Blank theater sign, download PSD template and put your title. Shiny theater marquee, frame with lights and blank space in the middle.

Resolution: 1280x960px
Full size JPG preview: Theater sign template
File Format: PSD
Color theme: red, yellow
Author: PSD Graphics
Similar item: Box of popcorn

Download Photoshop PSD source:
File Size: 1.56 MB

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to create beautifull lines of different shapes that you can add to any image.

Final Image Preview

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Resources

• Guitar Silhouette 3

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Step 1

Open Guitar Silhouette image on Photoshop. Go to Image > Image Size and change width to 1125px and height to 1500px.

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Step 2

Select Brush Tool and press F5. Choose a hard round brush with 10 pixels and set up following presets for current brush:

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Step 3

Create a new layer and make a straight line (white color) by pressing Shift.

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Step 4

Apply Filter > Blur > Motion Blur with these settings:

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Step 5

Duplicate layer with Ctrl+J and merge copied layer with original one by selecting both layers and pressing Ctrl+E to increase effect.

Repeat process several times till you have something similar to what i have below.

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Step 6

Go to Edit > Transform > Scale and transform line.

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Step 7

Duplicate layer a few times and move each copy right to get same effect as below.

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Step 8

Merge all the layers with lines into one layer and apply Filter > Transform > Scale to transform it.

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Step 9

Now make selection of current layer with Select > Load Selection.

Apply Gradient Tool with Transparent Rainbow gradient (one of standard Photoshop gradients) for the left part of selection of layer.

Repeat same process applying Gradient Tool to parts of selection but keeping some parts in between with white so line will look more fractional (It will create impression that the line consists of a set of lines).

Remove selection with Ctrl+D.

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Step 10

Apply Edit > Transform > Scale to make line longer.

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Step 11

Now we go to Edit > Transform > Warp to transform line to similar position as you can see on my screenshot below.

You can Transform the line in whatever way you want to decorate your image.

You can also make different shapes with line as you can see on my example below:

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Final Image

Add more lines repeating all steps and position them on canvas and you have learned to created beautifull lines in a simple way.

Brown vintage burst background, blank high resolution design theme in an old and retro style, grunge textured paper with sun rays.

Resolution: 5000x3750px
Medium size preview (1280x1024px): Vintage burst background
File format: JPG
Color theme: light and dark brown
Author: PSD Graphics
Might be useful (similar item): Retro sky background

Download hi-res JPG file:
File Size: 4.72MB

New apps and websites seem to be appearing on an almost daily basis, but trying to find the good ones among them can be tough, especially considering how many are not that great.

That’s why every month we research and showcase some of the best and latest resources available for web designers.

Here’s the newest installment of what’s new for web designers in the past few weeks. This month we’ve covered everything from new fonts to useful web apps to some new resources for you to use in your own designs, all recently launched!

As always, if we’ve missed something, let us know in the comments. And if you know of an app you’d like included in the next roundup, please tweet it to @cameron_chapman.

Please feel free to share your views on the products and services that we’re featuring this month, in the comments area below…

The Great Typekit Table

Sleepover has published this chart that shows us which Typekit fonts are good for long blocks of text. In addition to listing appropriate fonts, it also tells us whether the fonts are OK for Windows, whether they include extra weights and opticals, and more. All the fonts included had to meet certain criteria: they had to be available in bold, italic, and bold italic styles, and they couldn’t be handwriting, script or monospace.

Instagram

Instagram is a new camera app for iPhone. It’s free, and lets you snap a photo and then apply filters to it before sharing it via Facebook, Twitter or Flickr.

Curio 7

Curio 7 is the newest version of the Curio app for Mac, which allows for better organization of creative projects. This version adds a bunch of new features, and is easier to use than previous versions.

Sublime Video

Sublime Video is a new embeddable HTML5 video player, still in private beta. It will be a paid app once the beta is over, but aims to be more cost-effective than free apps by removing the need to manage or maintain the app, or go through complicated integration procedures.

Alertful

Alertful is a simple, free reminder service. Just enter a task, holiday, meeting, or other event and your email address, and it will remind you on the appropriate day. You can tell it whether to just remind you once or on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

BrushLovers.com

BrushLovers.com is a new sister-site to Webdesigner Depot that offers a huge collection of both free and premium Photoshop brushes. The brushes included are all exclusive, so you won’t find them anywhere else!

