Although this is only part one of a three part series, we should still take a minute to look back and review. Bottom line: the Internet has come a long way. It has completely revolutionized the way that nearly every company does business and proved to the world that it is no mere fad. While the Internet (in some form or another) has been around since the late 1960’s, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that the World Wide Web as we know it today began to take shape.

Where did we come from?

An examination of the Web’s ...

We're going to discuss techniques that you can use to start digitally painting your first illustration using the soft and hard edge brush, pen tool, burn and dodge tool, and levels adjustment.  A really helpful hardware tool to have is a Wacom Tablet, which can help make your digital airbrushing go a little smoother.

You can digitally paint almost any image, but in order to achieve success, it helps to go back to the drawing board, literally. Before you start applying color and definition to your artwork, you need to have a good looking sketch.

The following sample ...

As designers, we can all agree that not all of the photos we receive are professionally taken or stock quality.  This quick tutorial will get your stale photos up to a higher quality using the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop.

Final Image Preview

Here’s a sneak peek render of what your photos can look like after you have completed this tutorial.  This tutorial can be applied to any photo's or graphics to enhance their quality for the web or print.  The image used was a random photo pulled off the web for this tutorial and as you can see ...

Navigation has to be by far the most important piece of any design, as it will be the most used element on any website. There has been a huge push in the last few years to increase usability and SEO standards in web navigation, thus making them CSS and JavaScript based. Personally I love it, I think that creating menus outside of flash and DHTML has increased these 2 areas substantially. The only problem I have begun to see is that navigation menus aren’t really pushing the limits, they all look the same and seem to just be the same ...