Tutorial

Quick Tip: Convert Video & Audio Files with Adobe Media Encoder
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Quick Tip: Convert Video & Audio Files with Adobe Media Encoder

The task of converting media has always been tricky. It’s possible to use online tools or free programs like MP4 to MP3 Converter. But most of these tools are lackluster, full of adware, and don’t have the prettiest interfaces. Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 released with a new program called Media Encoder. This allows you to…

The Basics of Illustrator Vector Manipulation
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The Basics of Illustrator Vector Manipulation

Adobe Illustrator is a powerful vector program made for digital and print designers. Vector shapes are made to scale without any quality loss, which makes them quite different from pixel graphics. This means vector graphics can be manipulated differently and under different contexts which may be confusing for new designers. In this post I’d like…

Basic Shape Manipulation Techniques in Photoshop
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Basic Shape Manipulation Techniques in Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop has come a long way since it was originally released in 1990. While Adobe has put out their latest “monthly subscription” suite of Creative Cloud, many designers choose to stick with the last iteration of CS6. The CS6 pack is still incredibly powerful and there’s not much of a difference from CS6 to…

Trace Existing Icons to Create New Shapes in Photoshop
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Trace Existing Icons to Create New Shapes in Photoshop

Icon design is one of the most tricky fields of digital design. It often requires some understanding of composition and other art fundamentals like symmetry, lighting, and color. The best way to learn icon design is by studying under the best of the best. Unfortunately they probably don’t have time to teach you so it’s…

The Basics of Photoshop Quick Masking
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The Basics of Photoshop Quick Masking

Selecting and rendering objects from their background can be a difficult skill to master. Nobody is inherently born with an understanding of Photoshop – it takes years of practice and lots of screw-ups to become even remotely good. Yet it seems that rendering and selecting an object always remains one of the most difficult tasks…

Tips for Learning the Pen Tool in Adobe Photoshop
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Tips for Learning the Pen Tool in Adobe Photoshop

Everyone who’s tried their hand at Photoshop knows about the pen tool. At first it’s agonizingly difficult and practically mocks every newcomer. But there is a rhyme & reason to the madness. I do hope this post offers enough useful tips for anyone interested in learning this tool. I’ll preface by saying that to get…

Illustrator: How to average points for perfect alignment
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Illustrator: How to average points for perfect alignment

I’ve only recently been using this Illustrator feature, but I’ve found it to be very useful for really precise drawing. In my case, when I draw fonts. I want to show you how to use the Illustrator “Average” feature to get perfect point alignment during drawing. As you can see in the image above, I…

[Requested Illustrator Tip] Edit Styles in Multiple Text Boxes at Once
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[Requested Illustrator Tip] Edit Styles in Multiple Text Boxes at Once

This Illustrator quick tip was requested by Chris. Chris asks, “I want to make a global change to the FONT or STYLE of a bunch of text boxes (each with different text inside them) at once. Is there a way to do this?” As a matter of fact, there are a couple different solutions, both…

Easily make sexy error messages in WordPress (and everything else)
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Easily make sexy error messages in WordPress (and everything else)

Some hosts have custom error page options in their admin panel software, but if you want to bypass that and easily make your custom error messages work (as long as you’re running Apache) it’s pretty simple. Especially if your a blogger, and you’re familiar with .htaccess files, this is a very simple process and it…