We’ve talked about tracing a photo in Illustrator and creating an illustration using simple gradients in this post: How to Trace a Photo in Illustrator. What if you have a sketch or a hand drawing you’d like to trace and enhance?

This time, we use Photoshop. This is a good, very extensive tutorial on how to do just that. It’s not the shortest one, so be sure to take some time to complete it

You can view this tutorial here.

You probably know how to manually create a path around an object you want to separate from its background. Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso Tool can speed this process up a little for you.

You need to know a few tips though, all provided in this tutorial.

You can view this tutorial here.

Here come some free nice, glossy and shiny vectors for you. They are glass/metal buttons, or icons.

Thanks to Bittbox for these! As they are vectors, you need a vector program like Illustrator or Inkscape to use them; but they also come as SVG and PNG files – ready to use.

You can download the .zip pack including AI, EPS, SVG and PNG files from here.

This is a follow-up on our previous post about how to make glass buttons in Illustrator. While that covered basic, round buttons, this tutorial is about making more sophisticated buttons, and bars.

The tutorial also includes the vector source file for Illustrator.

View this tutorial here.

Learn how to make a stamp in Illustrator in 3 simple steps. You need to have an artwork for this, or a picture or photo which you can use as the stamp image. Here, you get to know how to make a stamp out of it.

Thanks again to Nick La of Ndesign Studio for this tutorial!

You can go directly to the tutorial here.

This is a very easy, 3-step tutorial on making stylish glass buttons in Illustrator.

There are different ways to do glass buttons, using different programs like Photoshop, but we prefer this way.

You can view this tutorial right here!

This is a very interesting and insightful, fully web-based graphical dictionary. If you need a powerful reference tool for writing, ths is where you should go!

The website delivers all you need to know about a word. It’s flash based and uses WordNet, the open-source database of the Princeton University.

Here is the link to the website. Experience it yourself! You can also read a complete review on Nubloo.com.

Nick La, who runs the website Web Designer Wall, collected these very useful shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop. They aren’t documented anywhere officially – therefore they can soothingly be referred to as ’secret’…

You can read the post on Web Designer Wall here!