Your portfolio can be as innovative as you please – helping you show off your previous projects to great effect in what is a very competitive industry. But before you design your online portfolio in any old way, take a look at these creative freelancers’ websites for inspiration.

15 Outstanding Design Portfolios You Can’t Miss Out

hm-andrei.ro

HM-Andrei.ro is the brainchild of web design and photography cultivator Andrew, from Baia Mare City. The funky, fruity mix of photography and computer generated graphic design leave you in little doubt about this guy’s creative abilities.

julienrenvoye.com

With a portfolio accessed through shaped thumbnails, Julien Renvoye offers a clean and creative white on charcoal site that certainly stands out.

adhamdannaway.com

Part designer, part coder, the split talents if Aham Dannaway are clearly displayed in his homepage image. Completely kooky, this website shows off Adham’s designs in a fun fashion.

leahhaggar.com

A chic portfolio from a classy lady. This combines photographic excellence with a black and white colour scheme that’ll always be in fashion.

mxlbs.de

An intriguing use of computer generated imagery on a long, scrollable page; this site almost tells a story.

teacakedesign.com

Navigate horizontally or vertically, it’s completely your choice at Teacake’s online portfolio. The vibrant yellow background allows this website to stand out, while the large images leave you in no doubt of the talent possessed by its creator.

13creative.com

Set out in a notebook style, 13 Creative is a stylish example of an online creative portfolio, with a pale blue colour palette and spattering of swirls. This is a happy website.

shannonmoeller.com

Not sure why this design features a CGI fridge… but it looks fabulous even despite its arbitrary nature. With language such as “dude” and “web monkey” used on the first page, you know you’re getting a unique personality when you hire Shannon Moeller.

damiansimpkins.com

Simple and effective, the layout of Damian Simpkins’ Art Direction and Design portfolio displays a clear understanding of how to effectively use white space online – ideal for all those internet projects.

wingcheng.com

Graphic and web designer Wing Cheng offers a beautiful display in a notepad style. Click on each sketch and you’ll find further details and imagery relating to his previous works.

ewenspencer.com

It’s big and it’s yellow. Bold writing and hi-res images make this an in-your-face website of stand-out design. It’s fun, it’s young, and it’s super cool – totally reflective of Ewen Spencer’s niche.

simonfosterdesign.com

Who said design had to be complicated? Simon Foster offers a website of clean cuts and straight lines. The linear scroll only serves to make this site more effective in its narrative structure.

mrahayes.com

An assault of patterns and colours, Adam Hayes’ website is eye-catching and displays the artist’s personality. The complete antithesis to the use of white space online, it shows that a busy portfolio can be beautiful too.

frankchimero.com

Designer and illustrator Frank Chimero shows how to combine white space and creative layout with a website that looks not unlike a noticeboard.

imtawn.com

Enter the Tawn website for a look at Ashleigh Downer’s creative works and scroll through collections and illustrations inspired by crystallography.

If you’re a creative by name, make it obvious you’re creative by nature. Your portfolio is what sells your skills so make it stand out. Judging by those already out there, there is some stiff competition.

Enjoy!

We all know that time is money. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to create a project on one of existing templates instead of building from the scratch? Yes, it would. Especially if the templates are responsive out of the box. Even if the customer does not require responsive layout you can always give it as a bonus and have one more happy client. This package includes more than 30 HTML5 responsive templates all built with Twitter Bootstrap framework, you can be sure that most of them will fit your next project.

HTML5 Responsive Twitter Bootstrap templates

22 WordPress themes are included in the bundle to make sure you will be able to cope with more complex projects like photographer portfolio, business website or even online shop. 4 of these themes are integrated with WooCommerce shopping cart and have one-click sample content import.

WordPress eCommerce themes

Professional WordPress Themes

This bundle deal is distributed under commercial license crafted specially for freelance designers. Which means you can use any of the templates and themes for your own or your customers project on unlimited number of domains. Though you can not resell/redistribute the templates as is, so fat it’s the only limitation.

Pricing

For a limited time this package is available for just $27, normally the cost is $714. Take you chance to get this great deal with a stunning 96% discount!

