You can add them to premade photos, or create whole new scenes from scratch. Photoshop gives you those abilities and allows you to express in all ways. In this post you’ll find 40 best tutorials around web to master abstract and lighting effects.

1. Super Slick Dusky Lighting Effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial you are going to put together a sunset image mixing some vector shapes and dusky lighting effects to produce a slick image that will make a nice album cover for a chillout mix.

2. Space Lighting Effects in 10 Steps

In this Photoshop tutorial you will be shown how to create a space scene with some nice lighting effects in 10 easy steps.

3. Advanced Glow Effects

In this tutorial, you’re going to create some really sharp-looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the Pen Tool and Color Blending. The end effect is quite stunning and you’ll pick up some tips effecting the tutorial.

4. A Cool Lighting Effect In Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create that effect you was able to see on the screen at the Macworld San Francisco. It’s basically some lighting effects with blurs and blend modes, but the effect is awesome.

5. Windows Vista Aurora Effect Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial, you’re going to see how to create the Windows Vista wallpaper effect yourself. This Vista lighting effect, sometimes referred to as the Aurora effect, can really transform an ordinary wallpaper to something extraordinary.

6. Awesome Digital Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a digital bokeh effect in Photoshop. The process is very easy and we will be using the super powerful Brush Engine, one of the coolest things in Photoshop.

7. Make Abstract Wallpaper with Brushes

In this tutorial, you will try to mimic the nice abstract preview that Axeraider70 made for his Ultimate Brush Pack 3. This will give the beginners a better idea on how to use these great resources.

8. Space Environment

Learn how to create realistic space scene from scratch using Photoshop.

9. Light and Glow Effect In Photoshop

This Photoshop effect tutorial covers the creation of several different light and glow effects in Photoshop. The effects in outcome consist of smoke, light trails, sparkles, stars and bokeh effects. Luckily it’s pretty simple to create each of these effects in Photoshop.

10. Create an Amazing Ad in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will use some images and play with Blend Modes and Color Adjustments to create a really cool Nike Ad in Photoshop.

11. Create a Dark and Surreal Geometric Space Poster using Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create an abstract space poster using geometrical shapes, masks and apply some filters in Photoshop. Layered PSD file is included.

12. Make a Freezing Cold Snow-themed Abstract Piece

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a snow-themed large piece. You’ll learn how to plan the composition of the piece, to add elements into the composition, how to recycle the piece itself to generate more elements for the piece, how to incorporate pen tools into a design and finally how to finish off and fine tune the piece to make it look great.

13. Use Lighting Effects to Make Photos Sparkle

This tutorial shows how to create a variety of light effects that can be applied to photography or illustration with equal impact. From sparkles, pixie dust effects, colored light spots and light beams, to using splatter effects as a form of lighting, it’s all here.

14. Sparkling Hot Girl in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create an image using light effects and sparks technique. It basically mixes some techniques from different tutorials and takes the best from them.

15. Achieve Brilliant Lighting Effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you’ll learn the essential process of achieving brilliant lighting effects in Photoshop. Using default brushes, blending options and a few stock images, you’ll learn step by step a variety of techniques that you can use in your own digital artworks to achieve professional results.

16. Give a Photo a Complete Glamour Makeover With Stunning Light and 3D Effects

This tutorial teaches you how to transform a regular, every day photo into a real glamour shot. In this tutorial, you will learn how to retouch a model’s face and subtly manipulate her hair. In addition, you will enhance the canvas by adding attractive lighting and 3D effects. This tutorial requires considerable Pen Tool skills, but with perseverance and a passion for design, you will certainly be able to achieve great results.

17. Amazing Photoshop Light Effect in 10 Steps

Learn how to create beautiful “Buy me a coffee” wallpaper in Photoshop. You’ll be using basic brushes and some blending effects.

18. Incredibly Realistic Water Text in Cinema 4D and Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a water text effect. Even though it might look complex it’s a very simple effect. You will need to use Illustrator for the text, then Cinema 4D to make it a 3D text and Photoshop to mix the 3D with some real photos to create a nice and realistic result.

19. How to Enhance Your Subjects With Striking Light Effects in Photoshop

This Photoshop tutorial will show you a simple technique that can be used to enhance any kind of subject with stunning light effects. You will use in particular selection tools, gradients and brushes to achieve the result.

20. Create an Electrifying Light Guitar

In this tutorial, Pawel Kiec will take you though the steps of extracting an image, creating a background, and then making an electrifying glowing guitar that resembles pure neon light. You’ll learn how to manipulate blending modes to achieve color and light, and you’ll also learn how to extract images with the pen tool, and even create flowing lines in Illustrator to compliment the Photoshop work.

21. Energize Your Graphics with Abstract Energy Lines

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create some energetic lines you can use to create more lively digital creations. Effects such as this are great for enhancing abstract compositions.

22. Recreating The Aurora Borealis

In this tutorial, you are going to recreate the northern lights effect, otherwise known as “Aurora Borealis”. Using a combination of filters such as Render Clouds and Motion Blur, you then transform the combined effect to form the shape of an aurora, with a touch of perspective.

23. How to Create a Gorgeous Glassy Text Effect

This tutorial will show you how to create glassy text effect using a series of shapes with different transparency and color effects.

24. Create an Abstract Design with Patterns in Photoshop

Follow this walk through to recreate this detailed design with nothing more than gradient and pattern effects.

25. How To Design An Abstract Wallpaper In Photoshop and Illustrator

In this tutorial you will be creating abstract shapes using the Pen Tool and Shape Tools in Illustrator and then using those shapes to produce an abstract wallpaper in Photoshop using various color blending techniques, textures and transformation tools.

26. How to Create a Realistic IES Lighting Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a realistic IES (photometric) lighting effect. Yoy’ll be using Photoshop CS4 as well as some free plugins and software.

27. Abduzeedo 2010 Light Effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will see how to create new Abduzeedo’s 2010 symbol. It’s a sort of monitor/halftone effect mixed with glows and other light effects. You will play with Blend Modes and Blurs. The whole process is quite simple and it won’t take more than 20 minutes to achieve the same result.

28. Drawing an Abstract Lightbulb

This tutorial covers a couple of simple techniques, which if used accordingly can help you attain great lighting effect.

29. Create Simple, Yet Elegant Abstract Spectrum Lines in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you the method used to design a simple, yet elegant abstract spectrum lines in Photoshop. You will see how easy it is to achieve this nice effect and you can use it a wide range of occasions including perhaps site header backgrounds, logos, or add extra flavor to your photo manipulations.

30. Create an Abstract Composition in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to create an abstract composition using rendered images and light effects. As you can see from the final result preview you will create a mystical and magical effect. In this tutorial you will have to use plenty of Photoshop tools, and also Cinema 4D, but if you don’t have Cinema 4D that’s ok, you will be able do all rest steps of this tutorial.

31. The Making of “Constant Slip”

This tutorial takes you through the creative process of making intriguing light effects and applying them in your work. This is more a process description of making this illustration, than a detailed step by step how to. It will give you some good guidance on how to deal with an illustration like this and cover the overall workflow.

32. Create an Explosive Abstract in Cinema 4D and Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will be creating an explosive abstract piece called “What is Man?“. You will have to use Cinema 4D to create the explosive effects. You will then take the 3D elements over to Photoshop for the final composite and lighting.

33. Create a Vibrant Abstract Space Artwork

In this tutorial, Paul from ForCG.com will show you how to create a vibrant and colorful abstract space artwork using Photoshop, Illustrator, and stock images. You’ll learn techniques on blending modes, the use of the pen tool in Illustrator, and how to combine elements for a visually stunning effect.

34. Quick and Effective Planet, Star and Meteor Impact Creation in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to make planet, star and meteor impact in Photoshop in a quick and effective manner. This is intermediate level tutorial so some steps can be a little tricky, but the outcome is worth it.

35. How to Create Great Abstract Artwork via Custom Brushsets and Particle Effect

In this tutorial, you will be able to follow the steps needed to create this cool abstract artwork via custom brushes and particle effect in Photoshop. You will be demonstrated how to create your own brushes and use them to add particle effect to the image to spice it up.

36. Create a Fantastic Abstract Fan Poster

In this tutorial, you are going to get creative with layering, lighting, and texture to build fantastic abstract piece. More specifically, you’re going to employ some unusual techniques to make a fan poster for the band Omega Code, but you’ll quickly see many different applications for what is taught here.

