Weekly Design Source – January 17th 2008

Starting this year I would like to make more review on great graphic design tutorials on the web. My criteria of choosing a great tutorial is simplicity, cleanliness, and well designed. I hope that by reviewing those tutorials, I can help myself on increasing the quality of my own tutorials.

This week’s review is started by Veerle‘s tutorial of Creating Simple Art Brushes in Illustrator. The tutorial is presented so well which makes me wonder when I have the time to layout my own tutorials to become as good as that. This tutorial explains about the function of Arc tool in Adobe Illustrator for making simple art brushes. Frankly speaking, I didn’t know the function of Arc tool before reading this tutorial. It took me for about 5 minutes to master it. It’s time to experiment my good ol’ Illustrator.

Still related to graphic design, which is Website Design. The Go Mediazine releases one of the series of creating a Killer Band Website Design Layout with Drupal CMS. In their previous news, Go Mediazine already mentioned that they will release a series of tutorial for Web Design Layout with Drupal. This tutorial is presented by Sean Hodge of aiburn.com and Connection Cube. He serve as a guest author for Go Mediazine, especially for this tutorial. The tutorial explains about creating layout with Slice tool in Adobe Photoshop. The layout involves:

• Setting up workspace for website layout
• Creating an outstanding Go Media’s Arsenal vector banner
• Creating button effect for navigation bar
• Creating textures for background

The tutorial is quite simple. For a beginner like me, an hour is the most I can do to master it. I also looking forward for the next series.

One of PSDTUTS author has released a tutorial for creating another alternative for Gold Text effect in photoshop. Yes, another alternative, I said. Because there are zillions of tutorials with the same title, but all of them are done in different ways. I found this tutorial as simple, quick, clean, and elegant. The tutorial is presented by Fabio, one of PSDTUTS contributors. This tutorial only involves filter effect and blending options. I’m not going to say it here because it is so simple, please go to the tutorial page in PSDTUTS instead. I’m a fellow subscriber of PSDTUTS. Almost everyday they post new, clean, and well presented tutorial. One of my favorite is creating spectacular flaming-text-like-a-meteor tutorial.