MailerLite

MailerLite is a low-cost email newsletter program that uses a drag-and-drop content editor and doesn’t require HTML skills. Pricing starts at just over $.01/email sent, and goes down from there, depending on volume.

Wibba

Wibba is a new social sharing service for tech products, both online and off. You can share anything related to the tech industry: news, apps, videos, and more, and follow people to see what they’re sharing.

PicsEngine

PicsEngine is a new photo storage and sharing service. They offer a 30-day trial, but after that the charge is 5 Euros per month (or 50 Euros per year) for unlimited storage and up to 10GB of bandwidth per month. Photo galleries can be viewed with any browser, while the library service only works on Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Observer

Observer is a new analytics app, currently still in private beta. It has a very elegant UI, and can give both a high-level view as well as a detailed view of what you need to know about your website traffic.

Weet for iPhone

Weet is a new, $.99 Twitter app for iPhone. It offers a clean interface, a number of built-in services (like Bit.ly, Posterous, Twitpic and TwitVid), and Read Later support. It also supports multiple accounts, and supports twitmore.

Awesome Fontstacks

Awesome Fontstacks is a great site for finding and creating failsafe font stacks that can be used with @font-face. Just pick a font to start, and the site will then show you compatible fonts.

Gitwrite

Gitwrite is “Blogging. For Nerds. Done right.” It’s basically a blogging platform built on Git. You sign up with Github and can then can update either via git or using their web interface.

Desks Near Me

Freelancers often work from home, which is great. Except when you’d like to get out of the house and work somewhere else for the day. That’s where Desks Near Me comes in. Enter your location and it will tell you of available places nearby where you can work for the day.

Owe Me Cash

Owe Me Cash is an online “collections” service that will send reminders via phone, text and email to those who owe you money.

RailsWizard

RailsWizard simplifies the creation of new Rails apps, by using a wizard to walk you through setting up the initial elements of your app. You can enter everything from the Database/ORM to the JavaScript framework and plugins to the templating engine and more.

foxGuide

foxGuide is a Firefox plugin that lets you add Photoshop-esque guides to webpages. It saves the guides you make for each page, too, so you don’t have to recreate them the next time you need them.

NULL Free Font

NULL is a new free font from Font Fabric. It’s a bold, sans-serif, display-style font, perfect for headlines.

Roke 1984

Roke 1984 is a new display-style font with a really unique look. It’s based on a geometric forms and mathematical symbols, and includes both numerals and accents.

Spatha Serif

Spatha Serif is a beautiful, slightly-rounded serif font with a vintage feel to it.

Unobtrusive Ajax Free Ebook

Here’s a free ebook from Jesse Skinner, and published by O’Reilly, for learning to use Ajax and JavaScript unobtrusively.

Verify

Verify is a new app for gathering feedback from users on mockups or screens. It gives clear, actionable results, and can be used for A/B testing among other types of tests. They offer a 30-day free trial, and then plans start at $9/month.

Cirkel Pro Font Family

Cirkel Pro is a funky new font family, that includes a number of unusual forms, all based on circles.

Skyhook Mono Font Family

The Skyhook Mono font family includes a variety of font weights and styles of this angular, monospace typeface. The regular weight is free to download, though other styles run about $20 each.

I Slabbed the Seriff Font

I Slabbed the Seriff is a new free font created with FontStruct. It’s a slab serif typeface, and includes numerals and accents.

Simple Booklet

Simple Booklet is an easy-to-use flipbook creator, that lets you include images, text, video, audio, and other content in your flipbooks, without any coding knowledge.

WordPress Snippets

WordPress Snippets simplifies theme creation and customization by providing pre-built code for a variety of functions and features. You can browse or search included code, or share your own code snippets.

The Square Grid

The Square Grid is a new CSS framework that works based on 35 equal-width columns. It also provides a 28px baseline-grid for smooth vertical rhythm.

Ai -> Canvas

Ai -> Canvas is a plug-in that lets Adobe Illustrator export vector and bitmap artwork directly to an HTML5 canvas element for rendering in a canvas-enabled browser. It provides drawing, animating, and coding options for creating interactive and well-designed canvas-based apps.

Markup

Markup is a bookmarklet that lets you draw on any webpage to share your ideas with others. You can draw with the Magic Marker or write with the Text tool, and then publish your ideas.

yfrog Widget Personalization

yfrog now lets you create a customized, personalized widget for sharing your yfrog photos in a blog or website sidebar.

Twilert

Twilert is a free app that lets you create automated email alerts for tweets. Just enter the search term, hashtag, or other criteria, and the time you want to receive your alerts, and Twilert will email you with any mentions.

