You might have just begun your career as a web/graphic designer working for agencies as an employee, or has managed to break out of the office life and started working as a freelancer, enjoying the freedom of working from home. However, you will find no matter what you do, learning will never stop and in fact, it’s the only way you can improve and survive in this competitive industry.

Blogs have become a great resource for designers for a long time and there are tons of useful tips and tricks you can absorb and use for your own works. Among the vast sea of design-related blogs, there are serveral primary ones which attract majority of attention from the design community every day.

The webmasters of those design blogs are designers, but they’re also entrepreneurs – they have turned their blogs into huge communities, loved by millions of people around the globe.

In this post, I collected Interviews of 15 Absolute Top Designer Bloggers on this Planet and put into one place. Hopefully they will inspire you and learn from the experiences they shared in those interviews.

Here goes the list, enjoy! (Please note that by click on the image will take you to actual interview)

Interview with Walter Apai of Webdesigner Depot

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the popular design blog Webdesigner Depot. In much less than a year WDD has become one of the leading blogs in the niche. I recently had a chance to interview the man behind WDD, Walter Apai.

Source: designm.ag

Interview with David Leggett: Founder of Tutorial9.net

David Leggett is a designer, blogger, and founder of Tutorial9; a leading website that provides Photoshop, Web Design, and Photography tutorials. David shares his experience in developing and growing Tutorial9, and provides advice for bloggers who are just getting started.

Source: brandfreeze.com

Interview With Steven Snell From Vandelay Design & DesignM.ag

I first connected with Steven back when I used to run Freelance Folder almost 2 years ago (Steven wrote some great articles there) and we’ve been in contact ever since. Here’s the interview I did with Steven recently, I hope you like it! Make sure you stop by in the comment section and feel free to ask Steven questions! :)

Source: spyrestudios.com

Interview with Fabio Sasso

You may be familiar with Fabio’s blog, Abduzeedo and his company site, Zee in Brazil with business partner, Fabiano Meneghetti. His design focus is on Graphic and Web design (he is very talented and I admire his work!), he also does regular tutorials for PSDTuts.

Source: fuelyourcreativity.com

Interview With Adelle Charles From Fuel Your Creativity – Design, Blogging And Business

Hey everyone! Today we have an interview with Adelle Charles of Fuel Your Creativity! Adelle is awesome, I’ve known her for some time now and have been an avid reader of her blog since the day I found it. I hope you enjoy the interview! :)

Interview with Nick La

Continuing with our designer interview series, I took the opportunity and am very excited to present today’s interview with Nick La. Nick is a well known freelance illustrator and web designer based in Toronto. He is the founder of N.Design Studio, and popular blog Web Designer Wall, Design Jobs on the Wall, and Best Web Gallery. He also recently launched his new site Icondock exclusively dedicated to icons.

Source: vector.tutsplus.com

Interview With Jacob Cass From Just Creative Design

If you are a web designer who also happens to read blogs, then you must have heard of Jacob Cass. Unless of course you have been living under a rock for the last few years. Jacob is a graphic designer who also has a blog with tens of thousands of readers. He also owns another 2 exciting websites! You can find Jacob Cass at his main website Just Creative Design, and also at his other 2 websites, Logo of the Day and Logo Designer Blog.

Source: webdesigndev.com

Interview with Chris Spooner

We’ve got a great interview for you today! We chatted with Chris Spooner of SpoonGraphics and Line25 about the last 12 months and his future ambitions.

Source: psdfan.com

An Interview with Freelance Designer Danny Outlaw

Danny Outlaw is a fulltime freelancer, and the guy behind the popular Outlaw Design Blog. Danny is well known in the community and shares his experiences of freelancing from abroad, managing clients and outsourcing work in video and blog posts. I caught up with Danny to ask a few questions of my own…

Source: line25.com

Interview With Jacob Gube, The Man Behind Six Revisions

I have had the pleasure of connecting with Jacob, the man behind the very popular design blog Six Revisions, on multiple occasions through various social sites and I recently interviewed him for SpyreStudios. I hope you’ll enjoy this interview with Jacob! Make sure you stop by in the comment section and feel free to ask Jacob questions! :)

Source: spyrestudios.com

Interview with PSDFan’s Designer and Blogger Tom Ross

Tom Ross of PSDFan is a web designer of 8 years and currently posts up tutorials, interviews, and even some free graphics here and there onto the blog. PSDFan has grown rapidly, and I feel honored to have an interview with Tom as we learn a bit more about what makes PSDFan such a success.

