How to create paper, receipts or newspaper with torn edges

receipt

I was asked by a client to present their final figures in a pitch they were doing in the form of a receipt. I thought it was quite a nice little Photoshop trick and a nice idea. Here’s how. Draw the outline of the receipt, or piece of paper, with the Pen Tool (P), and [...]

How to do distressed, grunge or rubber stamp designs in Photoshop

grunge-s

Put type or whatever you want distressed, grunged or “rubber stamped” on one layer in Photoshop with a white background layer beneath it. The create a blank layer above it (Cmd/Ctl-Opt-Shift-N). Then you need to create some clouds. Very easy. First of all make sure your background and foreground colours in the Tools palette are [...]

How to design a cool web 2.0 button in Illustrator and Photoshop

button-ai

An earlier tutorial on how to make a shiny button in Illustrator using the Opacity Mask feature can be improved upon greatly by adding a sexy brushed steel surrounding ring to your amber jelly button! As previously explained, the shiny “web 2.0″ button look can be made by placing a circle with a linear black-to-white [...]

How to turn a photo into an illustration

sunflower

Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator’s old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities! As soon as you place or paste a photo into Illustrator a button on the Control Palette offers [...]

Graphic design an eye

eye-450

This is one way of reproducing a striking image without having to pay for it! The logical way of doing an image made of dots would be like this: Make sure that your image’s width and height are divisible by 10 pixels (the above is 450 by 300 pixels). Nice round numbers make the following [...]

Designing photo montages in Photoshop

russia-putin

Although it’s important to cut out images well when composing a montage in Photoshop, it’s definitely not the most important thing. Images should be chosen for their ability to fit in with the other graphic elements in the composition. Usually one piece or element should stick out more than others – the “hero”. It is [...]

Graphic designer’s picture quiz #3 with hidden famous faces

rap-prog-450

How many famous faces can you spot, who are they, what’s the background they’re superimposed on? I did this to illustrate an article I wrote commenting on the music industry. I used paths, marquees with a feather of two pixels and a brush eraser with a hardness of 0% to cut out the heads. It’s [...]

Make your own pop art poster

kanye-west-pop-art

Buy pop art images here. Most pop art pictures in the public’s imagination contain a photograph that has been reduced to only two tones, black and white, and then colored in, for example Andy Warhol‘s Marilyn pictured below. The best way to do this is to go Image > Adjustments > Threshold in Photoshop. Move [...]

Designing a crystal ball in Photoshop

crystal-ball

This is cool technique I’ve discovered which uses the Polar Coordinates filter in Photoshop to make a globe or a planet. Start with picture (I chose one of some nice clouds). You may or may not at this point convert it into a square, but at some stage you will need to. As the edge [...]

Download free “How to Market Yourself Online” ebook
Discover the secrets behind building a better web presence

Everything you will need to know about self-marketing on the web, including:

  • Creating websites
  • Setting up WordPress
  • Writing blog posts
  • Getting links
  • Driving traffic to your site
  • Using social media
  • Offering RSS feeds and subscriptions
  • Getting found on Google
download icon
download button