As a tool or skill, sketching has its role in the design process. That role will vary depending on the end-product being created, the size and scope of the project, the individual designer’s style, experience, and workflow, and the client’s expectations. Find out more about how sketching is used in the design process within multiple design disciplines.

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Easter Sunday is drawing near very quickly, so why not celebrate it with some festive wallpaper? What are we going to create? How about a simple background, some subtle texture, and a few chicks—no, not that sort of chicks, the other sort! Let’s get started …

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Previously I showed you how to illustrate a construction helmet icon. Today we’ll be drawing a traffic cone, another handy icon for “under construction” elements. Our cone icon is inspired by one I saw on the VLC Player site recently.

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Illustrating scenes from the final frontier can make for some beautiful work. In this tutorial — the longest we’ve ever published — I’ll walk you through creating a spectacular space scene featuring two planets colliding. Strap yourselves in, Photoshoppers!

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We all know and love Photoshop for its pixel-based manipulation. In this tutorial, I decided to look into Photoshop’s vector capabilities, combined with gradients, layer modes, and layer styles to produce a great-looking, almost photo-realistic lighter.

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Construction icons have always been popular on-screen, and although those dot-com “under-construction” pages have mostly vanished from our screens, the trusty ol’ yellow helmet icon still has its uses. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating our very own icon from a photograph.

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