37. Calculations and Colorization

This Photoshop tutorial will show you how to create an Alpha Channel using the Calculations dialog and you’ll use it to get a really great abstract colorized photo effect.

38. Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design in Photoshop

Galactic space scenes are a popular theme for digital art, they’re packed full of texture and vibrant colour, which are two ingredients of an awesome design. Using Photoshop’s blending modes along with a mix of textures and brushes, you’ll get lost in space and create an abstract cosmos poster design.

39. Colorful Glowing Text Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial will teach you how to achieve great looking light text effect with some simple techniques.

40. Create an Abstract Cloud Jumper in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you’ll manipulate a photo with abstract elements to make it more interesting and active.

For simple users,who don’t code a lot, plugins is the best way to secure your blog. They’re free, easily usable and safe. This post assembles 35 best plugins to make your blog bulletproof. They’re each devised for different purposes, so you will get the best protection from each field.

Secure Your Login

1. Semisecure Login Reimagined

Semisecure Login Reimagined increases the security of the login process by using a combination of public and secret-key encryption to encrypt the password on the client-side when a user logs in. JavaScript is required to enable encryption. It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.

2. Stealth Login

This plugin allows you to create custom URLs for logging in, logging out, administration and registering for your WordPress blog. Instead of advertising your login URL on your homepage, you can create a URL of your choice that can be easier to remember than wp-login.php, for example you could set your login URL to http://www.myblog.com/login for an easy way to login to your website.

3. Login LockDown

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

4. Chap Secure Login

Whenever you try to login into your website, you can use this plugin to transmit your password encrypted. The encryption process is done by the Chap protocol. By activating the Chap Secure Login plugin, the only information transmitted unencrypted is the username, password is hidden with a random number (nonce) generated by the session – and opportunely transformed by the MD5 algorithm. In the first login there will be an error, but don’t worry is only a technical error. Indeed in the next login’s operation, if the values are correct, there will not be errors.

Admin Area

1. Admin SSL

Admin SSL secures login page, admin area, posts, pages – whatever you want – using Private or Shared SSL. Once you have activated the plugin, you have to go to the Admin SSL config page to enable SSL.

Database

1. WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to back up your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

2. Remote Database Backup

This plugin creates SQL dumps of your WordPress database. It is based on the WordPress Database Backup plugin (http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup) – but it removes some of the security restrictions in the plugin to enable automated remote backups. You still need the admin user name and password to do a remote backup.

3. WP-DB Manager

This plugin allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

4. BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress is a backup & recovery suite for your WordPress website. This plugin allows you to back up database tables as well as files and comes with a rich set of options.

5. Wordpress 1 Click EZ Backup

EZ Backup has been turned into a simple one click operation. Click the button and watch your files and database backup be created. You can create a backup of all your webspace files or backup just your wp-content folder all from this one plugin. Unlike the Full EZ Backup plugin this one does not require any special information such as usernames or passwords etc. This plugin costs $5.

6. myEASYbackup

This plugin allows you to back up, restore, migrate your WordPress installation, both files and mySQL tables with a single click. When performing a backup, myEASYbackup creates a compressed data set file that can be stored outside the WordPress installation directory. A list of all data sets on the server is also logged in the admin area.

Spam

1. Antispam Bee

AntispamBee protects blogs from digital rubbish. It is made up of sophisticated techniques and analyzes comments including pings. Also, for reasons of data privacy, the use of AntispamBee is a safe solution, as it is anonymous and registration-free.

2. NoSpamNX

NoSpamNX is the successor of Yawasp (Yet Another WordPress antispam plugin) and is a plugin to protect against automated comment spam (spambots). While Yawasp changed the names of the form fields in the comment template, NoSpamNX works without these modifications, but is equally effective. By eliminating the need for modifications the form field need maximum compatibility with other WordPress plugins or browser is ensured.

3. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

4. Math Comment Spam Protection

Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Example of such question: What is the sum of 2 and 9?

5. Defensio Anti-Spam

Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your readers. Advanced features such as support for OpenID, detailed statistics, charts, RSS feed of our comments (innocent and spam) and counter widget are also available.

6. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.

7. reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuously typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach.

8. Blackhole

Blackhole is a trap for bad bots. The concept is simple: include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap, which then performs a WHOIS Lookup and records the event in the blackhole data file. Once added to the blacklist data file, bad bots immediately are denied access to your site.

9. Invisible Defender

This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.

Other

1. Secure WordPress

Little help to secure your WordPress installation. This plugin removes error information on login page, adds index.html to plugin directory, removes the wp-version, except in admin area.

2. WP Security Scan

This plugin will scan your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and it will suggest some corrective actions.

3. AskApache Password Protect

This plugin doesn’t control WordPress or mess with your database, instead it utilizes fast, tried-and-true built-in Security features to add multiple layers of security to your blog. This plugin is specifically designed and regularly updated specifically to stop automated and unskilled attackers attempts to exploit vulnerabilities on your blog resulting in a hacked site.

4. TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker)

TAC stands for Theme Authenticity Checker. Currently, TAC searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code. If such code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspect code. As of v1.3  TAC also searches for and displays static links.

5. HTTP Authentication

The HTTP Authentication plugin allows you to use existing means of authenticating people to WordPress. This includes Apache’s basic HTTP authentication module and many others.

6. AntiVirus

Viruses, worms and malware exist for WordPress and could easily attack your WordPress installation. AntiVirus for WordPress monitors malicious injections and warns you of any possible attacks. It also has multilingual support.

7. Secure Files

This plugin allows you to upload and download files from outside of your web document root for security purposes. It can be used to can restrict file downloads to users that are logged in, or have a certain user level.

8. Replace WP-Version

Security your WordPress-Installation and eliminate or replace your wp-version and database-version on easy way with a small plugin. If you’re running an older version of WordPress, anyone can view source to see what attacks might work against your blog. This plugin replaces the WP-version with a random string < WP 2.4 and eliminate WP-version > WP 2.4.

9. WP Email Guard

WP Email Guard protects your email addresses included on any post or page from being crawled by spammers. It converts every email written within your post body into a JavaScript code, so the emails is readable and can be clicked by humans only. Spammers can’t crawl JavaScript.

10. WordPress File Monitor

Monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address.

11. WP Dephorm

WP-Dephorm protects your users from the prying eyes of phorm. This is achieved by setting a cookie to opt out of the phorm information mining. Your blog viewers will not have their information stored and used in marketing campaigns whilst viewing your site.

12. WordPress Firewall

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.

13. Secure Contact

SecureContact is a drop in form for users to contact you, based on the WP Contact Form plugin by Ryan Duff. It offers enhanced security by using captcha images.

14. Fast and Secure Contact Form

Fast and secure contact form for WordPress. This contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Super customizable.

15. Ultimate Security Check

The Ultimate Security Check plugin helps you identify security problems with your WordPress installation. It scans your blog for hundreds of known threats, then give you a security “grade” based on how well you have protected yourself.

16. Content Security Policy

Content Security Policy prevents content injection attacks by allowing admins to specify which sites they trust to serve JavaScript and other types of content in their site. Any content which is not explicitly allowed by the policy will be blocked from loading.

Further Resources

• Top 10 ways to stop spam in WordPress
• WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
• 12 Essential Security Tips and Hacks for WordPress
• 13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area
• 20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks
• 11 Ways To Secure Your WordPress Blog
• 10 Things to do After Installing WordPress

All the tutorials are categorized in 6 categories so that you can easily find what you are looking for (clicking on the category will navigate you to it):

1. Scenes Tutorials
2. Text Effects Tutorials
3. Character Tutorials
4. Icon Tutorials
5. Objects Tutorials
6. Illustration & Design Tutorials (Misc Tutorials)

