Author Archive for: admin

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/GvPGsvKRImU/

We’re ending the month of January by kicking off a new weekly roundup series, “This Week In Web Design”, in which we will bring you a curated list of web design related articles published in the past week. Every Friday we will provide a list of links to helpful tips, tutorials, and learning opportunities to help you continue to grow your web design knowledge and skills. Of course, we have a wealth of information here at 1stWebDesigner to aid in that endeavor, but we hope these lists will help you to expand your resources beyond our own site.

So, here’s what we’ve found this week. Enjoy!

Your Web Designer Toolbox
Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Web Templates, Icon Sets, Themes & Design Assets

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UI Interactions & Animations Roundup #2

Some selected shots of great UI interactions and animations for your inspiration.

How To Keep Designing When Tragedy Strikes

You’re going to face these things sooner or later, here’s how you too, can overcome your personal disasters.

How Web Designers Can Maximize On-SERP SEO and Traffic with Structured Data

Get your SEO hat on. How web designers can use structured data markup to qualify for key SERP features.

How To Design Powerful Narratives On Mobile

Want to build a website or PWA that attracts a large audience and then converts as much of that audience into paying customers as possible? If that’s the case, what you need to do is use storytelling in your web design.

How to Install MySQL

This article discusses various options for using MySQL on your local system during development.

How to Add a WordPress Author Box to Your Blog Posts

Using a theme, plugin, or coding yourself.

How to design a portfolio that will land you clients

Your portfolio website is the place to show off your best work and establish your brand. It needs to be easy to get to, pleasing to the eye and professional looking. It is a combination of business card, elevator pitch and samples of your work.

Going Beyond Sales: 7 Types of Website Conversions to Optimize for on Your Website

What a conversion goal is, seven types of website conversions, and four steps for setting up your conversion rate goals.

Use and Reuse Everything in SVG… Even Animations!

Learn how to build and optimize your code with <use> element, CSS Variables and CSS animations.

A Rational Approach to Updating Your WordPress Install

Take a look at some techniques to mitigate risk and give you some peace of mind.

What Is Modern Web Design in 2020? 20 Stunning Examples

You know an outdated design when you see it for sure. Here’s a collection of 20 examples of modern web designs to help shape a better idea of what it looks like.

How to Be a Sustainable Web Designer

Talking about the practicalities of going green and asking whether it is possible to be a sustainable web designer.

How to Improve Security on WordPress Websites for Optimal Performance

A discussion of some rather small but significant tips that can be used to achieve improved security on your WordPress website and as a result improve performance.

WordPress 5.4 Will Add Lazy-Loading to All Images

WordPress announced that WordPress 5.4 may feature image lazy-loading by default.

Sticky Table of Contents with Scrolling Active States

A fairly common pattern for documentation.

How to Automatically Update Your JavaScript Dependencies

One frustrating aspect of the modern JavaScript ecosystem is keeping all your dependencies up to date. Thankfully, there are automated tools that can handle this thankless task for you.

That’s A Wrap!

We hope you have found this list helpful in your continuing growth as a web designer. If you are a publisher, blogger, or own a website that is publishing articles about or related to web design and you would like to make sure you get included in our lists, please contact us here.

Cover photo courtesy of ShotStash

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/creative-toilet-paper-rolls/

If your creativity is wild, no medium is a limitation. This fact is exceptionally true with Anastassia Elias, a french artist who collects toilet rolls and turns them into great works of unbelievable…

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/sVIpbiCY5Io/

Procreate makes it easy to create stunning designs and pieces of artwork for personal and professional use. However, gathering all the resources you need, like Procreate brushes, can seem like a daunting task when you’re first starting out.

Instead of having to hunt down brushes to use in your art, we’ve put together a resource you can reference whenever you need a new brush. Here, we’ve compiled some premium brushes, free collections, as well as premium (free & premium) collections you can use in your work starting right now.

All The Best Procreate Brushes
Unlimited Downloads: Hundreds of Procreate Brushes For Your Designs

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Premium Procreate Brushes
Vintage Comic Brushes

The Vintage Comic Brushes set contains 51 brushes for Procreate that are heavily inspired by the vintage comic halftone look.

Procreate Texture Brushes.Sand

This set of texture brushes offer a variety of sand effects for your Procreate projects. The set comes with 6 sand texture brushes.

Fabulous Pencils for Procreate

The Fabulous Pencils set comes with 44 different brushes that offer realistic pencil textures for any project that requires a hand drawn look.

Graffiti Brush for Procreate

The Graffiti Brush set makes it easy to create analog graffiti looks in your digital artwork.

The Jungle Brushes

The Jungle Brushes is a set of 20 brushes for Procreate that can be used to add an earthy and grungy look to any project.

Free Procreate Brush Collections
Watercolor & Paint Brushes

This is a lovely collection of free watercolor and paint brushes.

250+ Creative and Free Brushes for the iPad Pro

This is a real treasure trove of free resources! Here, you can find over 250 free brushes that offer you new creative ways to make what you want to make.

351+ Inking, Lettering, and Calligraphy Brushes for the iPad Pro

If lettering is what you’re interested in, why not browse the 350+ brushes listed in this resource?

Free Procreate Brushes

Here’s another lovely set of brushes that you can browse and use for free.

Free Brushes: A Stockpile of all My Freebies

In this collection, you can browse through all the free brushes a fellow artist has compiled. How generous!

50 of the Best Free Brushes

Another great list here, this time of 50 fantastic free brushes.

Premium Procreate Brush Collections
Premium Brushes for Artists & Illustrators

If it’s within your budget, you can always splurge on a new brush or two after browsing those listed here.