Ontwik

Ontwik is a site that showcases lectures, screencasts, and conferences for web designers and developers. You can search or browse by tag (like creativity, Django, Github, JavaScript, jQuery, etc.). You can also submit videos of your own.

Yogile

Yogile is a new photosharing service that lets you create both private and public albums. Yogile stands out, though, by allowing friends and family to also submit images to your albums.

Capturely

Capturely makes it easy to create coming soon pages for your unlaunched websites aimed at getting visitors to submit their email address for updates.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

What do you think of these new tools for designers? If we missed something, please share it in the comments below!

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: n5UR0E

Source

Much has been written about using Twitter for business, for social networking, for personal connections, for making money with and increasing follower count. But many people forget that without a good (great) Twitter bio, it’s virtually impossible to get targeted followers, much less engage meaningfully with them.

Now some may argue that writing an itty bit bio of a 160 characters is hardly rocket science and they’d be right. But the number of atrocious bios I’ve seen lately has inspired this post. It’s not always easy to combine brevity, meaning and interest.

Whether you use Twitter for business or other, take a good look at your Twitter bio and ask yourself “Will someone reading my bio want to follow me?” and if yes, then ask “Will that follower be the kind of person I wish to attract?”

No one relevant will follow you if they don’t know who you are. And no one will know who you are if you don’t tell them succinctly. Enter your Twitter bio.

Twitter Bio Don’ts

Now before we discuss what you SHOULD write in your bio, let’s get all the DON’T stuff out of the way first.

• Don’t copy paste a longer than 160 character bio from somewhere else. Bios that are cut off mid-sentence are sloppy, unprofessional and irritating.
• Don’t write something in the bio that has nothing to do with you. For example, a popular quote. Besides, it’s cheesy; be original.
• Don’t throw out a challenge. “Follow me if you dare.” Umm, no thanks, I’m not that daring.
• Don’t leave it blank. Self explanatory.
• Don’t use clichés, jargons or buzzwords. They make you sound fake, insincere and a possible spammer. Like all those self-proclaimed “social media gurus” out there.
• Don’t mix languages unless your audience understands both. It’s annoying enough when you start following someone whose username is in English but who tweets in another tongue!
• Don’t type like a teenager (unless you are one, but even then it’s a thinly veiled excuse). By that I mean ThE TwITTer bIoS ThAt LoOk lIkE ThIs (Gosh that hurt!)

Remember, the main point of your bio is so that others may determine if you are follow-worthy or not based upon your mutual interests. People like to follow others who:

1. Have similar interests
2. They can learn something from (I’m obviously not including news sources and celebs in his mix; just regular people)

Twitter Bio Content Ideas

So then, what should you put in your bio that will attract the right audience?

1. Your interests, obviously. Your interests could include your hobbies and stuff that you have experience in. Examples could be graphic designer, travel content specialist, wine connoisseur, or whatever else interests you.
2. What defines you. If someone asks you what do you do, what’s your reply? That’s the reply that goes here. In condensed form, of course. One of my replies is that I’m an online entrepreneur. Another one of my replies is that I’m a proud mom to a toddler. Figure out your priorities and what you want prospective followers to know about you. In my experience, a healthy balance of personal and professional elements in your bio adds interest to the dynamics that make you an individual.
3. Your areas of expertise. What are you truly great at? What do you consider yourself an expert in? Is it CAD, politics, humor, journalism?
4. What you are passionate about. This should go without saying, but often people write really weird stuff like “I’m passionate about making money online” as their Twitter bio. Who wouldn’t like to make money online, seriously! Find a real passion and write it here. Your passion could be helping others in a specific way, or buying a Porche, or taking care of cute kittens until they find a good home. Passions are driving factors and people gravitate towards others who follow the same passions.
5. Keywords. If you want to be found on Twitter search or by the numerous Twitter apps that group people by interest, then it’s vital that you have relevant keywords in your profile. If you are marketing locally, you could have your location plus your business type as part of your Twitter bio–e.g. “NYC’s go-to bakery for bagels.” That way search engines are more likely to find your Twitter profile when searching for the keywords “NYC bakery.”
6. Usefulness/USP (especially for companies). There’s an example that follows later in this post of a service called BackupYourTweets. They compelled me to follow them on the strength of their Twitter bio. Read below to find out how they’ve artfully combined the unique selling point (USP) of their service into their Twitter bio.
7. Use adjectives. Instead of saying you are a blogger, say you’re a tech blogger, instead of calling yourself a freelancer, say you’re an experienced freelancer. I use the term “passionate writer” in my bio to distinguish myself from those who write just for money. I write because it’s a passion. Adjectives add flavor to your bio.
8. A dash of personality. Personally, I feel any Twitter bio is incomplete without this key element. It’s what makes us human (read: interesting). Don’t be afraid to show some personality; done tastefully this can augment your business bio rather than detract from it. I put in “fire-breathing dragon” in my personality section because I want people to know I’m a no-nonsense go-getter. See examples below of other great bios that have a smidgen of personality.