Enjoy!

If you still are not familiar with this type of design, let me give you a briefing. Flat design doesn’t use any fancy visual effects like 3D, subtle textures, drop shadows and so on. It’s modern, minimalistic, and fresh. It makes use of clean layout, bold colors, and sharp typography.

To be honest, typography is one of the key parts of successful flat design. Thus, fonts used in flat design are also specific. We decided to help you to start out with flat design and put together a showcase of paid and free fonts for flat design.

All of them are simple, bold, and straight-forward. These fonts will make you feel decent, sophisticated, cheeky, and turned-on. Below we feature 20+ awesome fonts for flat design. These fonts can be used not only in flat design, but in any other web project.

20+ Awesome Fresh Fonts for Flat Design

Mojave

Lovelo

Franchise

Lato

Manteka

Bellota

Laika

EXO

Museo Slab

NOUGATINE

KIDOT

Bariol

Tracks Type

Flex Display

SEAGLE

Idealist

Telegrafico

Caviar Dreams

Raleway

Gnuolane

ChunkFive

Conclusion

Don’t be shy and join our conversation! Let Crazypixels audience what do you think about these fonts? Are they useful for you? Maybe, there is something else you’d like to know about flat design. Don’t hesitate and ask!

Enjoy!

20 Awesome Photoshop Tutorials 2013

Create a Glowing 3D Text Effect With Filter Forge and Photoshop

In this tutorial you’ll get to know how to combine Photoshop with Filter Forge to create a stunning glowing 3D text effect. Iit starts with showing how to create the basic shapes in Photoshop, then you’ll see how to convert them into 3D, and in the end to add the final touches using Filter Forge and a few more Photoshop CS6 basic features.

How to create colourful wooden 3D text

Photoshop offers you some best tools for creating 3D text. This tutorial teaches you how to use Cinema 4D along with Photoshop application to create colourful wooden 3D text.

How to create surreal Motionscape effect with Photoshop CS6

This Photoshop tutorial teaches you about how to add surreal or strange effect to your photos using Photoshop CS6. This effect will work well with landscape photos.

How to create a colourful light burst text effect using Photoshop CS6

In this text effect tutorial, you are going to know about how to decorate your texts using colour radiation and beams of light that passes through and around the texts.

How to create an adorable children’s illustration

Kids always love magical and creative illustrations and this tutorial will teach you about how to create that magical children’s illustration using Photoshop. The digital painting techniques in Photoshop are used to create the effect.

How to Make Instagram Filters in Photoshop: Earlybird

Cell phone cameras and apps like Instagram have made it possible for anyone to practice and enjoy the art of Photography. However, because Instagram filters lack the ability to customize exactly how the images will be altered, using these filters can actually lower the quality of your photographs.This guide will show you how to add really cool Instagram-inspired effects to your photos using Adobe Photoshop so that you can Instagram the professional way.

How to create zombie apocalypse concept art in Photoshop

Creating concept art is an interesting thing and including motion in that will make it advanced. This tutorial teaches you about how to develop a concept art in Photoshop for zombie video game.

How to create a night jungle scenery in Photoshop

From this tutorial, you can learn about how to create a night jungle scenery with fairies flying around. The scene also includes a stone tower, doors for miniature villages etc.

How to create custom landscapes in Photoshop

Desktop backgrounds add more elegance to your photos. You can create your own custom landscapes in Photoshop and this tutorial will help you for that. You can mix different landscape photos, touch up with some colours and add a strong gradient effect to get a perfect custom landscape.

How to create Matte painting in Photoshop

This tutorial will help you to create a dramatic scene using vibrant colours in Photoshop. This tutorial includes some easy steps to create a magical scene using Photoshop that includes some blending and blurring technique.

How to create a horrific movie poster in Photoshop CS6

Create the popular zombie movie poster in Photoshop CS6. This trial explains you how to achieve it using a base photo and adding more effects and textures on it to get the result.

How to create a colourful retro poster in Photoshop

Using shiny textures, lens flares and brilliant colours learn how to create a colourful retro poster in Photoshop with this tutorial.