Source: insidethewebb.com

An Interview with Graphic Designer, Brian Hoff – The Design Cubicle

Brian Hoff is a one of those folks in the design community that make logo design look effortless. His logos are sleek and elegant. A fantastic acid test for a logo is how well it displays in black and white. Given that Brian’s logo gallery is entirely in black and white, yet looks stunning, I’d say he gets an ‘A’ on that test. Oh yeah, he is also a very good web designer and blogger. Brian was kind enough to answer some questions here on MyInkBlog, check out the insight he shares in the answers that follow.

Source: myinkblog.com

Interview with Johnson Koh from 10 Steps

Johnson Koh is a graphic and web designer from Singapore. 10Steps.SG was created with the purpose to share his experiments with Adobe Photoshop and interesting news he come across in the design world.

Source: digitalartempire.com

Graphic Designer and Blogger Andrew Houle of MyInkBlog

Graphic and web designers, lend me your ears! We have another great graphic design blog to add to our list today, MyInkBlog. Featuring all sorts of free goodies to download, amazing tutorials, inspiring articles, and a whole lot more! MyInkBlog is one of the premiere graphic and web design blogs on the web, with over 3,000 Twitter followers and almost 4,000 RSS followers.

Source: insidethewebb.com

An interview with Nick Pagano of Think Design Blog

To continue meetings with hard-workers and helpful persons in Web Design, I’m pleased to share this quick interview with Nick Pagano. Nick is the founder of Think Design Blog, a graphic design site where you can find freebies, resources, inspiration and much more.

Source: pvmgarage.com

That’s it for this post! Hope you find this collection useful and inspirational! Remember if you enjoy those interviews and haven’t yet checked out their blogs, please pay them a visit! You won’t be disappointed :)

Till next time, have a great day!

In my opinion, drawing effect has always been a vital part of Photoshop. The various tools and filters available in Photoshop provides designers pretty much endless possibility of creating realistic drawing effect. The good thing is to create those effect is not that difficult and everyone can do it – providing you put in some effort practicing :)

In this post, I will showcase you 10 excellent Photoshop Tutorials that I think can give you a boost to your drawing skills. I have personally tried out them in the past and I think the quality of them are quite good, and should give you lot of tips and tricks into the Photoshop drawing world.

For your convenience, I categorise those tutorials into three difficulty levels: 

Here goes the list, enjoy!

Beginner

How to Draw Badge Buttons in Photoshop

In this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to create your own shiny buttons that you can stick different pictures on.

Source: psdcore.com

Realistic Water Drops

In this Photoshop tutorial I will show you how to make basic water drops in three dimensional space using the elliptical marquee tool, free transform, duplicate layer and a few simple layer effects.

Source: pshero.com

Draw 3D Crystal Icon in Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to draw nice and glossy 3D crystal icon. A beginner level tutorial however quite informative. Have a try!

Source: 10step.sg

Custom Sim Cards Tutorial

This tutorial shows you the steps to make this really cool, realistic sim card in Photoshop. Very simple yet effective.

Source: hv-designs.co.uk

Intermediate

Create An Old Envelope

I’ve had several requests since posting the Postage Stamp lesson for a follow-up on how to create the envelope used in that tutorial. Well today my Photoshop friends your prayers have been answered. Here’s the step by step to creating that cool old envelope.