1. Create an Elegant Theater Interior with Illustrator

2. How to Create a Vintage Ocean Liner Poster

3. Create a Realistic, Vector Building Illustration

4. Create an Illustration of a Pearl-Filled Clam on an Ocean Bed

5. Learn to Create a Financial Crisis, Vector Illustration

6. How to Create a Cute Earth Illustration in Vector

7. How to Make a White Holiday Scene in Illustrator

8. Smoothly Shift Winter Colors, While Creating an Icy, Vector Landscape

9. How to Create a Landscape Wallpaper for your Desktop

10. How to Create a Cartoon Spaceship Interior in Under One Hour

11. How to Create Your Own Stylized Vector City

12. How to Create a Classic Vector Painting with Watercolor Washes and Line Art

13. How to Create a Fun Hot Air Balloon Sky Scene

14. How to Create a Textured Vector Landscape

15. How to Create a Stylized Underwater Scene

1. Create Colorful, Layered Paper Type in Illustrator

2. How to Create a Smokin’ Western Type Treatment in Illustrator

3. Make a Torn Vector Desktop Wallpaper with Angled Text

4. Create an Old Paper & Feather Pen Illustration

5. Create a Swirly Type Treatment

6. Create a bubble text effect

7. Create a folded paper text effect

8. Create An Editable Stitched Label Type Treatment

9. Turn Any Font Into a Sketch Font

10. Creating Editable Letterpress Styled Text

11. How to Create a Trendy Retro Type Treatment

12. Creating an Environmentally Friendly Green Type Treatment

1. Create a Cute Retro-Flavored Teddy Bear with the Gradient Mesh Tool

2. Modeling the Human Face in Illustrator

3. How to Design a Cheeky Koala Mascot Head

4. Create a Colorful, Vector Carnival Mask

5. How to Create Typeface Characters

6. Create a Set of Shiny Character Eyes

7. How to Create a Curious Owl in Illustrator CS4

8. How to Create a Vector Goldfish in Six Steps

9. Use Illustrator to Create a Fun, 3D, Character Logo

10. Tracing a Vector Face From a Reference Photo

11. How to Create an Eagle Head Sticker

12. How to Create a Stinking Zombie Flesh-Eater in Illustrator

13. How to Create a Mosaic Portrait from a Photograph

14. How to Create a Fantasy Character in Illustrator

15. How to Illustrate a LeBron James Cartoon Character

16. How to Create a Vector Illustration and Prepare it for Micro-Stock Sale

17. How to Create a Web Site Mascot

18. How to Create a Cartoon Character with Expressive Lines

19. How to Illustrate a Cute Emo Kid

20. How to Create a Killer Chainsaw Bunny Character

21. How to Turn a Sketch into a Fat Cat Vector Illustration

22. Create a Sweet Pair of Glossy Vector Lips

23. How to Create a Cute Bunny Vector Character

24. Create the face of a grumpy bear

25. Create the face of a greedy monkey

26. Create the face of a goofy bunny

27. Create a cute and simple hippo face

28. Create A Vector Art Twitter Bird Character Icon

29. Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator

30. How To Draw a Cute Vector Dog Character in Illustrator

31. Create a Rolling Stones Inspired Tongue Illustration

32. Create A Cute Creature Character From A Sketch

33. Create a Cute Panda Bear Face Icon

34. Create a Happy Sun Character

35. Create a Character Mascot with Adobe Illustrator CS4

36. Create a Twitter Style Bird Mascot

1. How to Create a Simple Cardboard Box Icon

2. Create an Ominous Jar of Purple Ooze

3. How to Draw a Glossy Yo-Yo Icon using Adobe Illustrator

4. How to Create a Distinguished Personal Diary Icon

5. How to Make an Opulent Chair Icon

6. How to Create a Hyper-realistic Flashlight

7. How to Create a Shiny Bucket Icon

8. Create a Stylized First Aid Icon in Illustrator

9. Creating a Toaster-Popping Illustration

10. Reflections Done Right – Creating a Money Roll Icon

11. How to Create A Realistic Chef’s Knife in Illustrator

12. How to Create a Golden, Vector Compass in Illustrator

13. How To Create An Academy Icon From Simple Shapes

14. How to Create an Energy Saving Bulb in Illustrator

15. Create a Fun Icon of Frozen People on Ice – Part I, Create a Fun Icon of Frozen People on Ice – Part II

16. How to Create a Recycling, Paper Bag Icon

17. How to Create a Photorealistic iMac and Magic Mouse

18. How to Illustrate a Brain Icon for OSX and Vista

19. How to Create a Gearbox Settings Icon Using Simple Shapes

20. Create a Yummy Ice Cream Icon with Mesh Objects and Blends

21. Abracadabra, How to Create a Magic Hat Icon

22. How to Make a Sweet Vector Popsicle Illustration

23. How to Create a Vector Sketchbook

24. How to Create an Hourglass Icon in About an Hour

25. How to Create an Alarm Clock Icon

26. Make 3D Yet Flat Looking Shopping Basket Icons

27. How to Make a Vector Military Cap Icon

28. Craft a Delicious Chinese Food Icon

29. How to Turn Glasses into a Great Geek Icon

30. How to Create a Magic Wand Icon

31. Create a laptop icon

32. Create a simple paint brush icon

33. Create a documents icon

34. Create a simple lcd monitor icon

35. Create a classic calendar icon

36. Create A 3D Vector Book Icon

37. How to Create a Vector iMac Graphic in Illustrator

38. How to Create a Vector Safari Compass in Illustrator

39. Create a Tasty Burger Icon in Illustrator

40. Design a Stylish Wallet Icon in Illustrator

41. Create a Vintage TV Set Icon in Illustrator

42. Create a Simple Storefront Icon

43. Create A Briefcase Icon

44. Create a Stylized GPS Icon

45. How to Design a Set of Multicolored Buddy Icons

55. Make a Handy 3D Vector Calendar Icon

56. How to Create a Transparent Battery Icon

57. How to Create a Juicy RSS Feed Icon

58. Design a Vector Audio Speaker Icon In Illustrator

60. Create a Vector Film Slate Icon

61. Create An Aperture Style Camera Lens Icon

62. Create a Vector Lock Icon Design

1. How to Create a Still Life in the Style of Primitive Art

2. How to Create a Medieval Paper Scroll

3. How to Create a Lustrous Electric Guitar

4. Create a Detailed, Vector-based iPhone Illustration, Part 1, Create a Detailed, Vector-based iPhone Illustration, Part 2

