Category: Tutorials

You learn something everyday if you pay attention

New Coffee Break Course on CSS Keyframe Animations

CSS keyframe animations offer designers a powerful way to create animations in the browser without having to rely on external plugins or extensive programming.  If you’re not sure how to use them, our new Coffee Break Course, Up and Running With CSS Keyframe Animations, is the place to start. In just ten minutes, Envato Tuts+ instructor… Continue reading New Coffee Break Course on CSS Keyframe Animations

A Comprehensive Guide to Typography Basics

If you’re learning web design from zero and want to significantly improve your typography chops, then this article is written for you. We will cover typefaces, fonts, typographic anatomy, hierarchy and how to choose typefaces. You will learn enough to become dangerous in no time. Topics As is usual for these comprehensive guides, we’ll be… Continue reading A Comprehensive Guide to Typography Basics

How to Create a Realistic Creased Text Effect Using the Displace Filter

What You’ll Be Creating Adding text to a dynamic background can be a bit tricky, as it usually ends up looking flat and fake. This tutorial will show you how to use the Displace filter to apply the text to a dynamic surface correctly, and make it conform to that surface to get a more… Continue reading How to Create a Realistic Creased Text Effect Using the Displace Filter

What's New in Android Studio 2.2?

The last few months have been an exciting time for Android Studio. First came version 2.1 with support for Android N. Then Google I/O brought us a preview of the next major release in the form of Android Studio 2.2 Preview 1, only for this to be rapidly replaced by Preview 2, which contained some important bug… Continue reading What's New in Android Studio 2.2?

Creative Examples of Geometric Web Design Styles

Something making its presence known on the web these days is the use of common geometric patterns which we all learned in grade school. Polygons, diamonds, rectangles, triangles, and the occasional rhombus are all an integral part of modern web design. So how does this 10th grade math subject end up affecting the way website… Continue reading Creative Examples of Geometric Web Design Styles

Animation for Beginners: How to Animate a Head Turn

What You’ll Be Creating Today we are going to learn how to animate a character turning his head. You’ll find that you will be animating head turns a lot when you do character animation. A head turn is challenging to animate because the mass and shape need to be consistent, as do the elements of… Continue reading Animation for Beginners: How to Animate a Head Turn

Taking Control of the tvOS Focus Engine

Introduction On iOS, users normally interact with your apps via the device’s touch screen. On tvOS, however, user interaction is handled by moving the current focus between views on the screen. Luckily, the tvOS implementations of the UIKit APIs handle the changing of focus between views automatically. While this built-in system works very well, for specific… Continue reading Taking Control of the tvOS Focus Engine

How to Create a Gradient Icon Inspired by Instagram in Adobe Illustrator

What You’ll Be Creating Rebrand your logo in style with this quick tutorial on creating a gradient icon in Adobe Illustrator CC. We’ll build our icon design from scratch with quick and simple shapes and pair gradients and effects from the Appearance panel to complete our on-trend design.  Alternatively, you may wish to use a… Continue reading How to Create a Gradient Icon Inspired by Instagram in Adobe Illustrator

Using Laravel Valet for WordPress Development

If you’re familiar with the PHP community, then you’re likely familiar with a number of the different applications and frameworks that are currently popular in the development space today. One of the more common frameworks that we’re seeing used to build web applications is Laravel. Though this tutorial is not specifically about Laravel, I recommend checking… Continue reading Using Laravel Valet for WordPress Development

How to Build a News Website Layout with Flexbox

What You’ll Be Creating It’s not necessary to understand every aspect of Flexbox before you can jump in and get started. In this tutorial, we’re going to introduce a few features of Flexbox whilst designing a “news layout” like the one you can find on The Guardian. The reason we’re using Flexbox is that it… Continue reading How to Build a News Website Layout with Flexbox

Using Subversion to Check Out WordPress

There are a lot of reasons to enjoy following open-source software, one of which is the ability to learn from the code that others have built.  Other examples include: following along with bug tickets seeing new features merged into the code base learning how to achieve something programmatically viewing the deprecation of an old feature… Continue reading Using Subversion to Check Out WordPress

How to Integrate SmoothState.js Into a WordPress Theme

In our previous tutorial, we used the History Web API within a static site to serve smooth page transitions. In this tutorial we’re going to take things to the next level, by applying what we learned in a WordPress website. There’ll be one crucial difference; we’ll leverage SmoothState.js instead of building our own from scratch.  SmoothState.js will: Request pages asynchronously (AJAX) and… Continue reading How to Integrate SmoothState.js Into a WordPress Theme

