September 2011

FanExtra Membership Contest Winners Announced!

As many of you may have seen, we’ve recently relaunched our FanExtra Network. This relaunch has brought with it many vast improvements, offering all FanExtra members a much improved browsing experience, and a lot more member resources.

We’ve now compiled over 1000 exclusive, high quality resources, and the feedback from our members has been nothing short of superb!

Here’s what some of our members have been saying:

A big virtual high-five to this weeks featured Marketplace authors!

Design a Futuristic Abstract Portrait

This tutorial will walk you through the steps of how to create your very own futuristic artistic portrait. The great thing is that these techniques can be applied to virtually any portrait, meaning you can give yourself a creative self portrait, or even Photoshop the faces of your friends and family to surprise them!

Create an Epic Beach Disaster Scene

Final Image

Here is a preview of the image t

I teach Thesis 1.8 users how to upload a custom Header image and Favicon for their WordPress Blog with Thesis as their theme in this tutorial. If you ever uploaded an e-mail attachment, or uploaded a file to the internet with WordPress, or YouTube, you’ll know how to upload a custom header image and favicon [...]

I think it’s fantastic that our marketplaces hit a million members this week. That’s progress! It took over four years to accumulate our first half million members, and less than a year to double it. Incredible!

But Envato’s marketplaces had much smaller beginnings. It all started with one fledgling site with much fewer members: FlashDen (now ActiveDen).

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is an amazing resource. It basically allows you to travel back in time and see your favorite websites the way they were back in the good old days. This afternoon I spent some time there exploring FlashDen.

Even as adoption of Google Plus by new users seems to be slowing down a bit less than three months after its launch in June 2011, the experts are yet undecided as to who will win the battle for number one place in the social networking arena, Google Plus or Facebook.

The bitter lessons that the Internet giant learned in the social media space with Google Buzz and Google Wave may stand it in good stead, but in the modern open source age, lessons are really out there for all to learn. Facebook’s privacy controls debacle has not resulted in a significant drop in active users, following a concerted campaign to educate them about existing and new features.

Create a Colorful Out of Frame Animal Composition

In this design tutorial we are going to create a nature inspired composition using a lioness as our subject. We will learn how to take various images and textures and seamlessly blend them together into one cohesive design. We will be working quite a bit with Clipping Masks and Adjustment Layers to create the highest quality image without compromising the quality of the design, and we will also cover some helpful coloring techniques along the way. Let’s get started!

Learning MS Paint in Siberia, being a smart alec and compulsive designer, lying about accents, and being huge Apple fans. Meet the GraphicRiver team.

Welcome to GraphicRiver! At GraphicRiver you can buy and sell royalty-free, layered Photoshop files, vectors, icon packs, Adobe add-ons, isolated photos, and design templates for just a few dollars. Items are priced on the complexity, quality and use of the file. The site is home to a bustling community of graphic designers and illustrators.

The People Who Make It Happen

Sometimes we forget about the people that work hard behind the scenes to keep everything operating smoothly and effectively on a day-to-day basis. Let’s take a look at the team behind GraphicRiver:

Photo Manipulate a Dramatic Battle Scene in Photoshop

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a dramatic action scene. During process of making this piece, you will learn how to combine different stock images, create exciting effects, effectively use blending modes, adjust color correctly and much more!

Final Image

As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Hello fellow blog readers! Aw_Shucks here to share some tips on how to create and design help files in a different and useful way.