5. How to Create a Charming Jewelry Box

6. How to Create a Tube of Paint and a Brush, Using Adobe Illustrator

7. How to Illustrate a Marvelous Violin Icon

8. How to Create a Vector Baseball Bat and Ball

9. How to Illustrate a Professional Looking Apple iPad

10. How To Create a Sleek DVD Player with Adobe Illustrator

11. Create a Stylized, Vector Rubik’s Cube

12. How to Create a Shiny, Vector Laptop

13. Create a Cute, Stylized Suitcase Tag in Pink

14. Draw a Glowing, Vector Pocket Watch – Front and Back

15. How To Make an Olympic Gold Medal In Adobe Illustrator CS4

16. How to Create an Electronic Piano in Illustrator

17. How to Create an Elegant, Vector Pen in Illustrator

18. How to Make Super-Sharp, Vector Swords

19. How to Create a 3D Marker in Illustrator

20. How To Create A Vector Wacom Tablet In Illustrator

21. How to Create Stereo Headphone Plugs in Illustrator

22. Make a Sleek and Refreshing Vector Energy Drink

23. How to Create Semi-Realistic Scissors in Illustrator

24. Hit the Mark with a Realistic Vector Dartboard

25. How to Make a Vector Diamond Ring in Illustrator

26. How to Create a Stack of Poker Chips

27. How to Create Shiny, Vector Dice in Illustrator

28. How to Draw A Realistic Vector Light Bulb From Scratch

29. Make a 3D Vector Film Roll, Drawn In Perspective

30. How to Make a Detailed 3D Vector Tire in Illustrator

31. Create a Milk Bottle with a Funny Cow Label

32. How to Create an Enchanted Holiday Ornament Design

33. How to Make Festive Vector Gift Boxes

34. Craft a Vector Collegiate Notebook Design

35. How to Create a Colorful Retro Style TV

36. Create a Checkered 3D Chess Figure Scene

37. How to Create a Fresh Mojito Cocktail Glass

38. Create an iPod Nano

39. Create a popcorn box

40. Create an illustration of a fountain pen

41. How To Create A Realistic Pendrive

42. Wooden Smoking Pipe

43. Vector Plasma Television

44. Create An Awesome Space Rocket Avatar in Illustrator

45. How to Create a Box Cutter Style Vector Knife

46. Make a Shiny Gum Ball Machine with Mesh Gradients

47. Create a Stylized Vector Police Badge with Metal and Leather

1. Using Gradients to Create a Vector Bug

2. How to Make an Attractive Vector Butterfly

3. How to Create a Stylized Vector Grasshopper

4. How to Turn a Client Approved Snack Label into a 3D Looking Snack Pack

5. Make an Awesome Military Themed Vector Package

6. How to Create Sheet Rolls with Custom Spirals

7. How to Make a Vector Photo Album and Wood Background

8. Create a Customizable Aluminum and Glass Styled Vector Emblem

9. How to Create an Art Gallery Frame in Vector

10.How to Create a Caramel Ripple Effect

11. How to Create Realistic, Vector Bubbles

12. How to Create a Rainy Window Vector Background

13. How to Create a Vector Optical Illusion

14. Create a Vector Tree with Custom Brushes and the Gradient Mesh Tool

15. How to Create a Rocketing, Vector Aircraft Shuttle

16. How to Create Your Own Abstract, Music Design

17. How to Create a Captivating, Self-Promotion Kit

18. How to Make an Inspired, Golden Painting in Illustrator

19. Create an Abstract, Textured Artwork in Illustrator

20. Create a Valentines Day Illustration for Your Sweetie

21. How to Create a Retro Vector Illustration with Stylized Lines

22. How to Create Colorful Abstract Artwork in Illustrator

23. How to Illustrate Deliciously Realistic Grapes using Simple Techniques

24. From Sketch to Vector, Simple Illustration That’s Not So Simple

25. Illustrating a Chili Pepper with Illustrator’s Envelope Distort Tool

26. How to Design a Shiny Zipper

27. How to Create a Pencil and Paper Illustration

28. Dress Up Your Desktop with a Sharp Dual Screen Wallpaper

29. How to Make a Retro RC Airplane Poster

30. How To Create Outstanding Modern Infographics

31. Turn a Boring Bar Graph into a 3D Masterpiece

32. How to Make Realistic Skate Wheels in Illustrator

33. Create a Code-Style T-Shirt Design for Website Promotion

34. Create a Fun Halloween Vector Poster

35. Create the Mini Logo

36. Japanese Sushi

37. Gradient Mesh Flower

38. Realistic Orange

39. How to Make an Icy Cocktail

40. Create A Mouthwatering Chocolate Covered Strawberry

41. Design Gift Boxes Using Illustrator’s 3D Tools

42. Create a Stylish Sports Car Dashboard With Areas of Detailed Realism

Let us know if we have missed some thing awesome and we will be happy to update the article.

Looking at the work of other designers can be a truly inspiring experience. There are many talented ones out there. This time we decided to share some great colorful logo designs.

We hope you’ll enjoy these!

We hope these logos have brought you some inspiration for your future designs. Which one is your favorite? We’d love to hear your opinions. And remember to share this article if you like it. Thanks!

1. The key to productivity is managing your ENERGY, not your time

Tony Schwarz is a frequent writer for the Harvard Business Review and also the author of 2 bestseller books, “The power of full engagement” and “The way we’re working isn’t working.”

His main point is, we aren’t hardwired to work like machines all the time. We are hardwired to make waves – to be alert during the day and to sleep at night, and to work at the highest intensity only for limited periods of time (during the day.)

He mentions an example of working 90 minutes and then taking a break for 30 minutes (or what I do is work 45 minutes and take a break for 15 minutes.) The key point is, during those 90 minutes you need to be doing your job without multitasking or being distracted and during the ‘rest time’ of 30 minutes, do something that fills you with energy (like listening to music, walking outside, exercising, but not reading emails because that rarely gives you much energy.)

You, as a web designer, can be way more productive in your work if you organize your time and manage your energy in this fashion. Try, just once, working for 45 minutes without distractions and then take a break of 15 minutes. Then do that again. Notice the difference. You’ll probably get a lot more done than usual. I also highly recommend Tony’s books if you want to learn more about this. It’s really counter-intuitive but it works very well.

2. How do you define ’success’? By measuring

If you’re doing freelance work, one of the main things that determine your success might be:

• Number of projects being done monthly
• Referrals by existing clients

and so on. In business, there’s a term called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and every major company has a number of them. If the company consists of people freelancing for other people, some of the KPIs might be the ones I’ve mentioned above. You can have all kinds of KPIs really. There are process KPIs, outcome KPIs… (see the link below for a great resource from Harvard Business School to learn more on this).

One short nugget on how to find the best KPIs for your business (got this from one business consulting book): Ask yourself: “What would success look like for your business”? This is a more sutble question than ‘How would you define success’ because with the second one, you don’t invoke your imagination and imagination is a very powerful thing. What would success look like for freelancers? A lot of clients who are willing to pay $500 per project? Put that as a KPI and focus on that…what you focus on is what you get.

Why do companies use KPIs? Because the best way to know whether you’re making progress is to compare yourself against some criteria (or benchmark). I highly recommend this short course to learn more on KPIs and performance management.

You can try and set up a few (2 to 4 at most) KPIs and try this concept. For example, if you’re selling website templates, you can measure the average time it takes you to make 1 template. Then you can set up a goal to make that time shorter (without compromising the quality, of course.) So you might come with a new process of making the header faster or putting all together. There are endless possibilities.

3. Don’t just innovate but imitate!

Imitation is a bad word, no? Yet, it’s one of the keys to human progress overall. I’ve recently read an article and a book on this and was astounded by the research. 97.8% of the value of innovations goes to imitators! And this is from 15+ years of research, not some stupid and false statistic.

Web designers love to innovate and re-invent the wheel. Many forget there are certain conventions for web designs and certain things that are proven to be working over time.

Now don’t try to go to extremes (like some people do), and say “now, imitation is everything and innovation sucks!”. No, that isn’t the case at all as we’ll later see. I think one of the main mistakes we do is to really go to various extremes when in fact it’s often the balance that’s the key and brings the most success. That’s not what society and popular culture teaches us (otherwise, would movies be fun? :) ).

I’m not saying it’s bad to innovate, I’m just saying that you should treat innovation and imitation as complementary and not like black and white. Oded Shenkar, who is the author of some of the research on imitation and the article I’ve linked to above, coined the term imovators. Those are people and companies that might take something, imitate it, but also improve (innovate) on it. Take McDonalds, Visa or Wal-mart for a start.

Many people have been doing this in web design. There’s been a bunch of great modification of the navigation menu (which proved to be working over time), for example. People have taken the concept and added some of their own modifications (innovative sub-menus), for example (from samsung.com):

That’s what imovators are :)

For a start, don’t try to re-invent the wheel but it’s totally okay to try to make it better (as long as it’s within legal boundaries.)

I hope these ideas gave you some useful insights.

This article contains 50 best Photoshop and Illustrator character designing tutorials. Most of these tutorials require a hand drawn sketch, so don’t forget about your pencil and paper.

1. Create a Cute Little Tiger in Illustrator

In this tutorial, you will be drawing the tiger, but you will be doing it a little bit different. Instead of portraying the tiger as a savage and mean creature, author will teach you how to draw a cute little tiger that you will be able to use in your projects, as a desktop wallpaper, etc. You will also learn lots of Illustrator techniques as well. This is the perfect tutorial for year 2010, the year of the tiger.

2. Create a Cute Baby Monster Character in Illustrator

Vector monster tutorial for all you designers learning Illustrator to get stuck into! Use Illustrator’s basic shapes to form the outline and structure of a cute baby monster character, before adding colour, gradients and effects to bring the design to life.

3. Draw an Angry Little Samurai in Illustrator

This tutorial will show you how to draw a samurai in Illustrator using shapes, free time and desire.

4. Create a Character Mascot with Adobe Illustrator CS4

In this intermediate Illustrator tutorial you will be shown how to create a vector character mascot from a sketch in Adobe Illustrator CS4. The techniques in this tutorial can easily be applied to other illustrations, icons, and design elements; as well as legacy versions of Illustrator.

5. How to Create a Curious Owl in Illustrator CS4

Learn how to create non-spooky scene set at dusk, with a curious owl sitting on a branch and some scenery in the background.

6. Create a Cute Panda Bear Face Icon

In the following easy tutorial, you will be shown how to create a cute panda bear face icon all from ellipses (well, actually there is one rectangle for the background). The great part about this tutorial, is that you can easily apply the techniques to other icons, illustrations, logos, or other projects.

7. Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator

Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. You’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. You can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.

8. How to Turn a Sketch into a Fat Cat Vector Illustration

This tutorial aims to guide you from sketchbook to screen; a “Fat Cat” doodled with biro translated into a neat vector caricature. Intermediate knowledge of Adobe Illustrator is advised.

9. Create the Face of a Greedy Monkey

This tutorial will help you create a simple illustration of a monkey face. It uses the Ellipse Tool, the Pen Tool, the Rectangle Tool, the Crystallize Tool or the Gradient Tool. For the shadow effects you’ll use some classic effects like the Inner Glow or the Gaussian Blur.