How to create a surreal Gothic artwork in Photoshop

With this tutorial, you can learn how to create an even background, include reflections to it and warping the image to create a scary gothic artworkin Photoshop.

How to create a retro and futuristic design

If you want to create a mix of retro and modern effects in your photo, then you can achieve that through Repousse feature of Photoshop. With this tutorial, you can learn to know how to deal with brushes, shapes, patterns and 3D objects.

How to create 3D gold text in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you can learn how to create an inspirational message in the look of 3D gold text. Also, learn how to add a dry background to your text and place your lights perfectly on the text.

How to create a 3D skyscraper text effect

This tutorial teaches you about how to create your text in the 3D tall skyscraper format. You will get to know about some basic 3D concepts too in this tutorial.

How to create a paper receipt in Photoshop

Just create a paper bill in Photoshop with the help of this tutorial. Using vector concepts, paper patterns and grids, you can create a paper bill illustration in Photoshop.

How to create a metallic 3D logo

Combine the 3D concept of CS6 with Filter Forge facility of Photoshop to create a metallic 3D logo effect for your text. You have to download the Filter Forge plugin from the website and install it on your website to use it.

How to create a 3D typographic illustration

Creating a magical and inspiring image may take the help of other applications too. This effect depends on Cinema 4D application to create the main 3D effects and Photoshop is used for final touch. This tutorial will explain you all about it.

How to create valentine day 3D text effect

Valentine day is always special and people love it always in all possible forms. This tutorial explains you how to create valentine day text-effect using Filter Forge concept of Photoshop.

How to create a disaster scene in Photoshop

You would have seen the disaster scenes in many movies and create one such shocking disaster scene in Photoshop with the help of this tutorial.

Conclusion

The above mentioned tutorials are not the ultimate list of tutorials published on 2013, but these are the best and most popular Photoshop tutorials of 2013. Do you think your tutorial is worth mentioning in this list? Don’t think twice, tell us through comment. If it is as beautiful as the afore mentioned tutorials, we will add it to the list.

Enjoy!

This Photoshop tutorial will help you to turn a bunch of your photos into a stunning Facebook cover. What do you need to create it? Just a few awesome images and Photoshop. By the way, this guide can be used by photographers, designers, artists, or any other creative people to showcase their works of art.

Facebook Cover Photoshop Tutorial

Final Product

Step 1

Create a document with a size 851×315 pixels. Size is quite important thing in order to make your cover pretty fit your profile picture.

Step 2

Choose the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and create a square with a size 170×170 pixels and a radius 2px.

Step 3

Set the Fill to 0% and add a 1px stroke.

Step 4

Put this layer in the place of your profile picture.

Attention. Position of the profile picture for your personal page differs from the public one.

It should be done in order to mark the place of your profile image. In fact, this space can be used in different ways. For example, you can add shadow behind it, which will make your cover unique, in the end. Or make any other changes, it’s all up to you. Just take a look at our Facebook covers for inspiration and get some ideas how you can use the profile image.

Step 5

Fill the background with color f3f3f3.

Step 6

Now take the Rectangle Tool (U) and create the following shape with the color #000000. Duplicate it several times, placing as shown below. Just make a copy of each shape layer, and make them invisible (it is required for future).

Step 7

Add a photo for each shape. Just put a photo lower than a layer with shape and push the button “Create a Clipping Mask”.

Step 8

Then add a shadow to each picture. Make the shapes from the six step visible and rasterize every of them. (Layer-Rasterize-Shape or by clicking on the layer, right-click and choose Rasterize Layer).

Step 9

Now apply filter Blur to each layer (Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur).

Step 10

Select all the layers from the previous step and make them smaller in height (Edit – Free Transform or ctrl + T).

Step 11

Now select every couple of layers in turn (shape layer and a share with a your image). Duplicate and combine each pair (Layer – Marge Layers or ctrl + E).

After that, reflect layers vertically. Edit – Transform – Flip Vertical. Once each layer is ready, select them all and omit down as shown in the image below.

