with black. Space your icon 60px from our screen (not including the stroke) and the top lined up with our ruler.

Now apply the following layer style:

Now, grab your text tool and choose whatever font you want, I am using Cabin by Google Fonts. Type out x, lowercase, with the color set to #eeeeee. Center it on your button so you have this-

Quickly we need to set up some rulers for our button. Just set up three more rulers that end at each side of our button so the rulers create a square around our button. Like this:

Now duplicate your layers and move them down and to the left. The second button should have the top line up with our x button bottom ruler and overlap 3px from our x button left ruler.

Now duplicate your layers two more times and line them up the same. Be sure to change the text on the buttons to be BA and Y. You should have this:

Alright, create a new layer and grab your ecliptical marquee tool again and create a perfect 10px tool and fill your selection with black.

Space your layer in line with the stroke on our screen and 25px from the bottom of our screen. Now apply the following layer styles:

With your gradient overlay drag it up a little bit to give it an easy, simple lighting effect. Now you should have a super awesome start button.

Now grab your text tool again, using the same font, but go all caps this time and type out START, with the same #eeeeee color we used before. Give it a nice 2px spacing from your button.

Duplicate your layers and move them down 5px. Change your text to select and the bottom of our layer is almost complete.

For the final piece to the top of our icon you need to open up the first PSD of your Nintendo DS from tutorial one and drag over our “top bar”, which is the bar containing the lights and hinges.

Place the top bar in line with our rectangle so that you have a nice bottom like this:

Create a new layer and draw out a rectangle that is 430px by 10px tall, filled with black, and space it at the top of our hinge bar, in between our first and last hinge line.

The top have is super easy. Duplicate your starting layer and the screen layer only and move them up until it is inline with the spacer layer we just created. Take off the inner glow of our main layer and move the screen up to be centered.

Now, duplicate your main layer again and use CTRL+T. Change your width and height to 95% and complete the transformation. Center it in your outer layer, if its not already, and apply the following layer style.

Create a new layer and create a perfect 10px circle and fill it with black. Now apply the following layer style to it-

NOTE: I have applied a simple pattern overlay to the speakers as well but it is not a main piece of the tutorial because most of the time this DS will be shrunk down too low to see the textures.

Duplicate your layer to make a set of speakers, three on top and three on bottom, with even spacing. Center it on the left side of your screen. Duplicate the layers and center it again on the right side and you are finished with your DS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With our last two giveaways being about business cards I figured it was time to give you guys a tutorial for designing a business card. Today we are proud to bring you an awesome business card design tutorial that, when you are finished, will be 100% print ready. The techniques and styles displayed in this tutorial can be adjusted to fit different colors and textures with little effort. Well, I think it’s about time to let Eric walk you through how to create these amazing business cards.

Getting Started

Hello! Welcome. I’m not one for intros, so let’s get started.

We’re going to be creating a simple business card today, using mainly a sweet pattern and the Museo Slab font (free) (I’m using the Square Serif font, but both are quite similar, so it shouldn’t make too much of a difference).

Open a new document in Photoshop with the dimensions of a business card, namely 88mm by 55mm and the resolution should be 300 pixels per inch (as you might want to print this, you better have a high resolution, otherwise the quality of the printed card won’t be very good). Set the color mode to CMYK (the RGB (red, green, blue) color mode is usually used for web, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key black) is used for print). Press OK.

Using the rectangular marquee tool (M), select an area of 300px by 300px (select Fixed Size in the style dropdown located in the menu bar). Fill it with black (or any color, it doesn’t matter right now) by pressing CMD (or CTRL) + Backspace.

Select the rectangle with the move tool (V) and press Edit – Transform – Rotate. In the input box that appears above (the one with the angle beside it) enter 45°, thus rotating the square by 45 degrees. Now it should look like a diamond.

Align the diamond to the top left corner of your canvas. In Photoshop CS5 it aligns automatically (snaps to the grid), otherwise you can add two guides and align the diamond with their help. Set the diamond’s opacity to 40% or lower, thus simplifying  the following steps.

Duplicate the shape (CMD or CTRL + ALT + right arrow key) horizontally. Align the center of the duplicated shape with the right edge of the original. Do this multiple times, until you’ve filled up the entire document (horizontally). Select the layers (not the background layer) and group them, I’ve called the group first.