10. How to Create a Slick Anime Character in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to draw an Anime Style character. To start, you’ll rely on basic shapes and the Brush Tool. Also, you’ll learn one of author’s personal techniques he calls “The Front Mirror” which he uses for almost any of his animation projects. This technique will save you lots of time, and will help you to draw many characters for your projects in a very fast way.

11. Creating Vector Characters in Illustrator

This character was created to be a mascot of sorts, and aimed at all ages. It is usable at a variety of sizes, and in both print and animation. See detailed PDF walk-through tutorial how to create it.

12. Create a Happy Sun Character

This intermediate tutorial is great for logos, children illustrations, and other projects relating to climate change. Moreover, you can easily apply this tutorial to other illustrations, logos, and projects.

13. Create a Student Character Mascot with Adobe Illustrator

This is an intermediate Illustrator tutorial level where you can learn how to create a vector student character mascot from a sketch in Adobe Illustrator. The techniques can easily be applied to other character design, illustrations or icons.

14. Create a Character Illustration Wallpaper

Following this tutorial you will be able to create a character illustration wallpaper in Photoshop just like in image below.. In this tutorial you will be focusing more on the shapes, scaling and using group layers.

15. Drunken Monkey Photoshop Tutorial

This article will explain yo you step-by-step how author’s designed an attractive character in one of his recent projects, namely for the company “Drunken Monkey Collectibles”. He will review the entire design process, from the first sketches and drafts to the final touches with Adobe Photoshop.

16. Create a Vector Pirate Cartoon Character from a Hand Drawn Sketch

By firstly using the power of pen and paper a character design is created, which is then scanned into the computer to use as a base for tracing with Adobe Illustrator. The final outcome is a colourful cartoon character in vector format.

17. Create a Blue Vector Character from Pencil Sketch to Coloring

Quick tutorial in which you will going to make a blue character illustration thing. You will be using Photoshop on this tutorial, but don’t forget about pencil and a paper because you’re going to start this with sketching.

18. How to Create a Stinking Zombie Flesh-Eater in Illustrator

In this tutorial, you will see how to create a cartoon zombie in Illustrator. Starting by creating a fresh corpse, you will then ‘yuck’ it up using a number of techniques.

19. Create Simple Cartoon Characters in Photoshop

You will be walked through the basics of colourful vector art to get you going on Photoshop CS and newer.

20. How to Create a Cute and Adorable Twitter Icon in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a cute and adorable Twitter icon. Throughout this tutorial, you will use some of the basic tools like Ellipse Tool, Pen Tool and Gradient Tool.

21. Create a Cool Vector Panda Character in Illustrator

Here’s a step by step walk-through of the process used to create a cool Panda character, from the basic outlines through to the detailed final design.

22. How to Create a Cool Monkey Character in Illustrator

In this tutorial, yo’re going to be creating a monkey character illustration using Adobe Illustrator. You’ll be using basic Shape Tools, the Pen Tool and various other Illustrator techniques to create the illustration.

23. Create Lady Birds Insect Tutorial Using Adobe Illustrator

You can find these cute little bugs being almost anywhere and they won’t ever cause anything but cheers. In this tutorial you will be shown how to create one cool lady bird using Adobe Illustrator.

24. How to Create a Cute Bunny Vector Character

In this Illustrator tutorial, you will see you how to create a cute bunny character. This tutorial uses simple shapes and gradients that are easy to apply to other character illustrations. The great thing about this tutorial is you don’t have to be an amazing artist to be able to do this.

25. Create A Cute Creature Character From A Sketch

In this tutorial you will see how to create a cute creature from a sketch. This tutorial uses custom brushes, the Paintbrush tool, Pen tool, and the Live Paint Bucket tool. Even if you’re not a huge fan of the cuteness, you can use these techniques for other illustrations, logos, and vector elements.

26. Character Development Tutorial Series

This 5 part video tutorial series using a combination of images, video, and commentary will walk you through the process of creating a character from scratch. This tutorial does a great job of showing you how to loosen up, explore ideas, and develop concepts into finished artwork.

27. Character Design from Life

In a handful of over-the-shoulder video tutorials author, David Colman, shares some tips on using real-life inspiration to create unique characters. What makes this series really shine, however, is that is offers a glimpse at how you can take your drawings to the next level by implementing simple and effective design elements.

28. How to Create Typeface Characters

Learn how to take different sections of the characters of a specific font and put them together, giving birth to different kinds of creatures.

29. Drawing Homer Simpson

This tutorial will teach you how to draw the Simpson’s favorite character, Homer Simpson, from grounds up. Your drawing project will involve drawing the outline of the character, applying strokes to these outlines, and then using various selection tools to color Homer’s skin and clothing. You will then finish it off by adding shadows and highlights to make it look similar to the image below.

30. Character Creation in Adobe Illustrator

Simple tutorial where you can learn basic techniques of character creation.

31. How to Create a Vector Illustration and Prepare it for Micro-Stock Sale

There are numerous micro-stock websites that vector designers can design for and make consistent earnings through. This tutorial details a professional workflow for creating vector illustrations and prepping the artwork for these sites. There are also included a bunch of time-saving tools and tips as well.

32. How to Create a Vector Character

This tutorial walks you through the creation of a vector character logo using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4.

33. Drawing Vector-Looking Cat Illustration Using Photoshop

If you are a beginner or an amateur, this tutorial in web-graphics would certainly be of a great use for you. The aim of this tutorial is to place in the clearest light the process of creating the chosen image. Step by step you will see the whole process and with the help of author’s notes you will clarify all these stages.

34. Cartoon Character – Dexter

Dexter is probably one of those cartoon characters that don’t need an introduction, but anyway, for those who never heard about him, Dexter is boy genius that has a giant secret laboratory filled with his great inventions. In this simple tutorial I will show you how to draw this character inside Adobe Illustrator.

35. How to Make an Animated Paper Robot

In this tutorial you’ll go through the steps of designing and making an animated paper robot character. Not just a picture, this is a moving character that will sit nicely on top of your computer monitor.

36. Make Colorful Bean Characters on Illustrator CS4

Learn how to draw these awesome looking characters using Pen Tool and Gradients.

37. Create the Face of a Grumpy Bear

In this tutorial you can learn to create a grumpy bear face. For the basic shapes you’ll only need the Ellipse Tool and some Warp effects. Later, for some discrete details, you’ll need the Inner Glow, the Gaussian Blur or the Drop Shadow.

38. How to Design a Cheeky Koala Mascot Head

This tutorial will show you how to combine basic shapes with some clever coloring and blending to make a fantastic looking koala character. You’ll use some opacity masks, brushes, gradients and effects, in addition to an easy shading technique you’ll find yourself using in plenty of other projects.

39. Create the Face of a Goofy Bunny

The following tutorial will help you create the face of a goofy bunny. You won’t need the Pen Tool. Only the Ellipse Tool and the Rectangle Tool plus some basic effects like the Inner Glow, the Drop Shadow or the Warp effect.

40. Create Character Driven Book Cover Art Using Illustrator and Photoshop

This two-part tutorial on creating the “Let’s Go To Monster School!” book cover, will show you a complete process from initial sketch to the final artwork, using an Illustrator to Photoshop integrated workflow. In Part 1 you will employ Illustrator to trace our hand drawn sketch, lay down the shapes and define the basic colors.

41. How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design

Get busy with Adobe Illustrator and design a cute bear character and surrounding scenery in just two colours, ready for use as a cool t-shirt design.

42. How To Draw a Cute Vector Dog Character in Illustrator

Follow this step by step design process of the making of a vector character. You’ll start with a hand drawn sketch of Chris Spooner’s dog, Jake the labrador retriever, then add various lines, colour fills gradients and highlights to produce a cute cartoon representation.

43. Draw a Nice Punk Kid in Illustrator

This tutorial will take you through the process of drawing a nice punk kid in Illustrator. You’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth and details to our illustration.

44. How To Draw Ferb Step By Step

Phineas and Ferb is an animated television comedy series. They are also known as “Disney’s Phineas and Ferb“. This tutorial is about only Ferb where you will be guided how to draw Ferb step by step in Illustrator. It’s a very basic tutorial where beginners can also practice this easily. You can also download the source file of Ferb at the end of this tutorial.

45. Create a Cute Pig Postcard from Sketch

This tutorial aims to guide you from sketchbook to screen; a “Cute Pig” drawn with pencil in just a couple of minutes translated into a vector postcard.

