Little Box Of Ideas

  It is the day and age of online readers, electronic books, pdf compendiums and Kindles. At the book store, I might buy a book on an impulse, but 9 out of 10 times, I come back home, get onto the internet and hunt for a bargain on various online bookstores. Such is the lure

A few months ago I refreshed my Twitter Background. I had been toying with the idea of doing a simple but striking mixed-media illustration for the background. When it was done, I received countless nice emails praising the design and many more wanting to know how I had achieved that effect. This cursory tutorial is

At great risk of angering the web design overlords I need to get something off my chest, I can’t stand the term "Bulletproof." When someone decides they have come up with a "sure fire" solution they label it bulletproof, which in reality nothing ever is. @font -face is supported by the top browsers using various

In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to create a Heavy Distressed Grunge Social Sticker Icon. This is a very easy, step by step tutorial. We will be mixing shapes, brushes and blend modes to achieve the final result. Let’s take a look at final result: Materials needed for tutorial Facebook vector logo 20

  A few days ago I was experimenting with plaid or gingham patterns in Illustrator for a Christmas cartoon I was making. It was a fascinating experience to see how simple it was to make a basic plaid pattern and then with just the additions of a few lines of varied widths, it transformed into

As a freelance designer, it is always good practice to send your clients and vendors a holiday greeting at the end of the year. This year, instead of purchasing a box of cards made by another designer, why not show off your own design skills by sending out your own unique greeting card. And, to

Thesis by DIYthemes is one of the most used wordpress themes out there. The reason people like thesis is because it’s not just a beautiful theme per se, but also a smart framework that let’s you customize just everything on the fly. If you often do wordpress design for your clients or for yourself, you

  There is a short way of doing a task and a long, roundabout way of doing it in Illustrator. Ever since I started tinkering with the software earlier this year, I have inadvertently ended up going the longer route. But once in a while you have the a-ha moment on your self-learning journey and

  A few weeks ago I shared a free high resolution photoshop brush set with my readers. Today I am going to show you how to create that brush set in 5 easy steps. We will be using both Illustrator and Photoshop to create very high rsolution, clean vector images for the brush. We are

  Grid patterns as backgrounds on websites are very hip and trendy. They instantly give the feel of a moleskin cahier or graph paper style sketch book, which is quite a coveted look. The best way to achieve this is to make a seamless grid pattern in Photoshop and use that image as a tiling

In a new section cluttering up the blog even more, I will be sharing with you fantastic design tricks that I am picking up everyday that are making my creative life a lot easier and opening up new worlds of design possibilities. In Tricks, I’ll show you how a little trickery can go a long

  Today, I am going to show you how to create a vector, cartoon monster eye in 5 extremely easy steps. This is another one of those beginner tutorials that can be achieved in under 5 minutes flat, with a little bit of practice. I like to use this kind of technique to create a

Didn’t you always want to cut out a picture of your friend from a family photo and place it next to a gorgeous woman in a photo, shot in an exotic locale, just to give his wife a great big scare? What’s wrong with you? You can’t do that to your best friend! Well, you

Yay I wrote my first tutorial. It is a nifty little 5-step process to create your very own vector Comment Bubble. This tutorial is strictly for those who are too intimidated by Ilustrator and who wake up in the middle of the night because they saw the Pen tool in a ghastly nightmare [ a