Duplicate the entire first group (CMD or CTRL + ALT + down arrow key) and move it downwards. Move it to the right by a bit, make sure both layers are centered (see image).

Duplicate the second layer, and move it upwards by a bit.

Now. Add a color overlay to all the textures, the pattern effect will be arise thanks to the opacity of only 40%, meaning multiple layers will be darker, spaces with only one layer will be lighter. Double click on one of the layers, the layer styles panel will pop up. Select color overlay and choose any color you like. Although my favorite color is blue, I’ll be going with a darker brown (#807e69) that goes well with the background we’ll be creating in a moment.

If you like the pattern we made, and don’t want to make any further changes, you can combine all shapes to one layer by pressing CMD (or CTRL) + E. Right click the layer, and select convert to smart object. Then rasterize the layer by right clicking and selecting rasterize. Select Filter – Noise – Add Noise to add a light noise overlay. The noise amount should be between 2% and 4%, I choose 3%.

Double click the background layer and press enter, thus making it editable. Double click again, this time bringing up the layer style panel. Add a color overlay of #fffef5 and confirm. Again, right click the layer, and select convert to smart object. Then rasterize the layer by right clicking and selecting rasterize. As before, add a noise overlay of 1%.

Now select the type tool (T). Enter some details you’d like to appear on your business card, I for example list my name, twitter handle and company website. Use Museo Slab as your typeface. Depending on if you’re using Museo Slab or Square Serif as font, the sizes will vary. I’ve chosen to change the font weight of my name to bold the size to 12pt, and for the other information the font size is two pt smaller, 10pt.

Place your information to the right and align the text to the right. Make sure you leave some white space at the bottom and the right, this is the “bleed area”. Set the text color to #5d5a4e, a dark brown.

Finally add a light drop shadow to the text.

Conclusion

 

Download PSD FILE

Great job! You’ve completed the tutorial successfully! With these techniques, you can now create similar cards, just play around with different shapes, textures and colors! See what I did below, using the same technique, in under 10 minutes! Try it yourself, and add your results to the comment section below!

Today we are going to be using basic layer styling and some basic tools in Photoshop to create a gorgeous Nintendo DS Pt. 1. In this tutorial you will learn to create the top view of a DS from scratch, using nothing but basic tools and filters. Be sure to follow this tutorial and save your document as Pt II will walk you through the process of creating the opened DS style. Now, let’s get started.As always this is what we will be creating:

Let’s Get Started

Create a new document 600px by 350px and fill it with white. Now, change your foreground color to #9a0000 and grab your rounded rectangle tool. Set your radius to 15px and drag out a rectangle that is 530px (w) by 260px (h).

Now, open up the layer styles for our Shape and apply the following layer styles.

The Top Bar and Hinges

Sweet! It’s time to move on to creating our top bar. This gets a little intense so pay pretty close attention. The first thing that you want to do is to zoom in on your document to 189%. Now you will be able to make a selection that is 40px tall on your shape.

Right click and choose “Layer via Cut”. Now right click your layer you just created and choose “Clear Layer Styles”.

Alright, now make sure the layer we just created is on top and use your down arrow key and click on it eight times. This will move it down 8px and cover up the top part of our bevel for the main DS part.

Ok, now we can go back to “Actual Pixels” size and work on our top black bar. What you are going to want to do, to keep organized, is create a new group and name it Black Bar. Put your layer we were just working on in that group.

Now, grab your paint bucket fill tool and fill it with black. I know it looks like crap, but don’t worry about it. We will get it fixed in the next few steps.

Hide the layer you just filled and grab your rounded rectangle tool again. Keep the radius the same but drag out a rectangle that is 530px (w) by 30px (h).You will want to line it up with the edges and with the very top of the DS.

Now apply the following layer style. With the Gradient Overlay you will want to drag up the gradient a little bit to give it a better look.

Now unhide your black layer. It looks a little funny but we can take care of that right now. Make a selection like below and hit your delete key.

-insert key-

Great! We are ready to move on to creating the distinction between the buttons and the main part of the hinge. What you will need to do is grab your rectangle marquee tool and make a selection that is 425px by 45px, like below.