46. Creating Convincing Characters

In this tutorial, you’ll learn some basic skills for converting your character from a pencil doodle to a complete, fully coloured image – learning some crucial Illustrator skills along the way.

47. Symmetrical Illustration: Thug Bunny!

This tutorial will go through the method of using symmetry in your artwork. Learn how to do half the work but still get the full benefit from your artwork.

48. How to Draw a Funny Bee Illustration

Although they can be very dangerous, bees are loved around the world for honey they are producing. From this tutorial you will learn how to create a funny illustration of a bee inside Adobe Illustrator.

49. Design a Cute Hamster Avatar

Learn how to design cute hamster in Illustrator from scratch. There’s also a soundtrack included in tutorial to help you work.

50. Draw a Beautiful Female Character

Office life would be very boring if there wouldn’t be those hot and strict secretaries. This simple tutorial shows you how to create a beautiful female character using Illustrator.

Among thousands of logos out there, some of them may look cheesy and cheap, and some visually give us confident. In order to grab our attention and get our trust, many companies even consider to re-brand/redesign their logo. As might be expected, the company will have to take the risk and be prepared of the pros and cons of this act. They should have really consider the reasons behind the redesign of their brand.

Below is a list, in no particular order of what I think to be famous and successful logo redesign from their old logo to the latest with explanations of what has been improved.

1. Toys R Us

Toys R Us has been the second largest overall toy retailer in the United States with many branch chain which located in Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Canada.

Old Logo History:

The yellow reverse “R” in quotation marks, which is similar to the Cyrillic letter Я, (ISO 9: Я), imitates a small child’s backward writing of “R”, which is short for “are”. The “R” is the most distinctive part of the retailer’s colorful kid-friendly logo. The current, modernized Toys “R” Us logo was introduced in 1969 as the first logo, then a blue star was added to the logo in late-1998/early-1999 during the Toys “R” Us “Concept 2000″ era.

New Logo – What has been improved:

On September 24, 2007 the logo was redesigned with alternating sized characters and a star in the middle of the reverse R. The letter R was changed from yellow to blue. In this new logo, the company achieve a better shape for the font character, leaving the “classic” feel behind and gives a bright and fun feel to it.

2. UPS

UPS, short for United Parcel Service, Inc. is the world’s largest package delivery company. Headquartered in Sandy Springs, Georgia, United States. UPS is well known for its brown trucks, internally known as package cars (hence the company nickname “The Big Brown Machine”).

Old Logo History:

The iconic package and shield originally designed in 1961 by Paul Rand. It became their original logo and first saw use in 1916 when the company was American Messenger Company. In 1935, the logo was redesigned to reflect the company’s new name United Parcel Service.

New Logo – What has been improved:

UPS decided to re-brand themselves in 2003, the new logo was designed by New York-based FutureBrand and it represents a strategic decision to emphasize UPS’s expanded business operations. All four designs for the logo shared the shield theme, but the new design clearly feels much more modern and and clean. Although the logo obviously doesn’t direct us to the shipping company, it gives the safe feel with the shield on the logo, knowing that our package will be protected.

3. Skittles

Skittles is a brand of fruit-flavored candies which were first made commercially in 1974 by a British company.

Old Logo History:

Candy brands are some of the most enduring brands in the market. Skittles have the excellent & long standing tag line ‘Taste the Rainbow”, with this tag line the company only focus on the rainbow color for additional effect behind their “Skittles” text which in this case become their logo.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Miles Newlyn admitted that concept & design for the new Skittles logo is not his but that of Dragon Rouge. Nevertheless, The colorful ‘tongue’ he retouched has been blogged around the internet. This multi-colored tongue concept is a literal though stylized translation of the brand’s slogan, “Taste the rainbow.”

4. MTV

Easily recognized since it’s first launched on August 1, 1981 is an American cable television network based in New York City. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs. Today, MTV doesn’t play music videos, and primarily broadcasts a variety of popular culture and reality television shows targeted at adolescents and young adults.

Old Logo History:

Throughout MTV’s early days, the channel’s main logo was a large yellow “M” with red letters “TV,” but unlike most networks’ logos, the MTV logo constantly morphed and adapted with different colors, patterns, and images filling in the large block letter. The very first moments of MTV after the “moon landing,” as well as the top of every hour until at least the mid-1980s, featured a rapidly changing station ID logo that changed its appearance several times per second. The only constant aspects of MTV’s logo at the time were its general shape and proportions; everything else was dynamic.

New Logo – What has been improved:

MTV’s logo has been instantly recognizable for the last three decades. Up to this point, MTV revised their original 1981 logo by excluding the “Music Television” caption under the big “M” letter, and the trailing letter “V” that branched off to the side of the original logo. Their long-running tag line “Music Television” at this time has been officially dropped since they are not primarily broadcast music videos anymore.

5. Delta Air Lines

As it emerged from bankruptcy, Delta Air Lines wanted to signal to both customers and employees that the airline was “coming back new and better”. In preparation for the momentous occasion, Delta engaged Lippincott to reposition the airline with a revitalized image and redesigned customer experience that would force reconsideration of the airline.

Old Logo History:

Delta’s identity has been short-lived for the last decade or so. Throughout its history with a whopping 19 logos in 78 years — with two major identity changes. See Delta Logo Timeline.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Some people think of Delta’s redesigned logo is more to a realign than a redesign. In spite of that,  Delta’s new logo now looks sharp. The colors in are more subdued and the choice of a all caps sans serif typeface gives the modern look and feel as well. This 3-dimensional red widget logo successfully reflects Delta’s transformation into a highly-differentiated, customer-focused airline.

6. Starbucks

With the largest coffeehouse company in the world, we can hardly ignore this green logo from Starbucks.

Old Logo History:

The original Starbucks logo sported a wood cut type illustration of a siren from Greek mythology. The logo has been significantly streamlined over the years. In the first version, which was based on a 17th-century the Starbucks siren was topless and had a fully visible double fish tail. In the second version, which was used from 1987 – 1992, her breasts were covered by her flowing hair, but her navel was still visible, and the fish tail was cropped slightly.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Starbucks’ current logo is used since 1992, her navel and breasts are not visible at all, and only vestiges remain of the fish tails. Today the current incarnation of the logo is much more streamlined and and memorable. It is a significant and unique logo for coffeehouse furthermore giving the impression of ‘one of a kind’.

7. Sprint

Sprint is a global Internet carrier and makes up a portion of the Internet backbone. In the United States, the company is the third largest long distance provider and also owns a majority of Clearwire, which operates the largest wireless broadband network.

Old Logo History:

The original Sprint logo was used from 1989 to 2005 with 4th variant used from 1995–2005.

New Logo – What has been improved:

When Sprint merged with Nextel a few years back they underwent massive re-branding campaign. Nextel’s attention getting black and yellow color scheme was merged with The Sprint name. The new symbol is based on sprints signature ‘pin drop’. The switch to a nice sans serif typeface also does wonders for making the logo look modern. This logo really shines when the symbol is set in motion.

8. KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken)

Old Logo History:

By the late 1990s, the stylized likeness of Colonel Sanders as the KFC logo had been modified and only used until November 2006.

New Logo – What has been improved:

With the colonel putting on his apron to replace his suit coat, this new KFC logo giving us the friendly and inviting feel. The new angled backdrop to the logo also adds a nice dynamic feel and implies quickness.

9. CBS Broadcasting Inc.

CBS Broadcasting Inc. (CBS) is a major American television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network’s former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the “Eye Network” in reference to the shape of the company’s logo.

Old Logo History:

CBS unveiled its Eye Device logo on October 17, 1951. Before that, from the 1940s through 1951, CBS Television used an oval spotlight on the block letters C-B-S.[16] The Eye device was conceived by William Golden based on aPennsylvania Dutch hex sign as well as a Shaker drawing and made its broadcasting debut on October 20, 1951. Since then the company insisted on keeping the Eye device and using it as much as possible.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Today the logo which is alternately known as theEyemark, has been slightly changed on the typography to get the modern and futuristic feel, keeping their classic long lasting Eye device logo (vaguely bigger) in the front of “CBS” characters.

