Jan 23 2011 15 Comments By Isaac Gube

As chief editor of Design Instruct, I’ve had the opportunity to observe the design community and the talented individuals that comprise it. I won’t claim to know all the great designers or that I’m familiar with all their work, but I do know that there is a vast pool of talent out there from every experience level and every discipline of Design. From illustrators to type designers to CGI artists, there’s no shortage of creative talent out there. Which begs the question: How is great design produced?

Jan 21 2011 21 Comments By Jacob Gube

It’s difficult to stand out from the vast sea of blogs on the Web; you truly have to try hard to create a remarkable and unique blog design in order to be memorable. This collection features beautiful and creative blog designs that step outside the aesthetics we’re accustomed to seeing in blogs.

Jan 19 2011 6 Comments By Nikola Lazarevic

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will take you through the process of creating a fun horror movie poster design. We will be mixing up stock photos and brushes with old, grungy textures to create a horror movie poster design for "Dark Castle," a fictional movie. A full moon, a spooky castle, a mysterious caped silhouette in the distance, and bats — you’re going to have fun with this one.

Jan 17 2011 9 Comments By Jacob Gube

Monospaced fonts, which are fonts whose characters have equal horizontal widths, are suitable for programming because they make source code easier to read. However, they’re not a designer’s go-to when picking out typefaces for designs because they’re created with functionality, rather than aesthetic appeal, as a priority. Although, some monospaced fonts do look great, and I hope in this collection you’ll find some that you can use in design projects.

Jan 15 2011 4 Comments By Isaac Gube

Who says beauty has to be perfect? Sometimes, beauty needs a little beating for it to come out. That’s certainly the case with these otherwise boring patches of cement — now cracked, and that much more interesting. Below, you will find a gorgeous collection of 12 high-resolution cracked textures for your designing and digital artistry pleasure.  As always, textures are provided free of charge but please do not redistribute the files without our permission.

Jan 13 2011 11 Comments By Jasmina Stanojevic

In this vector illustration tutorial, you’ll be learning how to draw a colorful stack of poker chips in Adobe Illustrator CS4 using intermediate-level techniques. Follow along the tutorial to learn how to utilize basic shapes to draw a stack of poker chips from scratch in vector format.

Jan 11 2011 20 Comments By Eric Vasquez

In this Photoshop tutorial, we will be making a monochromatic scene with the subject being a bird in flight with smoke surrounding its body. We will be using a high contrast stock image that we will manipulate and combine with smoke brushes.