Create a new layer and fill your selection with #2c2c2c. Now, click the thumbnail of our rounded rectangle layer. This will create a selection of the rectangle, now right click and choose select inverse and hit the delete key.

Now, apply the following layer style.

Hinges

It is looking good, now we just have to add a few different things to spice it up. Grab your line tool and choose 3px for the weight and black for the color. Draw our a line that is 40px tall and line it up with your button/hinge seperation and the top of our hinge.

Now, grab your line tool again but change the weight to 2px. Drag out another line that is 40px tall and space it 5px from our other line. This will give the hinge effect.

Now, duplicate your layers, flip them horizantally, and move them to the right hand side of our DS. This will give our second hinge.

Now to add our bottom part to our main hinge area. Grab your rectangle marquee tool again and this time make a selection that goes from the end of our left button to the end of our right button and is as tall as the black space.

Create a new layer and fill it with #222222. Now, apply the following layer style:

Power Buttons

We are looking good so far. It’s time to add our power and charge buttons. Grab your line tool again, with 3px set as your width. For our first “Charge” button we are going to use #a20000. Drag out a line that is 30px tall and space it 35px from the end of our right side button. It should stop at the end of our button.

Now apply the following layer styles:

Duplicate your layer and move it over to the right 10px. Change the color to #58a831 and apply the following layer styles.

You should have this:

Now you’re top bar is finished! Its time to put the finishing touches on your DS top. Grab your rounded rectangle tool again and choose 10px for your radius. Use whatever you want as a fill color as we will take care of styling in the next step. Drag out a rectangle that is 70px by 45px.

Now, lower your fill to 0% and apply the following layer styles.

Duplicate your layer and move it down so it is 15px from the bottom of your first “rectangle”. Now center them both on your DS and you are all finished.

Lighting Effect

For the final touches we have to work on some lighting effects. Create a new layer above everything and make a selection that is 555px by 5px and fill it with white. It should be at the very bottom of your hinge.

Now go to filter–blur–gaussian blur and choose 7.5px for your radius. Be sure that your selection outline is not on the screen anymore of the blur won’t work right.

Now, delete all the white that mades its way onto the hinge so its only on your top layer and lower the opacity to 55%.

And now you are completely finished. If you want to add some gloss go ahead, but I always add gloss depending on what I am using the project in.

Conclusion

I hope you guys enjoyed this quick tutorial and I am looking forward to releasing Part II showing you some more ways to use the basic tools in Photoshop to create wonderful effects. You can always check out a sneak peek of the tutorial final image on my Dribbble and be sure to follow us on Twitter, below, to get sneak peeks and exclusive content!

Today we are continuing our new series of User Interface Design. With the vastly rising popularity of mobile apps and mobile web design User Interface Design is now a huge area for Designers to become proficient in. In this quick tutorial I will be walking you through the process of creating a few simple form elements in Photoshop.

As always this is what we will be creating:

Resources

Pixel Patterns V2 by Rich Hemsley

50 Free Menu Android Icons by AndroidIcons

Cabin Font by Google Fonts

Gettings Started

Start out by creating a new document 600px by 600px, and fill it with #ffffed.

Now grab your rounded rectangle tool and choose 10px for your radius. Change your foreground color to #f5a0a0. Now drag out a rectangle that is 510px by 80px. For now go ahead and center the rectangle on the document.

Now, make sure you load the Pixel Patterns V2 that we downloaded in our resources earlier. Open your layer styles for your rounded rectangle and apply the following three layer styles.

The pattern I am using is Pixel 15

You should have a nice looking rounded rectangle that will be the background for your message box. As you can tell by color the first alert box we will be making is an error box.

The Icon

Alright, now open up the Android Icons freebie that we downloaded earlier. You can choose whichever icon that you want, but make sure to resize it to 42px tall. Drag it over to your document and space it 20px from the left and center it vertically on your alert box.

Go ahead now and set your layer style to Luminosity. This will give your default style an letterpress style look.

The icon I used was the stop icon resized to 42px.