How to Create a Watercolor Wedding Invitation in Adobe InDesign

What You’ll Be Creating Painterly designs are a big trend for wedding invitations right now. Romantic without being overly feminine or floral, they have an effortlessly cool, beachy style which is perfect for outdoor or more laid-back ceremonies. In this tutorial that’s suitable for beginners to the software, we’ll walk through the steps of creating an… Continue reading How to Create a Watercolor Wedding Invitation in Adobe InDesign

How to Create a Misty Landscape Photo Manipulation With Adobe Photoshop

What You’ll Be Creating In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a misty landscape with rocks, an arch bridge, flying birds, castles, and a medieval woman. You’ll learn how to combine simple images into a cohesive scene, play with the depth and atmosphere, adjust the colors, and more.  Tutorial Assets The following assets… Continue reading How to Create a Misty Landscape Photo Manipulation With Adobe Photoshop

Power Up Your Mobile Game With Design, Sound, and Music

A successful game needs to be beautifully designed and immersive. Most game developers aren’t good designers, though. And it doesn’t stop with design. Sound and music are just as important to captivate people playing your game. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a design or team up with one to create a fantastic game. You… Continue reading Power Up Your Mobile Game With Design, Sound, and Music

How to Create an AJAX Driven Theme for ProcessWire

In this tutorial we will look at setting up a simple theme in ProcessWire, we’ll investigate delayed output (now the default theme strategy within ProcessWire), and setup our site to request new content using AJAX. To accompany this tutorial I have created a new theme for ProcessWire, making use of both AJAX and delayed output,… Continue reading How to Create an AJAX Driven Theme for ProcessWire

10 Remedial Design Pointers for Developers

Here’s a situation which may be familiar to you: you’re a developer and you build a prototype to demonstrate something. It works just as you mean it to, but the looks of horror on your users’ faces tell you something is wrong–your demo looks like crap. Let’s look some simple guidelines and tips to help… Continue reading 10 Remedial Design Pointers for Developers

20 Best Shopify Themes With Beautiful eCommerce Designs

When it comes to eCommerce, the design of your site plays a crucial role. It can make or break your website—leading to sales either falling flat or converting profitably.  Even though you are probably eager to get your new site up and running as quickly as possible, it’s important to first make sure you pick… Continue reading 20 Best Shopify Themes With Beautiful eCommerce Designs

Using Let's Encrypt SSL With Your WordPress Project

What’s Let’s Encrypt? For years, purchasing, renewing, installing and managing SSL certificates overwhelmed me with expense and complexity. Now, Let’s Encrypt makes it fairly simple and free. Let’s Encrypt is an emerging, free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by a California public benefit corporation called the Internet Security Research Group—it also has nonprofit status.  Its… Continue reading Using Let's Encrypt SSL With Your WordPress Project

How to Create a Dory-Inspired Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop

What You’ll Be Creating To celebrate Finding Dory, the upcoming sequel to the classic Finding Nemo, I’ll show you how to create realistic fan art easily in Adobe Photoshop. Inspired by the movie, learn how to use photo manipulation and digital painting techniques to make any character come alive. Let’s get started! Tutorial Assets The… Continue reading How to Create a Dory-Inspired Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop

New Course: How to Use Live Shapes in Illustrator

What You’ll Be Creating Want to learn a new Illustrator skill in just ten minutes? In our new Coffee Break Course, illustrator Simona Pfreundner will introduce you to Live Shapes in Adobe Illustrator CC. You’ll get a brief introduction to what Live Shapes are, and then you’ll learn how to create something using this very handy… Continue reading New Course: How to Use Live Shapes in Illustrator

Free Course: Create Content in WordPress With Posts and Pages

What You’ll Be Creating WordPress is a powerful and easy-to-use tool for creating websites, but for beginners it can still be a little hard to know where to get started. What’s the best way to fit your content into the WordPress content management system? In our new course, Create Content in WordPress With Posts and… Continue reading Free Course: Create Content in WordPress With Posts and Pages

Ruby Templating With Slim: Part 2

In the second and last part of this mini series, we’ll finish this introduction with sections about outputting Ruby code, interpolation, plain text and how to customize Slim to your needs. After that article you should be ready for some Slim action.  Outputting Code You have already seen a bit about how to use Ruby in… Continue reading Ruby Templating With Slim: Part 2