This tutorial covers the use of filters, brushes, the pen tool, masks, and maybe a couple other techniques; all in order to create a realistic sandwich bag from scratch.

I love discovering awesome Photoshop brushes. So it’s good news that I keep learning about new Photoshop brush sites. However, the market for any service can very quickly become over saturated with too much of the same. Despite the volume of these type of sites, I try to give each one a fair shake to see if they separate themselves in any manner.

This tutorial will cover a lot of ground (that may or may not be a bad play on words :) ). We will use both Illustrator and Photoshop to create a cool winter background. The focus will be showing you how to create custom patterns in Illustrator and custom brushes from these patterns in Photoshop. I think you’ll find a lot of these techniques very useful.

It’s been another fantastic month in the design blogosphere. Here’s my collection of the best articles, tutorials, freebies and more from the design community for the month of October. Enjoy!

A great place to find design inspiration is in brochures, flyers and leaflets. Companies have been using these marketing tools for 100′s of years now. With the advances in printing the designs are limitless. The results of this creative marketing can be stunning.

In one of my recent web projects I was asked to include dropdown style navigation to the site. I found it quite exhausting just how many articles, techniques and services are out there are on topic. However, what I didn’t find was a compilation of some really slick examples. Here are some examples of sites that I think did a great job with it.

It’s in our nature, as we move through time to note the trends that shape said times. And furthermore, one might say, it’s in our nature to cycle through these timely trends from time to time. We see it in so many aspects of our culture. Fashion, entertainment, design. Each one sharing this retro-revisiting that brings back popular past elements to recapture something from our formers.

First off, thanks to everyone who submitted a poster design. You made this contest awesome, and really difficult to judge :) I know both Liam of Function and Adelle of Fuel Your Creativity agreed, it was really tough to narrow it down! But we did our best, and here are the results.

In web design, it can be tricky to decide how to present your layout to a client. There are some designers who believe you should skip Photoshop and go straight to coding. I disagree. At the very least you should sketch out your ideas with a pencil and pad before ever opening up a text editor. For me, my workflow is: sketch / Photoshop / code.

There is less then 1 week left to enter your design into the Big Typography Poster Contest. The results of this case study have been very impressive. I highlighted many of the awesome designs in my last update. Here are a some new submissions that I found visually stunning and creative.