The Typography

Alright, now choose your favorite font, <sarcasm>or a font that would look good if your favorite font is something incredibly weird that only works in one document </sarcasm>

Change your foreground color to #b56060. Type out your information into the text box. Depending on the size of information you want in there will depend on the font size. Since I am using dummy text, and I don’t put a lot in my alert boxes, my font size is going to be 30pt. Center your text vertically on your icon and space it 20px from the right of your icon.

And there you have it. Our first box is finished. To create the other two boxes you will just duplicate your layers, change the background color of the box, your inner glow, and your stroke, and then your icon. You can find the colors and icons we used below.

Yellow

Background: #f5f2a0

Inner GLow: #faf560

Stroke: #c9c431

Icons: light (resized to 42px tall)

Green

Background: #a0f5c0

Inner Glow: #69f999

Stroke: #08b248

Icons: tick (resized to 42px tall)

The Tooltip

Now let’s go ahead and create our tooltip style alert box. We will be using the same color scheme, same colors, and same layer styles as our larger alert boxes, but we will be changing the shape and icon size.

To get started grab your rounded rectangle tool again and keep the radius at 10px. Set your foreground color to #f5a0a0, just as before, and draw out a rectangle that is 175px by 100px.

Alright, time to add our bottom piece. To do this grab your Custom Shapes tool and make sure you have them set to symbols. Choose the rounded triangle tool (Sign 3). Keep your foreground color the same and draw out a triangle that is 30px by 15px. Set up your rectangle to come just at the bottom of your rounded rectangle, and horizantally centered.

Alright, now rasterize both layers. We are doing this because we need just one shape for our Layer Styles. To make one shape you can right click your triangle shape and choose Merge Down, or you can select both shapes and choose Merge Layers.

Now, go back to your first alert box and copy the layer styles. To do this right click your box background layer and choose copy layer styles. Now go to the rectangle we just designed and choose Paste Layer Styles.

Please note that this may not work with your version of Photoshop. If it does not you will have to manually apply the layer styles.

Alright, now grab your type tool again and make a text selection that is 155px by 55px. Use the same font, change the size to 23pt, and type out whatever text you want to use. center it horizantally and vertically on your rounded rectangle.

Now, grab the same icon you used for the first alert box, or a different one if you want to, and re-size it to 30px tall. Drag over the icon and place is on the bottom right corner 10px from the bottom and 10px from the right side.

Alright, now we are done with that box as well. You can create the other two boxes using the same layer styles from the other two boxes. Just copy and paste the layer styles.

Conclusion

Our document is finished! You can add a nice input box to see how it will look as well if you wanted to. These input boxes are pretty simple to design, good looking, and easy to turn into CSS3 and HTML5 forms *hint hint*.

Be sure to check it out on Dribbble!

For this tutorial we will be dipping into a little bit of icon design for iOS applications. The example icon for the tutorial’s sake will be an iPod Shuffle icon that would be used for a music related app or something of that sort. The tutorial should give some exampled of how to shade elements in an icon as well as bases that typical iOS icons would use.

The final product should look something like this:

Getting Started

The first thing to do is create a new document in photoshop that is 512px by 512px.

Base

Go to Layer>New Fill Layer>New Gradient Fill to create a new gradient fill layer. Set the settings to a 0 degree angle and a reflected style. At 0% make the color #cccccc and at 50% make a color with #e8e8e8. Then make a color at 75% with #a2a2a2 and at 90% make one with #e6e6e6. The last color will be at 100% with the color #7c7c7c. The final will look like this:

After this is complete, right click and duplicate the layer and then make a 512px by 512px rounded rectangle with a 90px border radius. Move the vector mask onto the duplicated Gradient Fill Layer. On this new layer, go into Blending Options and activate the Inner Shadow and Inner Glow options. In Inner Shadow, make the color white and the blending mode screen. Set the Opacity to 25% and the Distance to 4, Choke to 100, and Size to 0. In the Inner Glow option, set the color to white with the blending mode Overlay. Make the Opacity to around 40% with the Size at three and Choke at 100. Confused? Look at the image below to make sure you have everything right.

The Clickwheel

The ClickWheel shape can be created by making one large circle. A good way to do this is to set the shape mode to rounded rectangle and set the border radius to something high (like 300px). After this, set the shape mode to subtract and create a smaller circle inside that.

