2 Free Photoshop Brush Viewer Apps

Photoshop brushes are awesome you can make your own custom brushes and there are lots of cool free brushes available on web, in fact too many to install them all just to see what they look like! So, if you ever wanted to view your Photoshop .abr file (Brush set) without having to open the Photoshop and installing them read on to find 2 nifty opensource free apps which allows you to do just that!

ABRviewer
You can have the preview of a set without having to install it, without having to run photoshop! You can even adjust thumbnails size and you can have the preview of the actual size of the brush… you can also try it out!
This software is able to generate images for every single brush and can also generate the general image from the panel of the thumbnails you have visualised.

ABRView
All you have to do is download the utility, run it, and double click on the brush set you want to preview. (If it's in a non-standard place, you may also need to tell the utility to look in that folder)

You can adjust the preview sizes, or if you want to see the full size images on their own, just look in the "ABRViewImages" folder next to the program and you'll find all the brush images.

Not only that, but the program automatically produces set images, so if you create brushes you can produce a brush set profile image at the click of a button!

Personally, I use the first one, ABRviewer, but I think both of them are neat tools, just like how you can view the fonts! So try it, if you are not already using it, or if you are using or know about any other app, feel free to share with us!

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30 Brilliant Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

Photoshop combined with a designer's skill can do awesome stuffs! And, one of those awesome stuffs are Text Effects, one can create some amazing text effects in Photoshop! With this article I tried to look around the web to see some stunning text effect tutorials because no matter what your skill sets are we all need to keep sharpening our skills, experiments and learn something new!

Add Fantastic Color to 3D Text

Kaboom! Exploding Text

Realistic Chrome and Glossy Plastic Text Effect

Patriotic Text Using Displacement Masks

How to Quickly Create a Stylish Retro Text Effect

 

Great Gooey Photoshop Text Tutorial

 

Slow Shutter Effect

 

How to Create High Quality Metal 3D Text in Photoshop

 

Creating Very Cool Folded Typo

 

Scanline Text

Old School Type – Line Gradients

6 Quick’n'Dirty Photoshop Text Effects From Scratch

Awesome Milk Typography Effect in Photoshop

Shiny Calligraphy Text Effect in Photoshop

 

Write Message In Sand

Transparent Glass Lettering in Photoshop

Paint Graffiti on Wall in Photoshop

How to Create Eroded Metal Text with Photoshop

Text In Stitches

Create a Spectacular Grass Text Effect in Photoshop

Text Effects - Plastic Text

Watercolor Text Painted on a Wet Paper

Aged/Distressed Type Effect in Photoshop + Free Action Download

How to Create Inset Typography in Photoshop

3D Text effects

Design a Slick 3D Ice Text Effect

Multi-colored effect

Create a Layered Glowing Text Effect

Candy Coated Photoshop Tutorial

3D Textured Text Effect

And, this one is written by yours truly as guest author! :)

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Easily Create Sticker Text and Graphic Effect in Illustrator

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create sticker style effect in Adobe Illustrator. Sticker effect is quite common and I am sure, you might have seen it used in various designs. So lets get started and let me tell you, it is quite easy and you can create a sticker style text in no minutes and you can apply the same technique for any graphic illustration as well.

Step 1

Type down the text, make sure to use a little thicker font, I used Arial Rounded MT Bold. Select the text, right click, and choose Create Outline, so that we can apply gradients to the text (I wonder why doesn't Adobe make the text go with gradients without converting the text into outline). If you don't want to use gradients in text, you may choose not to convert your text into outline.

Step 2

Apply gradient to text, I decided to use shiny web 2 style gradient, you can see the values of CMYK in the image below.

Step 3

With the Rectangle Tool (M) create a square or rectangle fill it with any color you like except white and select it, right click and choose Arrange > Send to Back so that you have a background below the text. You could do this at the Step 1 itself.

