Welcome to the second part of this tutorial, in which we will finish designing the music player that we started in part one. This includes creating the icons at the bottom, as well as making the music player responsive, so that all elements adapt to the width of the artboard and, thus, can be used for different device widths.
Our premise in creating all of the icons is to use basic shapes as often as possible, instead of custom vector elements. Shapes are much easier to set up and modify, and we will still be able to combine them into more complex forms using Boolean operations.
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Sketch is known for its tricky, advanced facets, but it’s not rocket science. In this article, we’ll get a taste of all the impressive designs Sketch is capable of bringing to life.
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I have been drawing desktop wallpapers for Smashing Magazine’s monthly collections for over a year now, and every time it’s a very fun and challenging mission. In this article, I would like to share how I approach all stages of the process and provide general techniques for creating vector illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. Hopefully, you will find these techniques useful.
While referring to a particular drawing — the illustration for the “Understand Yourself” desktop wallpaper, which was featured in May’s wallpaper collection this year — I’ll also highlight key takeaways from my experience as an illustrator and designer.
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Drawing a cartoon is no trivial pursuit. It turns us into a director, writer, narrator. Through a cartoon or comic, you tell a story that takes place in a certain time, a certain environment, with certain characters. This is why you will learn here not just how to draw a cartoon in Adobe Illustrator, but how to decide on character, place and situation.
Before grabbing your pencil or software tool, ask yourself, “What will be my topic?” How many characters you will use, and who will they be? What background will they move against? What era will they live in? In what scene will you put them? Through the steps in this tutorial, I will explain to you my own choices. Let’s begin.
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In WordPress, a navigation menu, a list of categories or pages, and a list of comments all share one common characteristic: They are the visual representation of tree-like data structures. This means that a relationship of superordination and subordination exists among the elements of each data tree.
There will be elements that are parents of other elements and, conversely, elements that are children of other elements. A reply to a comment depends logically on its parent, in the same way that a submenu item depends logically on the root element of the tree (or subtree).
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While animation in Photoshop is not a new concept, it definitely has come a long way in the last few years: The Timeline panel has been overhauled, video layers have been introduced, as has the ability to create keyframe animation. These additions have really upped Photoshop’s game.
Even though Photoshop is still a long way off from being able to create the high-end and cinematic animations of such programs as After Effects, it still has enough power to create complex animation — which is especially useful if you don’t want to spend time learning a new application.
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The 6 Plus is the first iPhone that sports a “Retina HD” display — the sharpest display Apple has ever made. It forces designers to provide an additional set of image resources to developers to match that sharpness.
We needed only one set of assets for the original iPhone up to iPhone 3GS. And when iPhone 4 came out with the Retina display, we also needed 2x assets — images twice as detailed. Now, with the display of the 6 Plus being even more detailed than that of the iPhone 4, we will also need to provide 3x assets. The numbers 1x, 2x and 3x are also called “scale factors.”
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Photoshop isn’t just for retouching images or manipulating photos. It can be used for so much more, such as creating your own textures — as long as you know where to look. In this article, I will present a foundation of techniques to help you build custom textures. I’ll go over three Photoshop features that I rely on to do most of my texturing — filters, layer styles and brushes. Before we jump in, I want to demonstrate the importance of textures.
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