Creative Bookmarks features the top resources for designers from around the web every month. You’re busy, so we won’t waste your time. If it’s here, it’s the best.

Photoshop Tutorials

Combine Photo Elements to Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation

This photomanipulation tutorial does an outstanding job explaining essential techniques for beginner to professional level Photoshop users. The final result for this specific lesson is quite nice as well.

Create Dynamic Distortion Effects

The technique taught in this article takes a bit of time to execute, but the results are well worth the effort. Definitely a suggested read for advanced Photoshop users.

Create Destructive Black and White Lettering with a Dramatic Splash Effect

Also known as “The Best Text Effect Tutorial Online”. No but really, this is quite a lengthy read (comes with a 50 minute screencast), and creates quite the dramatic effect.

Create a High Flying Snowboard Illustration

Quite a few valuable lessons to be learned in this tutorial, but what’s really impressive about it is the line work involved in bringing the whole piece together. Great lesson for all levels, and comes with a screencast.

Create a Simple Vibrant Light Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial runs you through the process of creating some nifty abstract light effects of your own (via flashlight and camera), then putting those resources to use in Photoshop to create a wonderful lighting effect.

Space Explosion Photoshop Tutorial

One of our frequent authors at Tutorial9 shared a new tutorial over at Smashing Magazine that outlines an out of this world explosion photoshop tutorial.

Design an Epic Fantasy Scene with Photoshop

One of our newest contributors, Ciursă Ionuţ, proves that he is a Photoshop force not to be reckoned with in his first tutorial submitted to Tutorial9. Take a look at his outstanding lesson for creating an Epic Fantasy Scene in Photoshop.

Illustrator Tutorials

Let’s Make a Playful Yet Robust 3D Letter Design

Simple, Fun, yet quite an attractive text effect for something so quick. It’s amazing how a little depth of field can completely change a design. If you’re new to Illustrator, this isn’t a bad tutorial to start up with.

Quick Tutorial: Gradient Strokes

It’s hardly a life-changing tutorial or anything, but this is a great technique for applying gradients to strokes in Adobe Illustrator. Certainly worth knowing to say the least.

Retro Geometric Vectors in Space with Illustrator and Photoshop

With a bit of work in Illustrator, followed by some touching up in Photoshop, putting together a retro-styled geometric vector composition isn’t all that difficult. Leave it up to the guys at Abduzeedo to come up with something like this!

Web Tutorials

Simple scalable CSS based breadcrumbs

If you need a breadcrumb style navigation menu, this tutorial makes great use of one image to create a stylized, scalable menu that gets the job done quite well.

How-To Minimize Load Time for Fast User Experiences

This has got to be the most comprehensive, detailed article online for minimizing page load time. If you want to improve your page load time, this is the article for you. Period. Bookmark and use again and again.

5 Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS

It’s true, employing these techniques will improve your CSS writing abilities, and hopefully save you hours and hours of aimlessly searching your own stylesheets when working on your own projects.

Quick & Easy CSS Development with Firebug

Firebug is a nifty Firefox Extension (and standalone app) that can really cut your time in half when it comes to diagnosing and repairing CSS problems across multiple browsers. If you’re not using Firebug or a similar program yet, it’s time to start.

Freebies, Inspiration & Resources

Videogame Remakes by Orioto

You don’t have to be a fan of video games to respect these remakes of popular titles such as Sonic and Mario. Talk about talent. This guy brings old games to life with vibrant and exciting artistic style.

35 Beautiful Examples Of Animals Photography

Here’s an outstanding collection of animal photography worth taking a peek at. Capturing the right moment with photography and animals is not an easy task, but when done well it can sure create powerful imagery.

“Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme

WeFunction always creates outstanding quality resources. They continue to impress with their latest free WordPress theme released on Smashing Magazine.

10 Excellent Open Source and Free Alternatives to Photoshop

Haven’t made the jump to Photoshop quite yet? Maybe you won’t have to. These 10 free Photoshop alternatives have many of the same features you’ll find in Adobe’s award winning software, and in many cases will do everything you need in 2D Raster Editing Software.

7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility

Seven great ways to test cross-browser compatibility with your code. Actually, there are eight, but the 8th is a “bonus“.

101 Absolutely Breathtaking Infrared Photographs

The title pretty much sums this one up. If you missed our roundup of 101 Breathtaking Infrared Photos, this is your last chance to see some really impressive photography.

Free Exclusive Vector Pack from Go Media Arsenal

Go Media and Tutorial9 teamed up to bring T9 viewers an extra special deal this month. Download a free exclusive vector pack from the folks at Go Media, and next time you buy there be sure to use the coupon code “tutorial9” for a 10% discount.

Free Social Icon Pack: Nurture

Just one last exclusive freebie for the Tutorians! This social bookmarking icon set will bring a fresh green look to any web project you’ve got in the works, and they are entirely free to use!

Get Featured in Creative Bookmarks

If you’d like to be featured in the next volume of Creative Bookmarks, simply send us your tutorial, resource, or article link before the end of the month. If we think it’s a top notch link, we’ll be sure to share it with all of our readers!

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