No April Fools here, just a handful of the top content in the design and web community. We have all of the top tutorials, freebies and resources for you to enjoy from the month of March!

Photoshop Tutorials

Fantastic Disintegration Effect inspired by Watchmen in Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to create a disintigration effect similar to one used in the movie “Watchmen”. Perfect for making that annoying friend dissapear. Or, you know, making a cool effect in photoshop.

How to Create Super-Malleable Effects with Colorful Lines

These days colorful lines are one of the most malleable effects you can easily create in Photoshop. They simply fit everywhere and can look really awesome. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create these fantastic colorful effects using only Photoshop.

Gunshot Through a Glass

Learn how to create a suspenseful photo manipulation in Photoshop. You will learn how to create realistic distortions with the displace filter and apply photo effects to give it a cold look.

Professional Photo-Retouching Video Tutorial: Hair

A video tutorial that shows some useful techniques for retouching hair in photoshop. Helps improve color, vividness, adjusting tonal values, and more.

Discover Seven Ways to Create Sepia Images in Photoshop

Like most things in Photoshop, there are probably a half dozen ways to simulate a sepia tone image. Here are 7 ways, along with a nice history behind Sepia Toning images.

Light and Shadows – Feathering Gradients in Photoshop

Surn an ordinary shape with solid colors into a detailed scene by adding shadows and lighting. Great technique shown, and can easily be applied to everyday work.

Use type as a creative effect in Adobe Photoshop

Unlock the power of the Distort tool in Adobe Photoshop to create this enigmatic image. The process is slightly painstaking, but the result is really phenomenal.

Create An Amazing Diamond Advertisement Poster in Photoshop

Our newest writer, Constantin Potorac, shares an incredible tutorial with the Photoshop Community this month for creating an outstanding Diamond Advertisement Poster. This guys great! Be sure to tell him so!

Draw a Classy 3D Poker Chip in Photoshop

This tutorial shows how to illustrate a 3D Poker Chip in Adobe Photoshop starting from scratch. Great technique, and very high quality polished results.

Illustrator Tutorials

Working with type in Illustrator

Focusing on using type in Illustrator to create a bold, eye-catching message, we are going to use a ‘type as image’ style of typography. This style is both popular and effective for communicating strong messages visually.

Create a Cute Panda Bear Face Icon

In this easy tutorial, you’ll learn 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.

Draw a Windy Sunset Illustration

There’s really no question why we love GoMediaZine so much when they continually offer tutorials like this one. That, and when they give exclusive vector packs to the Tutorial9 community.

Tips for Working with the Gradient Mesh Tool In Illustrator

One of the most amazing and confounding tools in Adobe Illustrator is probably the Gradient Mesh tool. Working with this feature allows the user to divide almost any shape into a mesh. Each intersection of two lines (horizontal/vertical) can be colored with a solid color. This tutorial takes a different format than some of our other tuts, and will help you work with the Mesh tool better.

Elegant Gradient Ribbon in Illustrator

Learn to draw a colorful, elegant ribbon with Illustrator in Veerle’s usual style. Simple, but it sure does look nice!

How To Create an Awesome Vector Skate Deck Design

Learn how to create some killer skateboard deck art, and then how to apply the design to see how it would actually look.

Web Tutorials

Fluid Grids with CSS and XHTML

Coding websites to a grid? Pfft, that’s so last year. A List Apart takes a look at how to create websites that resize with a fluid grid in a recent post.

Good Call-To-Action Buttons

The call-to-action button is an important tool in the user experience designer’s box of tricks. This article gives you a few pointers on providing effective ones.

A Better Login System

Net.tuts+ has published several great tutorials on user login systems. Most tutorials only deal with authenticating the user, which allows for two levels of security: logged in and not logged in. For many sites, a finer degree of control is needed to control where users can go and what they can do. Creating an access control list (ACL) system will give you the flexibility for granular permissions.

jQuery UI Tabs with Next/Previous

Learn how to create a tabbed navigation with previous and next links using jQuery. Live Demo and Source files included for those who like to inspect.

The Easiest Way to Use Any Font You Wish

Thanks to the latest browser updates, developers can begin working with time-saving new properties – such as @font-face. Unfortunately, the availability of these features is limited to a tiny fraction of our overall userbase. At least for the next year or so, we’ll need to continue utilizing the Flash and Javascript alternatives when embedding fonts. Luckily, a new contender, Cufón, has made the process unbelievably simple.

Photography Tutorials

Baby Photography 101

A very insightful, informative read for taking excellent photos of babies. Some of the required knowledge needed before reading this post can be found in a similar article called How to Shoot an Indoor Maternity Session.

Wildlife Photography Tips: Take Better Wildlife Photos

This post describes some basic tips to improve the quality of wildlife photography. Anyone interested in capturing more compelling images of animals will find it useful in furthering the development of their skills.

Outstanding Bird Photography Tips

A nice collection of tips for photographers looking to take better pictures of birds. Some great photos including this shot by nicebiscuit.

HDR How to – Photographing

This is a detailed guide about taking photos for an HDR image. Practice has shown that successful and smooth HDR photography takes careful planning and sets certain requirements for the gear.

Freebies, Inspiration & Resources

53 Incredible High Resolution Photoshop Paint Brushes

These brushes are not only good for roughing up or distressing your designs, but these Photoshop brushes are also great if you just need to reproduce a paint brush effect.

Download “Imprezz”, A Free WordPress Theme

Imprezz – a simple and beautiful 3-column-theme, a free WordPress theme designed by Gopal Raju from ProductiveDreams for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Layout Packs from CSS Tricks

Chris Coyier provides a useful pack of common column layouts for download over at CSS Tricks. That man does a ton for the web community—did you know the featured content slider on Tutorial9 was built from this tutorial he wrote?

Typeface Anatomy and Glossary

FontShop has a handy glossary of pretty much all the terms you need to know when it comes to type, along with a useful illustration of a typeface’s anatomy.

45 Amazing Type Faces – Typographic Portraits

No really, these are amazing faces made from type—definitely a gallery to check out. Is that a kern-el stuck in their teeth? Haha, get it guys? Guys?

New Smashing Freebies For Designers and Bloggers

The giving folks at Smashing Magazine have some new freevies including a Web Developer icons set, designed by Pedja Rusic, a WP Smashing WordPress theme, designed by Greg Johnson and a Cafe icon set, designed by Enk.

Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet

This is a must read for bloggers. In what direction are we heading for the future of the internet. Is the free spirit of the internet sustainable for much longer, or will more sites look for other ways to monetize content?

10 Principles For Readable Web Typography

This post explains some Web typography terms and how they play into readability. The article presents numerous tips to help improve the readability of your content, and showcases very readable websites, layouts and articles.

Children Book Illustrations Showcase

Like all things design, it is amazing to see the evolution of illustration in children’s books. Gone are the days where children’s books were just simply some pretty pictures for kids to look at. Today, children’s books illustrators are artists in and of their own right.

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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