Adding visual elements to your website design can often make the difference between a good and a great site. While illustrations can often take a lot of time and talent to produce, the result is often a stunning website design that can really make an impact with your readers. The following showcase includes 40 examples of brilliantly illustrated web designs to help inspire you for your next project.

(Continue)

The use of textures can dramatically improve your print design work. You can (if used sensibly) add more depth to your work, whether your work be business cards, advertisements or posters. The results of using texture in your print design projects can be completely different every time, depending on various factors such as what textures you use, how many textures you use, and how you apply them to your work.

This post showcases a great selection of print design projects that make good use of textures; making the work more visually appealing. The showcase is followed by a small selection of useful links and resources.

(Continue)

Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!

(Continue)

The eyes have long been considered the windows to the soul. Photographers often try to focus on a subject’s eyes as a way to add depth and emotion to a photo. But there are still only so many ways you can emphasize the eyes in a standard photo.

That’s where photo manipulations like those below enter the scene. Some are macabre and just a little bit (or extremely) frightening, while others make us think of fantasy worlds filled with fairies and nymphs. And then there are those that are done just to make the subject appear more striking. In any case, all are inspiring and a great place to start if you’re looking for some ideas.

(Continue)

The shortest month of the year in 2010 is definitely not short on content for our readers. This month was packed with some high quality content in all areas. First we have some great tutorials that cover a lot of genres like 3D, painting, typography and more. The freebies are high quality and great as always, awesome wallpapers as well as fonts and icons. And last but not least we have sets of articles and inspirational posts that are packed with great art. This month features both SlashTHREE and DepthCore releases, so get ready to be inspired and check it all out.

(Continue)

Textures, textures, textures. The design community, both print and web, seems to be going absolutely texture mad, but there are several valid and very good reasons to why that may be:

(Continue)

Book covers can be incredibly creative design projects. They can also be wildly challenging when compared with many other types of designs. A cover has to not only tell something about what the story is about, but also be appealing to the book’s target readership.

Many book cover designers turn to photographs when creating book covers. Not all books have the budget for custom photo shoots, so often stock images have to be used. And what many readers don’t realize is that many book covers are actually composite images, made up of multiple stock images to create the look and feel the designer is after.

(Continue)

Over the weekend and into Monday we unfortunately experienced some pretty severe downtime on all Envato WordPress blogs. The downtime was due to problems in the data centre of our current hosting company which was out of our control.

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

Unfortunately, the Psdtuts+ staff have had to remove a recently published Plus tutorial, as the final artwork closely resembles an artists existing work. When this situation occurs, unfortunately, the tutorial is removed and payment is not made to the author of the tutorial. Claims of plagiarism are taken very seriously and thoroughly investigated on this site and always something to be aware of. We appreciate the communities diligence in catching this and have removed this tutorial from the site. Thanks.

(Continue)

We have another Psd Premium tutorial exclusively available to Premium members today. If you want to take your photo manipulation skills to the next level, then we have an awesome tutorial for you. Learn more at the jump!

(Continue)