Now, select the text, Copy it (Ctrl/Comm + C) and Paste in Back (Ctrl/Comm + B). While the text you just pasted is selected, change it's Fill color to white (with no stroke) and go to Object > Path> Offset Path and choose the settings as shown in the image below or any setting that suits your text.

Note: You can also offset the path via, Effect > Path > Offset Path, which is actually a better way because later if you want to edit it, you can always do so from Appearance Panel. Also, if you have not turned your text into outline in Step 1, you will have to offset the path via Effect Menu.

Step 4

While the path you just offset in Step 3 is still selected, open your Pathfinder Panel and hit Add button.

Next, if you wish you may also apply gradient to the offset path. For the Left Slider I choosed the color of gradient as shown in image below and for Right Slider the color is 0% for CMYK.

And, then apply some Drop Shadow (Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow) to the selected path.

That's about it! Quite easy right?!

Also alternatively, instead of applying the drop shadow, you can duplicate the offset path, send it back, offset the path again to around 2 pixels, change it's fill color to black and bring down it's opacity to around 10 or 13%.

In the similar way, you can create the sticker effect on any graphic illustration or shape. But the steps are slightly different.

Take any illustration and give it a background.

Select the illustration with the Selection Tool (V), Copy it (Ctrl/Comm + C) and Paste in Back (Ctrl/Comm + B). While it is still selected, Ungroup it via Object > Ungroup (Ungroup it till it is completely ungrouped, that is till you see the Ungroup button is greyed).

Whilst it is still selected, open your Pathfinder Panel and hit Add button, as shown in the image in Step 4 above. And, change it's Fill color to white (with no stroke) and go to Object > Path> Offset Path and choose the Offset Settings that suits your illustration.

You can see your Offset Path as shown in the image below, if you click on the eye button of your main illustartion in Layer Panel.

Finally apply some Drop Shadow as mentioned above.

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A to Z Free Fonts

This article presents a collection of free fonts arranged alphabetically. Well, I had this idea to showcase some cool free fonts but, just one font for each letter in alphabets. So I searched through my font's folder and bookmarks to feature 26 free fonts I hope, the title is not misleading. ;)

There were many awesome free fonts for many letters and it was a challenge to feature just one, but for some letters like, "H", "I", "O" there were few choices and surprisingly, for letter "X" there was no free font that was very appealing, or maybe I needed to browse more.

Anyways, below you will find 26 free fonts. I tried to put together a list of some known, some unknown, some professional, some fancy, some serif, some san serif, some script... in short a collection of mixed fonts, so that there is something for everyone and everybody finds something new.

The name of the font is on the image itself. Click on the image to view the original source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Is there no proper free font that starts with letter, "X"?!!

 

 

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45 Useful Collection of Free Photoshop PSD Files

Sometimes a design project comes with a very pressing deadline and has to be finished within little time. For such rush projects, some great design resources and freebies are quite useful. And, especially if it is a source .psd file it comes in a lot handy cause you can easily edit or modify it to fit it well with your design. Also, it can be easily mixed and matched! I browsed deviantArt and I found some really great gems, this awesome free .PSD files can be really useful to designers for any design project, plus I think, this freebies can also serve as a learning material as well.

Pencil PSD

Globe Resource v.2

Apple .PSD

Free Product -Software PSD Box

Cassette-PSD-File

notebook psd

 

Curl Preview Border

Designers Icons

Hearts Take Flight

Headphones Resource

15 illustration frames

 

Deluxive Creative Pack

 

5 Red Roses Pack

 

5 Sunflowers Pack

 

Coffee cup Resource

 

DVD Case Inlay - PSD

 

15 illustration frames 2 

 

Skate Longboard template

 

iPod Touch PSD

stiker PSD

 

 

Christmas stock 1 of 5

 

FREE RENDERS

Documents + Letters

Fruits

Item Coffee PSD

Photoshop 3D Cube

Lined Paper

Paperbag .PSD

Only Photoshop

 