10. Apple Inc.

Old Logo History:

Apple’s first logo, designed by Jobs and Wayne, depicts Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. Almost immediately, though, this was replaced by Rob Janoff’s “rainbow Apple”, the now-familiar rainbow-colored silhouette of an apple with a bite taken out of it. Janoff presented Jobs with several different monochromatic themes for the “bitten” logo. In 1998, with the roll-out of the new iMac, Apple discontinued the rainbow theme and began to use monochromatic themes, nearly identical in shape to its previous rainbow incarnation.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Entering the digital era, in 2007 Apple started to redesign their apple logo to give their customer a simple, minimal, yet modern look with the touch of chrome shade.

11. FedEx

Old Logo History:

The original Federal Express logo was designed by Richard Runyan in 1973.

New Logo – What has been improved:

The Fed is always purple and the Ex is in a different color for each division and grey for the overall corporation use. The original “FedEx” logo had the Ex in orange; it is now used as the FedEx Express wordmark. The FedEx wordmark is notable for containing a hidden right-pointing arrow in the negative space between the “E” and the “X”, which was achieved by designing a proprietary font, based on Univers and Futura, to emphasize the arrow shape. Other than giving the new and modern look, this new logo with the hidden arrow was a genius idea behind their new logo,  made it looks like it’s presenting the moving forward company as well.

12. City of Melbourne

The City of Melbourne is a Local Government Area in Victoria, Australia, located in the central city area of Melbourne.

Old Logo History:

City of Melbourne first logo M and leaf symbol was introduced in the early 1990s.

New Logo – What has been improved:

The new logo received many critiques for the cost of the big “M” research and design. Despite that, this dimensional colored “M” is different compared to the other city logos on earth. Unique and sophisticated.

13. Discovery Channel

Old Logo History:

The Discovery Channel’s very first logo was a television screen picturing a map of the World. In the mid-90s, the word “The” was dropped from the channel’s name. A globe became a permanent part of the logo and a strap was added to the bottom of the logo.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Discovery Channel started using a new logo on 2008. With new graphics and the new tagline “The World is Just Awesome”. The new logo has been designed by Viewpoint Creative in Boston and replaced Aurora Bold Condensed with Gotham. The globe has been merged with the “D” in “Discovery”. Their new logo now looks more simplified and less crowded.

14. MailChimp

MailChimp is a free and paid email marketing service started in the 2001.

Old Logo History:

Their first logo was the iconic monkey head used in the year of 2001 until 2005. In 2006, they decided to change the monkey-icon logo with using only typography “MailChimp”.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Since 2008, MailChimp with their third generation logo has become one of the best email marketing services. The new monkey logo gives us a warm, friendly feel and overall pleasant.

15. Target

Target Corporation, usually known simply as Target, is an American retailing company that was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1902 as the Dayton Dry Goods Company.

Old Logo History:

In 1968, Target changed its bullseye logo to a more modern look. Target script used from 1980 until 2004. Changes from the original logo are that its brandmark is a single red ring with a red dot in the middle, and its wordmark uses the Helvetica font.

New Logo – What has been improved:

Target’s latest logo are in red block letters using Helvetica font that the word “Target” uses in favor of a more streamlined red “Target Brand” look.  Over the survey, ninety-seven percent of American consumers recognize the Target Bullseye logo. Perhaps their logo redesign isn’t essential, but by making their Bullseye bigger that the “TARGET” characters, it obviously focusing more on their recognizable brand.

What are your thoughts about these logo redesigns? Feel free to share them with us.

The thing is, you don’t even need to be experienced designer or artist to start selling your work. On few sites you can even sell your leftover work so you get best out of it. While browsing I found that these all sites listed below seem to be really promising. Honestly I have never tried any of these but I guess it’s first time for everything.

1. DeviantART

DeviantART is the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 13 million registered members, attracting 35 million unique visitors per month. If you want to sell your art then this is the place to be.

2. 99designs

99designs is the #1 marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design.

3. crowdSPRING

Designers compete with each other to win money.

4. Themeforest

Themeforest is just 1 of the 7 options you can choose. Here you can sell pretty much everything ranging from logo designs to 3D models.

5. Brandstack

This is pretty much the best way to sell in 4 easy steps:

1. You create several logo designs for a client.
2. Your client chooses one.
3. You have a bunch of left over designs.
4. You sell your unused designs on Brandstack.

6. iStockphoto

iStockphoto is the internet’s original member-generated image and design community.

7. Zooppa

Zooppa is the world’s largest social network for user-generated advertising.

8. Wordpress Designers

9. Buy Stock Design

If you can make any type of Design, Templates, Wordpress or html, then this is website for you!

10. Templamatic

A unique marketplace for premium web templates.

11. Fotolia

Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images.

12. Imagekind

The world’s fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale.

13. BigStockPhoto

Bigstock is your fast, easy-to-use marketplace for quality stock images.

14. Crestock

Crestock is a growing player in micropayment royalty-free stock photography and provides a great experience to both buyers and sellers.

15. Graphic Leftovers

Quality vector art and images on the web.

16. Cutcaster

Sell photos or illustrations with best prices.

17. Zazzle

It’s free and easy to create an online store on Zazzle to sell t-shirts online or sell posters online featuring your art, images, and designs.

18. Inkd

The world’s first online marketplace for cutting edge print designs.

19. Texturevault

TextureVault is a community driven supplier of royalty free texture and background images. It allows talented photographers and artists to sign up and sell their textures via the website.

20. CoSwap

If you are talented web programmer or graphic designer and deciding what to do with items that no longer have use for, then this is for you!

21. LogoTournament

An online community where businesses can go to receive the logo they really want by hosting a logo design contest.

22. RedBubble

Sell your work online. Over the last 3 years RedBubble has shipped 352,700 items of art! They take care of all the hassle. Give them your digital file and they will turn it into the finished product, deliver it to your customer and take care of any customer service problems.

23. Minted

24. ivoteforart

You can sell one-off originals like paintings, limited edition prints or open edition prints – that’s up to you.

25. Pixmac

If you’re looking for the best picture or just trying to sell your best shot, Pixmac is your perfect tool, with accurate search results and helping you at every step.

26. DepositPhotos

DepositPhotos.com is your #1 resource for buying and selling Royalty-free photographs and vector images.

27. Spreadshirt

Submit your designs and earn cash every time an item with your design is sold.

28. LogoSportswear

29. CafePress

The world’s largest collection of user-designed products.

30. Printfection

The easiest way to sell t-shirts & merchanise.

Here we’ve have collected various feedback, collaboration tools/websites as well as several sites offering you to create polls really easy – ask in Twitter, Facebook and get responses immediately!

1. Please Critique Me

They’ve made it easy, simply paste a couple of links to your design(s) below and they’ll have one of our critics get on the job.

2. UserVoice

Join companies & organizations of all sizes that already depend on UserVoice for feedback. Uservoice communities are the easiest way to turn customer feedback into action:

• Share ideas.
• Vote up the best.
• Respond, implement & repeat!

3. Get Signoff

If you struggle to get design approval from your clients, Get Signoff is the tool you’ve been waiting for. Manage feedback and design revisions simply and elegantly.

4. ConceptShare

ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients. Easily share media and invite others to add and reply to comments, approve artwork, and markup on visuals.

5. Launchly

Launchly lets you find and provide feedback to new websites.

6. Get Satisfaction

It’s a social support application for engaging your customer community to reduce support costs, build buzz and collect feedback. Unify interactions across your Website, Facebook, Twitter, blog, and mobile apps. For companies of all sizes.

7. Suggestionbox

Suggestion box is the exciting new way to send suggestions and then watch ideas turn into action. The one place where individuals can share ideas with every company, group, organization, and product on the planet. The best part of a free individual membership is that it’s interactive. People can stay in the loop by tracking their ideas, connecting with people, and improving the things around them.

8. Getbackboard

Simplify document feedback for your workgroup. Backboard automates the entire process — from upload to final approval — all from within your web browser.

9. Webnographer

Test any website, web app, prototype or intranet, with large numbers of users, all over the world, in their natural environment.

10. Usabilla

The most simple way to test with real users. More than 5200 companies use Usabilla for remote usability tests.

Features:

• Usability feedback in every stage of your design process.
• Participants point & click to share their opinion.
• Clear visualizations to analyze your results.
• Available in 20 languages, any other language on request.
• No installation required.

11. Kampyle

Fully hosted solution leveraging user feedback to increase conversion rates, reduce churn and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

12. WAVE

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.

13. OpenHallway

Simple usability testing.

Features:

• Record users from anywhere – remotely or locally.
• Share video results with your clients or team members.
• Completely web-based. No software for you or your test participants to install.
• Unlimited projects and test scenarios (within your storage limit).

