And the 10 lucky winners are: Simon, jeannie, Sue Brettell, MAANJO, Akshay Sawant, Victor Abadio, Pablo Lara H, Aubrey, Adam, and Craig Paterson. It was a pretty small contest, with only 50 comments, so you had a one in five chance of winning! The winners will be contacted shortly about how to claim your prize!
To start off the week, we’ve got some really cool free stuff. Our friends at Designious.com, who so generously offer freebies on a regular basis, have launched a brand new premium design resource site today called DesignTNT.com. It’s a subscription-based site, so you can really get some good deals with the right kind of account and diligent downloading. I’ve got 10 Pro accounts (good for 1 month) to give away to some lucky BittBoxers, make sure and read the rules (they’ve changed a bit) and good luck!
Typography plays a key part in many kinds of design. Some would even say it’s the most important element of web design, in order to correctly portray your message you have to invite the user to read what you have to say. So how do you make your type stand out? In today’s tutorial I want to cover some of the basics of modifying text using Layer Styles in Photoshop. We’ll learn how to create the “letterpress” look, how to overlay textures and patterns, and how to use tools like Stroke and Bevel. Let’s get things started.
Preview:
For our inaugural “Freebie Friday”, I’ve got some useful Photoshop Custom Shapes for everyone’s downloading pleasure. These should save you time if you need them, as you won’t have to go into Illustrator to make your own sunbursts on the fly. Just use the custom shape tool, in PS and blam, sunburst. Sunbursts can make I nice background element in a variety of ways. :) (Download after the jump)
I give away a LOT of stuff here on BittBox, mainly textures and brushes. The truth is, many of the textures are manufactured using recycled images I already have hanging around on my hard drive. I want to share one of my favorite ways to quickly add a little extra to a rather uninteresting texture, without using Photoshop brushes.
I’ve recently come across a lifesaver Photoshop plugin that is gonna rock your world. It’s called GuideGuide from Cameron McEfee and it’s a godsend for creating print layouts, and web for that matter. GuideGuide is free, and its a “panel” that assists you with laying out your guides across the artboard/document. Instead of having to do the math with complicated layouts, you can simply tell guide guide how far from each side of the document you want to place a guide. So simple it hurts.
GuideGuide can even find the center of a selection! You can set the number of columns, and gutter width as well. This is one USEFUL plugin, and I wanted to share it with everyone. Thanks to my friend Mike for the tip. :)
![Must-Have (Free) Photoshop Plugin: GuideGuide [CS4, CS5]](http://www.bittbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/guideguide.jpg "Must-Have (Free) Photoshop Plugin: GuideGuide [CS4, CS5]")
A week or two ago, I gave away some textures I called “Simply Worn.” I was asked by many of you to make a tutorial on how I made those, and here it is. Best viewed fullscreen.
Photoshop: How to Make a Subtle Worn Texture from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.
I was contacted recently with an amazing offer from a relatively new design resource site called Design Panoply. They have given me tho opportunity to do a giveaway of 3 copies of their massive Photoshop Styles Mega Pack Collection, which includes 120 truly top quality Photoshop styles, to three very lucky readers. That’s over $700 worth of styles! You know the drill. Read the rules, and good luck!
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