My Moleskine

Post-it - psd

Free Film Frame

T-Shirt PSD

Tag PSD

Talk icon

 

 

 

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

 

XBOX 360

 

 

Torn Paper Snapshot Border 

  

Web 2.0 stickers - psd

 

DVD Label - PSD Template

PLASMA TV 

FREE Product Box PSD

Buttons PSD

DVD Case+Art - PSD file

Pixel Arrows PSD

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Creative Process - Making an Ambigram in Illustrator

Ambigrams can be quite fascinating. I saw some brilliant ambigrams and was inspired enough to try and make one myself. For those who don't know what ambigram means, here is a definition from Wikipedia:

"An ambigram is a typographical design or artform that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction, or orientation. The words readable in the other viewpoint, direction or orientation may be the same or different from the original words."

To simply put, a ambigram is one where the word looks/reads same when upside down, or flips to create a whole new word.

There are many types of ambigrams, but the most basic is a rotational ambigram - visual representation of a word that when rotated 180 degrees (i.e. flipped both vertically and horizontally), spells the same word as before.

Rotational ambigram is the one that I tried to make. As it was my first try, for the words I decided to make an ambigram from my name, Sonali as I thought it is short 6 letters word and might be easy to make. Oh and if you still don't know, yes, my name is Sonali meaning golden or someone like gold. :)

Just like any designs, creating an ambigram doesn't have any set steps or rules, it depends on what you want to write. A good ambigram is one which is is legible and readable. I also think, making an ambigram is a good brain exercise as you have to think not only how you're going to write it but also how it would appear when inverted and you've to be quite creative.

I used Adobe Illustrator to make my ambigram, but you can use any app. that allows you to edit text. Also, you can sketch your ambigram with traditional methods, but I'm more of a digital person and I figured out using a font as a base would be the quickest method to make ambigram.

I don't know, how many of you would be interested, but I really wanted to share my process, so, below is a brief overview, a walk-through on how I made an ambigram of my name, Sonali.

Font:

After trying several fonts, I zeroed in on using a font named, Old English Text MT. Rather than Uppercase I decided to use lowercase alphabets. I Outlined the text and Ungroup it.

Planning:

The idea is to convert a font into an ambigram.

The word, Sonali has 6 alphabets and I figured out that "S" would have to look like "li" when rotated 180 degree. "O" should become "a" and "N" should be "N" when I rotate it to 180 degree. Here is a visual presentation of the idea.

For letters S and li:

The challenge was to convert S into li ans li into S. In the image shown below you will see the steps on how I created S and li. I used Illustrator's Selection Tool, Knife Tool for cutting the text and Transform Palette to flip the objects horizontally and vertically.

For letters o and a:

This one was easy as letters o and a are quite similar, in the image below you will see the steps.

For letter N:

This again was easy, the task was to make N look like N itself when you rotate it to 180 degree. I took only the left side of n, duplicated it and flipped it horizontally and vertically. After that I added the middle part and some frilly bits with Pen Tool.

Below you will see my final ambigram. You might have noticed above, that I have added some frilly bits to the text along the way to give it a finishing touch.

And here is the animated version so that you can see, it looks same when you rotate it.

That's about it and it's my first try with an ambigram and I think, it turned out good! I hope you enjoyed the above creative process.

So have you ever made an ambigram or are you planning t o make one? Either way it's fun to make an ambigram. Personally, I didn't follow any tutorials for this, just skimmed through some of the resources. Plus, like I have mentioned above, there are no standard steps to make an ambigram.  But you might like to check following articles and tutorials to get you started with an ambigram:

How to Make an Ambigram on Wikihow
Make an Ambigram
Advice On Learning to Create Ambigrams
How to draw ambigrams - Ambigram tutorial and walkthrough
Typographic Doppelgängers

I have also written a article on Ambigrams for Vectortuts - A Clever Collection of 40+ Inspiring Ambigrams which features some brilliant ambigrams, (logos and otherwise).

*Top image credit:ambigram.com

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