Step 12

Now each of these layers must be transformed, as at the image below.

Step 13

Drop couples of layers on a few pixels down and change the opacity to 15%.

Step 14

You can add text, such as the name or title to your Facebook cover. You can also add some shadows or glare. Change it whatever you like. There are lots of options to change it.

Step 15

Let’s get back to the profile image. Select it using the Drop Shadow and remove the Stroke. We’re done.

Step 16

That’s pretty it. Here is the result.

Download PSD file

Afterwords

Now you see how fast and easily you can create your own unique and stunning Facebook cover in Photoshop. If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas, feel free to use the comment field below.

Enjoy!

Color Background Generators

Background in any web design, whether viewed on a desktop or mobile phone plays a significant role as it directly affects our viewing experience. You can achieve enthralling background easily with the following color background generator tools that will help you create patterns, tartan, stripes and gradients straightaway.

Bgpatterns

This is one of the best fully-automated background creator tools available that just required you to pick your color and pattern to create your own custom-made unique background.

Patterncooler

Here you can add your own colors to contemporary and retro pattern designs, besides browsing from thousands of pre-colored patterns in the seamless pattern background library. Moreover, you can use every artwork available on the website for your web and graphic design projects, profile, portfolios or personal artwork for free.

Stripe Generator

Download the tile and experiment to unleash your personal style with this color tool. You can also use it directly in your CSS file or as pattern in Photoshop.

Stripemania

This is a simple and free web 2.0 tool to create seamless diagonal stripes for your designs. Not only does it help you choose the size of the stripes and the spacing between those, you can even add color gradient effect for all of your stripes with this tool.

Repper

This free pattern creator can transform your images into stunning designs. Moreover, you can create unique background patterns, textile patterns, etc. with Repper; besides designing for your personal webpage, social profiles, business cards and posters.

Colour Palette Generators

These color palette generator tools offers designers a finite set of colors for the management of digital images or a graphical element for choosing from a limited set of choices to mix and match their desired outcome.

COLOURlovers

This is a great resource for web designers who monitor and inspire color trends. Get this comprehensive tool to check out a range of colors, compare color palettes and patterns or read color related articles and interviews.

Adobe Kuler

This color tool is a web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. The best part about this color tool is that no matter what you are creating, Kuler allows you to experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

ColorExplorer

This is a free online color toolbox that allows professionals and color enthusiasts to design and work with color palettes.

Raquedan

This little, well-designed web application is mainly a random color generator that is intended to help designers get rid of any designer’s creative block.

COPASO (Color Palette Software)

This popular color tool (from the house of Colourlovers) is an advanced color palette tool with which you can create the perfect color schemes and themes. Besides a scratch pad to save colors you’re working with, it comes with a photo tool to extract colors and an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you tons of color inspiration.

Colorotate

This color tool has been designed after exploring the conventional methods of choosing colors on computers that are limited to obscure sliders and flattened 2D viewers by making colors in 3D. This are however, done in real time and in a way that matches how our minds process color.

TinEye Labs

This wonderful color tool allows you to choose a color palette, besides letting you search for millions of creative images so as to produce a collection of images in your selected palette. With this tool you can also upload your own images to the site, which will help you put together a palette to apply to the rest of your site so that you have a consistent design.

Shutterstock Spectrum

You can call this an advanced imagery discovery tool that enables users to search images by color, rather than keyword descriptions; thereby, catering to the visual minds of designers. Moreover, it collects images of the same color palette (in real time) as the searcher moves the color slider to different shades and provides an interactive means of inspiration.

Color Scheme Designer

This program helps you create customizable color schemes based on different angles and combinations on the color wheel. Besides that the ensuing schemes offer several variations in hue to choose from, and you can easily transfer the accurate colors to your design from each Pantone number provided.

myPANTONE

This is an extremely helpful universal color matching system with which you can have access to Pantone swatches and their corresponding numbers irrespective of anywhere you are. The USP of this color tool is that this mobile app will make you accessible to 13,000 Pantone colors, thus ensuring that your chosen colors will translate to your design appropriately.