Go into blending options for our clickwheel shapes and set the drop shadow to a Multiply Black with 5px distance and 7px size

The next style is an White Screen Inner Shadow with 22px Distance and 35px Size.

Next is a 25% Opacity, Black Multiply Outer Glow. This style should have a 5px Size.

Next is a White Screen Inner Glow. The Opacity should be set to 10% with 100% Choke and 1px Size.

Next we will add a Bevel. Set it to a smooth Inner Bevel at 100% depth. The Size should be 0px and the White screen setting should be at 50% Opacity. The Multiply black setting should be at 0%.

Next is a subtle Gradient Overlay. All the settings should be the default except the colors. Set the colors to #141414 to #1e1e1e.

Now add a 1px Sized Stroke to add depth to the ClickWheel. Make sure the Fill type is Color with the color set to #191919.

White Controls

To add the next white control glyphs, some experience with the pen tool is required. The pen tool is one of the harder Photoshop tools to master which is why I suggest you use mine.

When the glyph vectors are complete, add the following layer styles.

Final Play/Pause Glyph

Again, the vector shape is supplied in the .PSD included with the tutorial. To give the glyphs an imprinted looks, the Inner Shadows and Drop Shadows can be used.

Now apply the following layer styles to the shape.

Adding Shading

To increase depth in the base, a simple gradient can be applied. The Opacity toggles in the Gradient Overlay blending option should be set to 25% (left) and 50% (right). The make the left color black and the right color white. At 50% location, add another white color fill.

Conclusion

Ipod Shuffle PSD Download

This tutorial should hopefully give you some insight as to how to go about starting icons, as well as some easy layer styles that can give imprint or bulging 3d feels to parts of icons. The tutorial should have also helped you see how many iOS application icon bases are made. Hope you learned something or brought something away from this tutorial!

 

 

Hey, guys. Today, we’re going to learn how to create a toggle (on/off) switch, and we’re gonna do it using vector shapes and layer styles. That’s right. For now, say goodbye to working in raster and open your eyes to the bright future of resolution independence. Kinda warm and glowy, isn’t it? Good stuff.

In order to create those switches in the image above, you’re gonna need to familiarize yourself with the Pen (P) and the Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle (U) tools. Plus, get ready to wield the Path Selection and Direct Selection (A) tools. Those will be your weapons in the steps ahead. Alright, to the Photoshops!

Step 1: Create the Background

We’ll start with a new canvas of, say, 200 x 200px. Right away, let’s create a new shape layer for the background by using the Rectangle tool. Press the keyboard shortcut U or select this icon from the toolbar:

In the Options bar, make sure the Rectangle is selected. Unfortunately, most of those tools (Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line, and Custom Shape) share that same keyboard shortcut: U.

If you enable Preferences > General > Options > Use Shift Key for Tool Switch, you can cycle through all those tools by holding Shift and pressing U. Nifty!

So make sure you’re using Rectangle, and drag a shape from the upper left corner of the canvas to the bottom right, covering the entire canvas. This is our background.

On that new layer in the Layers panel, double-click the colored square on the far left. Use the picker to choose a color for the background; I chose a dark grey (HSB: 0, 0, 15).

Let’s make a hole for the button to rest in. First, add a vertical and horizontal guide at the center of each axis. Since our switch is going to end up being 70 x 44px, set a vertical guide 35 pixels to the right and left of center, and two more guides 22 pixels above and below the horizontal center guide. Go to View > Rulers (Cmd+R) for help with lining everything up exactly.

Tip: Click and drag from the Ruler on either side to pull out a Guide. Hold Shift to force it to snap to the tickmarks along the ruler. If the increments between tickmarks are too big, zoom in for finer detail.

Draw a rounded rectangle with 1px radius inside these new guides. If you have View > Snap enabled as well as View > Snap To > Guides, the shape you draw should snap nicely into the corners of the guides you just set up. Handy!

Change this shape layer’s color (like you did above) to black and double-click an empty area on that layer in the Layers panel to open the Layer Styles dialog box. Click on Stroke at the bottom, and set it to 1px of black on the Outside. This will be the hole in which our switch toggles, and since we’ll building a lot of layers above it and the Backgound, let’s lock those layers so we don’t accidentally mess anything up.

