Jul 31 2010 36 Comments By Supratim Nayak

This free set of social media icons has 20 icons of popular social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon. Each icon has dimensions of 48x48px and is in PNG format. It’s perfect for blogs and content-centric websites (it also includes an RSS feed icon). It’s available to you, Design Instruct readers, for your commercial and personal work; attribution is not required but is greatly appreciated. You may not redistribute or resell the files and this icon pack.

Jul 29 2010 18 Comments By Jacob Gube

Even the most talented designers in the world receive negative feedback on their work. Design is, to a large extent, a matter of taste — and the people we work for sometimes dislike the flavors we employ in the designs we make for them. We asked a few designers and artists how they handled feedback to get a glimpse of the strategies they use for handling critical appraisals of their work.

Jul 27 2010 51 Comments By Ciara Panacchia

In college in Waterford, Ireland, one of our class projects was called “Techniques.” The brief was to become familiar with every printing technique we could and show them through physical pieces. It was a fun project. However, when you leave school, you don’t always get the chance to work with these really amazing printing techniques or even figure them into your budget, but what I will talk about in this guide are popular and affordable. Consider them in your next print project!

Jul 25 2010 17 Comments By Isaac Gube

Six months ago, my brother and I launched Design Instruct to serve as a place for designers and digital artists to get inspired, share techniques, and learn more about their craft. That was the basic idea we worked with. We had no idea where this would take us. Today, 6 months after the fact, we could not be happier with the way the design community has embraced our site.

Jul 23 2010 12 Comments By Jacob Gube

Retro-futuristic art, which refers to how artists in the past envision the future, bring to mind classic movies such as Mad Max, Star Trek, and The Terminator. When today’s designers and digital artists — armed with digital graphics software such as Photoshop and Illustrator — interpret retro-futuristic styles from the past, the results are quite enthralling. For your inspiration, feast your eyes on this collection of retro-futuristic digital art.

Jul 21 2010 24 Comments By Dariusz Markiw

In this tutorial, we will create an out-of-this-world composition of a computer mouse that is streaking down like a meteor. We will focus on creating unique light effects and leveraging layer adjustment techniques for coloring and enhancing our scene. We will use Cinema 4D to create a simple backdrop for our stars, however, the important parts, we’ll do in Photoshop.

Jul 19 2010 21 Comments By Mohammad Jeprie

In this Photoshop tutorial, we will draw a realistic mobile device. Our aim is to make our work appear so realistic that it looks just like a regular product shot. We will cover basic concepts for drawing a true to life object, making a basic pattern for the speakers of our mobile device, leveraging plenty of layer styles to keep our techniques flexible and non-destructive, and more. The key technique we will stress upon is paying attention to the small details, which greatly affects realism.