ColorMunki

This one of the hottest all-in-one color solution is the industry that delivers unparalleled color control and color creation tools for photo and design digital work flows.

Color Capture

This handy app from paint company, Benjamin Moore helps you create color palettes. All you have to do is simply upload photographs you love and pull together unusual palettes based on the photos. This tool is an asset when you’re redoing your house.

Chromixa

This free app (now available for iPhone) is a color game. So, in case you need a break from thinking of colors that match well, download this mobile game where you solve jigsaw puzzles with color and light.

Color Inspirator

This simple web tool is perfect if you are looking for some plain old palette inspiration. So, all you have to do is click mix, and see your color palette appear. And if you want some more, just press ‘mix’ again and a new palette will show up.

Degraeve Color Palette

Make color schemes. Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color scheme that matches a stock photo a client wants to work with.

Which is your favorite color tool for web design from aesthetics as well as usability point of view? We’d like to hear from you.

Enjoy!

Like I already mentioned earlier that designing for mobile web is completely different from designing for desktop. That means, building a responsive layout will solve only half the issue. It will definitely adapt to the screen size automatically because of the liquid layout, but what about the user experience that we constantly keep talking about. What we, (here by we, I mean the entrepreneurs) expect is to build a website which is easy to use.

The common problems faced by mobile users are struggling with scrolling the images and web pages to view the complete page. Therefore, there are certain things that need to be considered while designing for mobile web, to ensure great user experience and more flexibility for the users while using web on their Smart Phones.

1. Challenges: Screen Sizes & Resolutions

One of the most common, or should I say most predictable mobile web design challenge is the limitation of screen size and resolution that the designers face. It is not easy to design for mobile devices when we know that the screen size is small and limited and so are the touch pads. This means, it can be extremely challenging to design touch buttons, images and other things (the overall web-page) for mobile devices. Moreover, the standards of web for desktops have developed in the last few years and desktop hardly faces any usability issues.

Even different phones have different screen sizes and different resolutions. This means that it is a more difficult challenge, because, you will have to design differently for different devices. Or, you will need a solution that works best for all these devices. Even these possibilities have their own challenges. Because mobile devices give less space, means that there is very less content that can be included in the web-page. And because of such less space, you need to ensure that you have a web design, which clean and simple, rather than cluttered and over crowded with unnecessary content.

2. Mobile Networks Means Slower Connections

Another challenge that developers and designers face while designing for mobile web is the connectivity issue. There is no doubt that the technological advancements have led to many new things in the world. Even mobile networks have become faster and advanced with availability of 3G (and in some areas even 4G) services. This means there is smooth and uninterrupted connection. However, more than half of the mobile users still suffer slow internet connections.

Keeping in mind the needs of the masses, it is necessary that you design a website which are not very heavy and do not take ages to load. Images also should be adjusted in the same way, if possible to ensure better user experience.

3. Context of Using Mobile Internet Differs

Earlier we saw the most common challenges faced during mobile web designing. Now that we know that screen size is one of the most common challenges, we must also understand that the interface is a big dispute. Mobile designing doesn’t mean dealing with different platforms and devices. In fact, it means dealing with a completely different context altogether.

Mobile devices face several physical parameters, like they are used in public places. That means, it can be extremely noisy; they are used outdoors, means extreme light situations. Moreover, the users have limited abilities when using mobile web. Therefore, you must take into account all these context differences while designing for mobile web.

4. Using Mobile Devices is Very Different from Using Desktop

The last thing that is very important is the behavior of people when using mobile web. One thing you must remember is that people behave differently while using desktop web and mobile web. There expectations are also different. However, because they are more accustomed to using desktop web, they want a smoother functionality even when they are accessing web on a mobile device. Most of them use mobile web for online shopping. However, you cannot ignore the others who use mobile for other things like accessing mails, video chats, documentation and more. That is why, it is necessary that you design mobile web in a way that people have great experience while browsing your website.

On a Concluding Note…

It is challenging to design for mobile web. However, it is not impossible to do so. You must focus on providing great user experience and meet the expectations of people. Considering the above mentioned things while designing for mobile web will definitely help you do a good job.