Step 2: Make the Basic Switch Shapes

Using the guides, draw another 1px-radius rounded rectangle in the left half of the hole, but this time, let’s make it white, so it’s easier to see.

Now let’s zoom in for a bit, say, 300%. Switch to the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow cursor), and select the two rightmost points in the shape layer.

Delete those two points, then use the Pen tool to close the shape between the remaining two points. Hold down the Option key while you click on the two endpoints so they stay sharp corners without bezier handles.

Once the shape is closed again, move those points 1px right back to the center.

Tip: If you’re zoomed in, pressing the right arrow key to nudge the points won’t snap them to the next pixel. It will only move them a fraction of a pixel, depending on how far you’re zoomed in. For example, if you’re at 200%, each nudge will be one-half of a pixel. If you’re at 500%, one nudge equals one-fifth of a pixel. So check your zoom level and make sure to nudge the correct number of times. Otherwise, you’ll end up with shape perimeters lying between pixels, and that makes for fuzzy, anything-but-sharp lines. Bad bad bad.

So essentially, what we just did was create a rounded rectangle on the left half with sharp corners on the right. This is the flat, pushed down side of our toggle switch.

Copy that layer, flip it horizontally, then move it over to the right to mirror the first half. Try giving it a slightly darker grey color so you can tell it apart from the left side. This will be the angled, raised side of our toggle switch.

Select the two points in the top right of our angled side, and move them up 1 pixel. Same thing with the bottom two, but move them down.

Now move all four of those points left 3 pixels. This will give the illusion that the right side is flipped up in perspective. Also, let’s change the shape color to a light grey so we can tell it apart from the left side.

Next, we’ll use the pen tool (and some extra guides) to add a rhombus shape, which will imply depth on the side of our switch. Make sure this new shape layer is below the angled side and overlaps it. Also, let’s make its color darker than the right side to be more depth-y.

Alright, we’ve got our basic switch shape! Time to apply some layer styles.

Step 3: Light the Switch

We’ll start with the left side of the switch. Double-click its layer to bring up the Layer Styles dialog. Set the Gradient Overlay to a subtle dark grey ramp. I used (HSB: 0, 0, 40) to (HSB: 0, 0, 30).

Then set a similar style on the right side, but start slightly darker on top. I went from (HSB: 0, 0, 35) to (HSB: 0, 0, 30) for this.

In order to imply a rounded corner, we’ll try to create the illusion of a highlight on the top edge of the Depth shape. Set a Gradient Overlay with a light grey at the top (HSB: 0, 0, 40) that quickly fades to a darker grey (HSB: 0, 0, 25) and ends at an even darker grey (HSB: 0, 0, 18) at the bottom.

Use the Angle setting to tilt the gradient to 87 degrees so that it lines up with the angle at the top of the depth shape.

Step 4: Bevel the Edges

We want this switch to look three-dimensional, so let’s spice it up a bit and add a bevel around the edge. Start by duplicating the Flat Side layer.

Next, use the Rectangle tool in Subtraction mode to cut a hole out of the middle, leaving just a pixel width around the edge.

Change the existing Gradient Overlay to something more like this:

The HSB values for each of those points in the gradient from right to left (top to bottom) are: (0, 0, 50), (0, 0, 35), (0, 0, 30), (0, 0, 25), (0, 0, 20).

Next let’s do a similar thing to the right side, but this time, let’s cut out the hole from the middle using the Pen tool. Set up some guides for help snapping to the pixels.

Again, let’s change the gradient to some more like this:

Those HSB values are: (0, 0, 50), (0, 0, 44), (0, 0, 30), (0, 0, 20). Note the difference in their positions along the gradient compared to the bevel on the other side.

Alright, now we’ve got some beveled edges. Starting to look a little more like a physical object, eh? Let’s continue along this road and add a little more depth.

Step 5: Imply Depth

First, we’ll add another layer to the angled, right side of the switch to give it more dimension. Duplicate your Angled Side layer and drag it in the Layers panel to be above the Angled Side Bevel. I’m gonna rename this new layer “Angled Side Shadow”, clear its Layer Style, and lower its Fill to 0%.