14. Redmark

Redmark helps designers and their clients communicate visually in just three simple steps. Redmark helps graphic designers work better and faster.

15. Raed Skaik

Professional feedback on your creative project. The Quick and Easy Way to Refine Your Work. Supportive feedback, save time and clients. Free feedback on any design work.

16. Ididwork

Get feedback from your manager.

17. UX Booth

The UX Booth is a blog about and for the User Experience Community. Together, they are writing articles and sharing resources on usability, user experience, and interaction design.

18. Basecamphq

19. Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback provides quick, actionable feedback from thousands of qualified, professional designers and developers.

20. Veristlabs

Verist Labs is a web application that radically transforms the way companies listens and act upon the voice of the people. Manage online reputation through social media monitoring. Also create a direct channel for people to share their complaints, feedback and ideas.

• Listen to what is being said about you on the web
• Listen to complaints, get ideas, get feedback
• Act on it & build great product & services

21. Feedback Army

Simple, Cheap Usability Testing for Your Website. Start a usability test for your site in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive 10 responses from our reviewers. The cost is $15.

22. Fivesecondtest

Five second tests are simple usability tests that help you measure the effectiveness of your designs. Conducting a five second test allows you to find out which parts of your designs are the most prominent.

23. ProofHQ

ProofHQ is an online proofing system that streamlines the process of managing design reviews and approvals.

24. Notable

Easiest way for teams to provide feedback on websites. Quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser.

25. Pbworks

Forums

26. DesignersTalk

27. Sitepoint.com

28. Featuredcontentgallery

Twitter And Facebook Polls

1. Twitpoll

Engage Your Customers. Ask Questions. Get Feedback.

Available only for Twitter!

2. Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It’s the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print — anywhere. It can help you to raise money by letting people pledge via text messaging. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews.

3. StrawPoll

Poll your twitter friends, settle a long-standing debate or just collect opinions.

Available only for Twitter!

4. Polldaddy

Create a poll and send it to your Twitter followers in seconds. No account necessary!

5. MightyQuiz

6. SocialToo

SocialToo is your companion to the Social web! SocialToo helps you manage Twitter and Facebook and unclutters your stream and Social Graph so you can focus on what’s most important – relationships!

7. TweetBrain

TweetBrain is a crowdsourcing service powered by the Twitter user community. It facilitates people to ask questions, get answers, and earn money from answering questions posted with a reward.  It also greatly increases your reach in the Twitter community well beyond your followers.

Available only for Twitter!

8. Hash Poll

Very simple Twitter polls.

Available only for Twitter!

9. Pollpigeon

Creates a simple twitter poll!

Available only for Twitter!

10. TwitQA

Twitqa is a place where you can see the twitters interacting with each other in a most knowledgeable way.Everything is asked,answered and discussed by people like you.

Available only for Twitter!

11. Twittpoll

Twittpoll.com is the opinion channel of Twitter. You can vote on a poll for 24 hours. After that you will receive the overall result within your twitter account.

Available only for Twitter!

12. Formspring

Ask questions, give answers and learn more about your friends.

Available only for Facebook!

13. Facebook

This is the premier polling application on Facebook. Create polls for your Facebook pages and Profile pages. Ask your friends or fans questions you want or create contests for your fans thanks to Polls! Very simple and easy to use. You can also add pictures, videos or links into your polls.

Available only for Facebook!

Campaign

Campaign includes different ads groups that contain different ads which target different keywords. We can create maximum 25 campaigns, for Each Campaign we can set a daily budget. We can use campaign to target different countries or products. we can also schedule the campaigns.

Source: “Growing your business with AdWords”

Ad Groups

It is the part of a particular campaign. An ad group contains different ads which in turn contains various keywords. We can create 100 Ad groups for each Campaign. Different ad groups can be created to advertise different products.

Ads

You can create multiple ads for single ad groups & test the effectiveness of different ads. There are three different types of ads Text ads, Image ads & WAP Mobile ads, which you can create in the ads section.

Text Ads: It contains five parameters they are Headline, Description line 1, Description line 2, Display URL & Destination URL. All this parameters have limitation of maximum number of character per lines.

Image Ads:The image ads supports gif, jpg, png, & swf formats which could be of size 50k max, the other parameter image ads include is Name Image, Display URL & Destination URL.

WAP Mobile Ads: The mobile ads can be text ads as well as image ads the other parameters this ads includes selection of different markup language & even you can select different carriers for which you want your ads to be displayed

Keywords

Keywords are the key terms that are related to the product or service you are providing. Here we can choose various keywords that are related to your ad. For Each keyword we can have specific budget. In Adwords, there are four different keywords categories which are broad, exact, phrase & negative keywords.

Exact Keywords: When you ads some keywords in exact format then the ads are only shown for that search words. Exact keywords are added as [keyword].

Example:

You have design blog as your exact keyword then your ad will be shown when users search this exact word as the search queries. If users enter different query like famous design blog then your ad wont be displayed.

Broad Keywords:Broad Keyword are just opposite to exact keywords, as your ad will appear in all search term containing that your keyword. Broad keyword are added without any quotes & brackets as keyword.

Example:

If your keyword is design blog then It will appear for the search terms like famous design blog, graphic design blog , design Wordpress blog & design blog website.

Phrase Keywords: Phrase keywords are the words that will appear in the same pattern that you have added into your ad groups. The order of the keywords is taken into account. You can add phrase keyword as “keyword”

Example:

If design blog is your keyword then It will appear for the search terms design blog, wordpress design blog, flash design blog. It will not appeared for the search terms like design php blog, java blog design.

Negative Keywords: These types of keywords are used ensure your ads are not shown for that particular search terms which that are included is search queries. This keywords are added as –keyword.

Example:

If you are selling an design ebook on your website & you have design ebook as your broad keyword in the ad groups, hence when user search for free design ebook still they will see your ad & will click which will generate unwanted clicks on your ad. Hence you need to add terms like free in your negative keywords section to save the damages from such words.

CPC

It’s an abbreviation for cost per click.  It is the cost you pay for each ad which has been clicked. We can set a default bid (price) for all keywords present in the ad group or we can add unique bid to each keywords.

Default Bid:If we set default bid of 5.00/- to the ad group then it is applied to all the keywords in that ad group. So if our keyword is cost is 1.00/- then it will appear for five clicks.

Unique Bid: If we set unique bid for each keyword for example 2.00 for a keyword in ad group then it is applied to particular keyword and so if your keyword is cost is 1.00/- then it will appear for only two clicks only.

CPM

It is cost per 1000 impression. Impression is number of times your ads had been displayed at Google network website. So you are charged for displaying your ads.

Example:

If your CPM is 50.00/- then you will be charged 50 bucks for displaying your ads for 1000 times at particular website.

CTR

It is known as click through rate. It is the ratio of no of ads clicked to Page impression. It is expressed in percentage. It is use check how well your ads are performing. It is expressed in percentage.

Example:

If your ad is clicked 5 times for the Page impression is 1000 then your CTR will be

CTR =  No of time Ads Clicked/Page Impressions * 100 =       5/1000*100  =   0.5%

Ads Ranking

It is which position the ads will appeared on Google & its network website. The Ad ranking on Google depends on three basic things that are Max CPC, Quality Score & Min bid.

Max CPC : It the maximum cost your willing to pay for your keywords.

Quality Score: It depends on the relevancy of the ads which are displayed (It is calculated by Google).

Min Bid: It is minimum bid(price) we pay for keywords

It does not mean paying a higher CPC & bid will improve the rankings. The main factor is the relevancy of the ads. So if the ads are relevant then we don’t need to pay high price for it.

Ad Variations/Rotation

Ad Variations will help you display your alternate ads for a particular ad-group here you can set the frequency how random an ad need to be changed. This will help you decide which of your ads  is working better.

Example:

Ads Placement

It is helps our ads to be displayed at various Google network site. As many people used Google Adsense on their website to display Google ads on their website. In ad placement you will find top websites which are daily receiving more then 100k visits. So you can select website best suited for your business and can display your ads at those site.

Ads Scheduling

This Feature will help to scheduling a particular ad campaign at particular time period. We can pause ad campaigns for certain days when we are receiving less conversion for example on Saturday and Sunday. We could also display ads at particular time of the day, such as we can pause our ads in the morning and at nights.

You can also download the Google Adwords Beginner Guide: http://www.google.com/adwords/pdf/hc/growing_adwords_en.pdf

If you have some tips or advise for the Google Adwords Management do let us know in the comments.