Enjoy!

As you see, most of them were made using a pencil as an old artists’ tool. I’m quite sure that these days web designers use tablets and digital pencils, but still the tool is symbolic. Vivid colors, pencils, brushes and paints splashes make these logo designs unforgettable and creative.

These art related logos can be used by different art & web agencies, freelance writers and artists, art equipments suppliers and schools of art. Moreover, you can buy any of these logos from its original source.

1. DesignStore

2. DesignsFix

3. Twisted Design

4. LOOK Design Company

5. Design Basket

6. Jewelry Arts – Design School

7. DesignGraf

8. Royal Art

9. artmap

10. Monkey Media Marketing and Design

11. ciclopencil

12. pencil light

13. Ricri Design

14. creative block

15. supersonic design

16. Phoenix Design

17. artree

18. Design Bees

19. La Fleur Du Monde

20. Hot Art

21. Color wings

22. Colorholic

23. Skywriter

24. Illustrious

25. Triple Tower

26. QuickPencil

27. Papercut

28. Cherry Red

29. ArtCity

30. NEWONE

31. Ball on Draw

32. Boom!Box

33. Arty Love

34. Jano Lavalle

35. MoUSE DESIGN

36. Salada da Arte

37. PencilFish

38. Dark Art

39. ArtKvadrat

40. Night City

41. Visionary

42. Artcher

43. Art & Cafe 2

44. Boomart

45. Art for life

46. Custom Cake Art by Sharon

47. Expoart

48. faQ – fine art Quotient – Subject to Interpretatio

49. Ownage

50. Recreativa

Enjoy!

CrazyPixels is more than happy to present you Massive Design Bundle full of over 100 high-quality design resources at a shocking low price!

Take a look at this brief promo video about this coming deal:

In the Design Bundle you’ll find incredible business card designs, amazing wordpress themes, stunning HTML themes, creative Facebook covers, and many more!

Enjoy!

Today I’m going to tell you about a few key ways which would help you to find new ideas and to understand the types and techniques that are used in illustrated sites.

Let’s start with the basic roles of illustration on any site:

• Graphic component of site or service;
• Examples of works, and/or objects;
• visual explanation of the data.

One can list a few more tasks, but they anyway will overlap with those I have described above. As a rule, when designing a site these tasks are combined for bigger efficiency.

If you ask yourself a question about the role of illustrations on the web page, in most cases, you name at least two of these them. However, it does not mean that the design can not be successful and functional with only one task. You’ll see it after looking at the sites I put below. But first, let’s learn the main types of illustrated websites.

Themed Illustrations

The first category is creating illustrations which are associated with human activity or a product. This proposition is clear main goals pursued in the creation of these illustrations. Of course, this type can be combined with the others to make website really useful and attractive.

Mascots

Mascot is usually represents a site or product, being its main character. Often name of a site is similar to the name of the character, and its usage helps to make the design more memorable and unique. The combination of character with additional illustrations can emphasize its role more clearly. They also can help you to use site and explain some moments.

Illustrated Elements

This is a rather ambiguous category, because many examples can be attributed to the thematic illustrations. However, all sites from this category use a wide variety of objects and techniques.

There can be used large decorative elements (backgrounds or substrate), and small, sometimes imperceptible at first sight, decorations (pictures of people, animals and the different locations or objects of any size.) Just take a look at the sites with illustrations below.

Illustrated Text

Using of the original, custom text, obviously not a new trend, but can make a site really outstanding. The main goal of illustrated text is drawing users’ attention and highlighting the information on a web page. After all, the text fits perfectly to do this.

Informative Illustrations

Examples in this category are the most beautiful, creative, and technical. It combines reliable layout, clear or short description and, most importantly, memorable and beautiful illustration. Just take a look at the websites below.

More Inspirational Examples

Remember, while creating an illustrated website think about your product or service in order to make it right. The illustration should totally fit your company and personal style.

To burst out your creativity I’ve put together more website with illustrations below.

Enjoy!