Now double-click the layer and give it a new Gradient Overlay. This time, we’ll make both ends black and make our adjustment on the Opacity points above. Keep the left one at 100% and change the right one to 0%. Also, make sure to rotate the gradient’s Angle setting to 0 degrees. This will set the gradient to run horizontally instead of vertically (the default).

Back in the Layers panel, step down the Opacity of the layer until it looks more angle-y and dimension-y. 25% seemed to be the magic number for me.

Looking good! Let’s repeat this method to give the Depth shape some more dimension as well. Duplicate the Depth layer, clear the Layer Style, set Fill to 0%, and start a new Gradient Overlay from scratch. This time, we’ll want the darkness to run from right to left, so change the Angle setting to 180 degrees. You’ll also want to pull the transparent side of the gradient toward the middle, since the Depth shape is partially hidden under the Angled side shape.

Alright, almost there!

Step 6: Create the Glyphs

We’ve got a switch now, but it’s totally unlabeled. What are we switching back and forth? Let’s add a checkmark glyph to the left side and an X glyph to the right side.

I laid out some guides to help me draw this shape. Unlike before, however, I’ve intentionally positioned my guides on half-pixels. Usually, this would be bad, but if you want pointy corners on an angled shape like a checkmark, the best way to achieve it is by making sure the corners are dead center on a pixel. Sounds counter-intuitive, but you can see that it works.

Checkmark created! Let’s give this guy some glowiness. Add a Gradient Overlay, but make it a Radial one this time.

The green gradient I’m using is light in the center and slightly darker on the outside. I used the HSB values (120, 100, 100) and (120, 100, 75). That gives us this:

I used a similar method to create an X shape on the right side of the switch like so:

Okay, time to mess with its Layer Style. Since the X is recessed into the face of the switch, let’s give it a dark grey Color Overlay of (HSB: 0, 0, 25). And to sell that recessed look, add an Inner Shadow with the following parameters:

To further imply dimensionality, we’ll add a green Drop Shadow. This gives the impression that the edges of the X shape are beveled and reflecting some of the light cast by the glowing green checkmark. (If this looks kinda weird, don’t worry; we’ll do other things to sell this effect in a moment).

Step 7: Glows and Bounce Light

Our green checkmark is glowy-ish, but I’m not convinced. Let’s really sell the idea that there’s a light behind the button by adding a circle glow over the checkmark.

Use the Ellipse tool to create a circle shape centered over the checkmark, like this:

Lower the layer’s Fill percent to zero and add a Gradient Overlay that looks like this:

Reduce the layer’s Master Opacity to 25%, and you should end up with a nice glow over your checkmark.

Finally, let’s add a layer of bounce light to the right side of the switch. Bounce light is when a light source reflects (or bounces) off a nearby surface, changing the look of the surfaces around it. For example, on a bright, sunny day, someone standing on grass will have a slight green bounce light under their chin, which happens because the sunlight reflects off the green grass, picks up some of that color, and illuminates the person’s face from below.

Duplicate the Angled Side Shadow layer, move the duplicate above the original layer, and change the Gradient Overlay to green instead of black. I had to reduce the layer’s Master Opacity to 7% to keep it from being too strong.

Step 8: Add a Cast Shadow

This whole time, we’ve been rendering the switch under the assumption that there’s a global light directly above. In that case, the raise side of the would cast a shadow below it, so let’s create that shape now.

Use the Pen tool to draw a black triangular shape under the right side like this:

That shape is too sharp to be properly shadowy, so let’s fuzz out the edges by giving it a 3px black Outer Glow with a Normal blend mode.

Reduce the layer’s Master Opacity to 50% so it’s not so harsh. Let’s see what we’ve got now.

Tada!

That’s it! You’ve got a nice, dimensional toggle switch. Congrats

If you’ve been learning along the way, you should be able to create the opposite “Off” version of the switch. (Try duplicating all your layers and flip everything horizontally to get started.)

Download PSD FILE

Thanks for reading this tutorial. I hope you’ve learned a little bit about shape layers and layer styles in the process of following along. Feel free to give the switch your own personal flair and send me your results. You can find me on twitter @marshallbock. Enjoy : )