Source: pshero.com

How to Make a Badass WordPress Logo

I was in a store the other day and walked by a sign with a logo that had an amazing shiny/metallic look to it. So, I whipped out my cellphone and took a picture of it. I spent a while trying to recreate the look but came up with something a little different. I applied that look to a WordPress Logo. This is how I did it…

Source: 3nhanced.com

Creating a Glass Ball

During the course of this Photoshop tutorial we’re going through 9 major steps to create a glass ball. The main goal of this tutorial is that you get an idea how to approach this. It’s not that important to remember all settings, but it’s more important that you understand what’s exactly happening.

Source: lunacore.com

Advanced

Faking the 3D look using Photoshop

The aim of this tutorial is to show you a different use of Photoshop other than image editing. It is my tribute to the original artist’s work. Besides, I wanted to break a tradition here. Most of the 3D work of animators is inspired from 2D work (sketch/painting/photo).

Source: 3dtotal.com

Create an amazing Ad in Photoshop

I’m a really fan of Peter Jaworowski aka The Hejz, I even wrote a tutorial for PSDTUTS showing an effect inspired by one of the Peter’s amazing works. Then last week, Cameron and Bobby, gave me some tips on how create those light streaks, and that is what I will share with you in this post.

Source: abduzeedo.com

Design a Vintage Radio Icon in Photoshop

In this Photoshop Tutorial, you’ll learn how to design an old vintage radio using simple shapes, gradients, patterns and textures.

Source: tutorial9.net

OK that’s it for this post! Thanks for reading it and I hope you found those tutorials useful for improving your drawing skills!

Till next time, have a great day!

Time to do a nice roundup of the tutorials here on PSD Vault! If you have been a good old friend of the site, you might still remember some of those tutorials. However, if you are new here, this post would come in handy when you try to dig up something extra on PSD Vault.

I would also like to announce that PSD Files for each tutorial from PSD Vault are available for just $2 per file, via Paypal, and the Freebie Section will be up very soon.

Some forewords …

It has been a big four months since I launched the site back in Mid November, 2008. The site has grown from 10,000 pageview per month to 10,000 pageview per day on average. Despite the traffic increase, the focus of PSD Vault remains the same: To provide quality Photoshop Tutorial, Resource and inspiration to all levels of designers.

No doubt there is still plenty of room for improvement here and I receive a lot of feedbacks for the tutorial/site design through comments/emails. I will certainly try my best and I thank you for all the constructive comments/feedbacks you have made.

Last but not the least, I would like to say a big THANK YOU to the wonderful site sponsors – thank you so much for the support!!

Ok enough talk, here is 10 tutorials I chose for this roundup, enjoy!

Tutorial Roundup

Create a Realistic Volcano Eruption Scene with Lava Effect in Photoshop

Create a Diablo III Inspired Grungy Text Effect

Bring Colour and Light out of Ordinary Image

Design a Dark and Crimson Forest Scene in Photoshop

Translucent Text Effect with Sky and Cloud

Easily Transform Your Photo into a Watercolour Painting in Photoshop

Create an Realistic Dark Ocean Text Effect in Photoshop

Render a Far Cry 2 Inspired Golden Sunset Scene in Photoshop

Create a Realistic Weedy Text Effect in Photoshop

Give Your Photo a Shining and Metallic Effect in Photoshop

Hope you enjoy this roundup and learn to the maximum!

$2 PSD File Download

I would also like to announce that PSD Files for each tutorial from PSD Vault are available for just $2 per file, via Paypal. You should now see a big red $2 button on the right sidebar, click on it and you will be re-directed to Paypal payment page.

Just one thing to remember:

When you buy the PSD files, please specify the name of the tutorial in “Add special instructions to the seller” in the Paypal payment page, so I know which file you’re after.

I will send the PSD File to your Paypal Email within 24 hours once payment is received.  You can Contact Me if you have any further question.

In the future I will make this system fully automated so you will get the download link straight away. Monthly membership here on PSD Vault is also on its way, so please watch out :)

Freebies, Freebies, Freebies

Yes, I will have a freebies section setup very soon, where you can download stock photos and texture for your own design purpose. There will be no restriction for those images and you can use them whenever, wherever, for whatever.

Hope you enjoy this post and those roundups and have a great day!