January 2011

The start of a new year a great month for the design community to kick off the year with a ton of great articles, tutorials and freebies been released throughout this month. January there was a lot of news including the revealing of the HTML 5 logo which reminds of that web 2.0 type of effect, will the web 2.0 effect be reborn again in 2010 I wonder.

This months episode of the Envato Community Podcast is a special one. Joining us in this episode is the web dev guru and Nettuts+ manager, Jeffrey Way. Jeffrey is currently visiting the Melbourne office and was nice enough to drop by for our recording. We also have a chat with the one of the funniest people at Envato, Aaron Osteraas.

Don’t wait, start listening to this months podcast! Subscribe, downloads, and show notes below.

Oh, and did we mention there is a special giveaway to users who listen to this episode? Well there is, be sure to listen and see the full post for more information.

Collis is Envato’s wise and fearless leader. Every month we’ll choose a bunch of your questions, and Collis will answer them. You can add your questions to the pot by heading over to this Web form. It’s also a great place to catch his previous pearls of wisdom.

Here are this month’s questions:

Hey Collis, I’m happy to have found a place where I can ask you a question! About a month ago you mentioned something about a streaming service or something along those lines, for AudioJungle. Are you able to elaborate on that?

Today we meet RobGD from AudioJungle.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from, what do you do for a living?

[Whilst the following is a paid review, my opinions are totally honest/unbiased, and I will only ever review sites/services that I feel are useful to our audience]

BrushLovers.com

When Walter Apai contacted me about reviewing his new photoshop brushes website, I was of course already aware of his hugely popular design blog WebDesignerDepot. Without this backing of quality and reputation I may have just assumed that BrushLovers would be ‘simply another brush site’. However, I would have been very wrong!

Help Shape Our Content!

As many of you have seen, we recently relaunched PSDFAN. We’re a lot happier with the new setup, and have a LOT of great new content to share with you. However, we’re always keen to know exactly what types of content would be most useful to you.

If you’re curious how to achieve a certain type of design, or a particular area of design interests you then please leave a comment to this page. We’ll do our level best to create a tutorial to help you, and I’m sure our community will find it beneficial too!

Members Area Tutorial: Create A Human/Robot Hybrid In Photoshop

Final Image

The result of this tutorial is shown below:

A wide collective of tutorials ranging from the basic fundamental tutorials for learning the mesh tool to more advanced technical tutorial to master the technical aspects of the mesh tool. The mesh tool is one of illustrators complex tools but when mastered you can create some great designs. Feel free to leave a comment to share your favourite tutorials featured in the post.

Did you know that every Tuts+ site has a freebies page? They’re definitely worth checking out. Let’s go for a tour.

Psdtuts+ Freebies

34 Free & Beautiful xHTML/CSS Templates

Nowdays, more and more designers and developers start selling their work for money, and as time goes by less free xhtml/css templates are being released. However there are a small number of authors that really provide great and free templates to the community, which helps cater for the audience of people who aren’t willing to pay for a theme, or simply can’t afford it. In the following collection, we have gathered an awesome pack of more than thirty beautiful css/html themes, that are absolutely free!

34 Free & Beautiful xHTML/CSS Templates

Nowdays, more and more designers and developers start selling their work for money, and as time goes by less free xhtml/css templates are being released. However there are a small number of authors that really provide great and free templates to the community, which helps cater for the audience of people who aren’t willing to pay for a theme, or simply can’t afford it. In the following collection, we have gathered an awesome pack of more than thirty beautiful css/html themes, that are absolutely free!

Small Business

Create An Underwater Typography Scene

In this Design Tutorial we are going to be creating a custom typography piece. We will be using custom brushes, light effects, and more to achieve the end result. The techniques we will cover can be applied to any type, so let’s fire up Photoshop and get started!

I don’t know if you’ve felt a bit like me this week, but it’s been hard to get going. It feels like I’m trying to kick start the year. The kids are home from school playing Xbox all day, the rain just keeps on coming, and all that ham I ate over the holidays is making me feel lethargic.

But I’ve had a great week. I love taking some time to get organized at the beginning of the year, and have spent hours doing that this week. It’s a great feeling moving forward knowing that you’ve already got the new year a little under control. What about you? Do you prefer to plan the year in advance, or be surprised when you get there?

Here are the highlights from Envato Notes this week:

Congratulations to this week’s featured marketplace authors!

ActiveDen Featured Author: zehreken

Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is zehreken who joined in October 2009, has a portfolio of 5 items for sale and has racked up 16 sales!
View zehreken’s Portfolio

What Members-Only Content Would You Like to See More Of?

With the new year underway we’re working hard to provide even better content on a weekly basis. We’re fully aware that tutorials are the favorite type of content at PSDFAN, which is why we’re bringing on board some more full time tutorial writers for the new year. With the upcoming relaunch of the blog you’ll see a lot of fantastic free content available on the blog!