How Do I Fit It All In?

It’s all very well to provide a laundry list of what to include in a Twitter bio, but you may be wondering how the heck am I going to fit all this material in 160 characters? Here are some tips and tricks:

• Use short phrases. It’s a good idea to use phrases instead of complete sentences; they save space and can convey the same amount of value. So instead of “I have 15 years of experience in internet marketing” write “internet marketing veteran.”
• Use symbols. I really like the pipe symbol (|) as a separator of key terms. It looks very slick and saves tons of space! Else, just use a comma or semi-colon. Use abbreviations that your industry understands: Example B2B, SEM, etc. You don’t have to use all of the above: stick to what feels comfortable and how much you want to disclose.

Examples of Great Twitter Bios

Here are some examples of great Twitter bios:

• @BtoBSocialMedia. BtoBSocialMedia offers daily b2b business tips on using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media to increase brand awareness and social influence.
• @PeterShallard. The Shrink for Entrepreneurs who want freedom, wealth & sanity. 100% Organic Tweeter
• @backupmytweets. Did you know that Twitter only gives access to your most recent 3,200 tweets? Our service will keep your tweets forever!
• @garyvee. Family 1st! but after that, Businessman, @winelibrary, @Vaynermedia, Author of Crush IT and a dude that loves the hustle, people and the @nyjets.
• @marieforleo. CEO | Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur I’ll Turn You Rich Happy & Hot W/a Badass Combo Of Marketing Wisdom, Spiritual Power Tools & Irresistible Booty Moves

And with that, I hope you are off to write or re-write your Twitter bio!

Twitter forces us to condense our thoughts, use brevity and still convey lots of meaning. That’s a big challenge for most people. Find what defines you best and construct your bio using that information. Think of your bio as a concentrated version of your tweets.

Your Turn

Did I miss an important point about Twitter bios? Do you want to showcase a great Twitter bio you’ve seen?

Add it all in the comments below!

Snippet is a jQuery syntax highlighter plugin built on top of the SHJS with native support for 15 popular languages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and XML. It can be extended to support 24 additional languages.

This syntax highlighter plugin provides a quick and easy way of highlighting source code passages in HTML documents. It comes with 39 different styles (color schemes) for highlighting your code.

A blank winners podium with numbers on it. Number 1 and first place symbol. Edit PSD file and change the color easily or update text.

Resolution: 1280x1024px
Full size JPG preview: Winners podium icon
File Format: PSD
Color theme: orange, white
Author: PSD Graphics
Similar item: Gold trophy cup

Download Photoshop PSD source:
File Size: 942 KB

White gamepad icon in PSD format, video game controller against white background, with clipping path. Computer and game console joystick symbol.

Resolution: 1280x1024px
Full size JPG preview: White gamepad icon
File Format: PSD
Color theme: white, blue, purple
Author: PSD Graphics
Similar item: Tablet PC

Download Photoshop PSD source:
File Size: 2.90 MB

Yellow and black shield with a silver metal frame. Glossy finish web icon, download PSD source.

Resolution: 1280x1024px
Full size JPG preview: Shield security icon
File Format: PSD
Color theme: black, yellow, silver
Keywords: network protection concept, website and internet security guard, shield shape and symbol
Author: PSD Graphics
Similar item: Silver padlock, security icon

Download Photoshop PSD source:
File Size: 1,98MB

Comment, flag, thumbs up and thumbs down, unique style, modern design web icons.

Resolution: 1280x1024px
Full size JPG previews:
Thumbs up icon
Thumbs down icon
Comment icon
Flag and report icon

File Format: PSD
Color theme: blue and white
Keywords: social media icons for websites, blog and forums, internet social communication symbols
Author: PSD Graphics
Similar item: Like and dislike symbols

Download Photoshop PSD source:
File Size: 3,62MB