34 of the Best Brushes

This list of 34 all-time favorite brushes can really take you far when it comes to professionalism — plus there are some freebies included here as well.

The Best Procreate Brushes for iPad (Free & Premium Packs)

Another free and premium list here, chock full of some of the best brushes you could ever ask for.

The Best Procreate Brushes to Download in 2019

Over 300 brushes are listed at this resource. Odds say you’ll find what you’re looking for here.

100+ Brushes for Artists (Best Free & Premium Brush Sets)

Last on our list is this collection of over 100 brushes that includes free and premium selections, all of which are great for working artists.

Use These Procreate Brushes to Create Your Next Stunning Work

Don’t let a lack of on-hand resources stunt your next project. Instead, see what’s available to you for or for a nominal fee. What’s available might really surprise you. And hopefully, this collection of Procreate brushes will send you well on your way toward putting together something truly eye-catching. Be sure to check out our other brush resources here.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/W0uqFEhNjQw/beautiful-liquify-logo-animation-after-effects

Beautiful Liquify Logo Animation in After Effects

abduzeedoJan 24, 2020

I have been going back through old tutorials to fix some of the images that might be broken or with old formatting. The blog has changed quite a lot since we started 12 years ago. It’s incredible to see how many Photoshop tutorials we’ve written and how some of them stood the test of time. One of them was the Beautiful Water Effect in Photoshop. I love that tutorial, and it gave me the motivation that I need to continue studying After Effects. My goal was to try to reproduce the effect with some cool motion to it. With that, I would love to share a little After Effects tutorial on how I achieved the result.

A little disclaimer, I am not a pro with After Effects, on the contrary, I am learning, and my goal is to share the step by step on the things I discover along the way. I am sure there are more natural ways or better ways from other great resources, this one here is just a bit of my way of learning.

After Effects Tutorial

Step 1

The first thing to do is to try to understand how much in common After Effects and Photoshop have. In Photoshop this effect is quite simple, you use a displacement map. For my surprise, After Effects also have one.

So let’s get this started. Create a new project and add a new composition. Composition>New Composition.

Step 2

For my Photoshop image, I used a photo of ocean waves. So now we need to find a video for this project. It’s amazing how similar things feel when I started doing Photoshop tutorials. It was tough to find high-quality resources; we didn’t have Unsplash back in the day.

Now for photography, we have a plethora of excellent places. For video, the story is a bit different. I started this project using a sample for Adobe Stock, however, after searching I found a right place, it’s called Pexel Videos. The clip I am using is from there; it’s titled Close-Up Video Of Water Ripples by Stas Knop.

 

Step 3

Download the video and drag it to your Project panel. In Project pane, select the clip and hit “Enter,” to rename it. I like to keep the names short. I just called mine “Ocean.”

After that, drag the “Ocean” clip to your composition timeline panel. That way it gets centralized automatically.

Step 4

Let’s change opacity to 90%. In the timeline, expand the Ocean object, the expand Transform, and you will see Opacity. Just turn it to 90%

Step 5

Now let’s adjust the colors. Go to Effect>Color Correction>Hue/Saturation. Reduce the Saturation to -100.

Step 6

Let’s tweak the Levels now to remove the greyish look. Go to Effect>Color Correction>Levels. Use the values below.

Step 7

Let’s import the artwork we want to use for the displace effect. I am using the Abduzeedo logo. My logo is in vector format in Illustrator. Importing it to After Effects is straightforward. Again, I don’t know if it’s the right way, but this is how I did.

Select the vector in Illustrator and copy it.
In After Effects add a new solid layer. For the name use Logo and make sure the color of the layer is white.
Paste the logo in the composition as a path mask, and that’s it.
Select the layer in the timeline and go to Layer>Pre-Compose. The reason for this is if you want to replace the paths later you can do it without worrying about the timeline, imagine Smart Objects in Photoshop.

Step 8

Time to add some magic, at least it feels like that for me. One thing that I love about After Effects is that it does have some neat tricks, for example, the Effect & Presets panel has a search box. So you can type Displacement and boom, you will find what you need. In our case the Displacement Map. It can also be found via Effect>Distort>Displacement Map.

Make sure the Logo layer is select and just double-click on the Displacement Map option. You will notice on the left side there’s a new panel called Effect Controls. Let’s tweak these numbers to apply the effect to our layer.

For the Displacement Map Layer select the Ocean layer.
Tweak the Max Horizontal and Vertical Displacement. Depending on the logo and how much distortion you want. The cool thing is that you can animate these values too. I will show you an example at the end.

Step 9

To make it more realistic, duplicate the Ocean layer and reorder, so it’s on top of the Logo layer. After that change the Blend Mode to Multiply. After that change the opacity to 70%.

Step 10

The effect is pretty much done, but you can also try to add a little radial gradient to focus everything on the center of the composition. I haven’t found an easy way to add one, but here’s my hacky way.

Create a new composition. Make sure the background is black
Add a new solid layer with white color.
With the Ellipse Tool Q add a Circle in the center. It will mask the white layer.
Go to Effect>Blur & Sharpen>Gaussian Blur. Apply a significant value according to the gradient you want.

Step 11

Back to the main composition. Drag the Gradient composition to the timeline, below the logo but above the Ocean layer. Change the Blend Mode to Overlay.

Step 12

That’s it. The necessary effect is done. What you can do now is try to animate the in and out of the composition. You can do that by tweaking some of the values of the displacement, for example:

Select the Logo and go to Effect Controls>Displacement Filter.
Make sure the timeline is in the 0s. And click on the little Clock/Time watch icon next to Max Horizontal Displacement and Max Vertical Displacement.
Move the timeline to 3s and add keyframes. It’s the little diamond icon on the left side
Move to 7s and add more keyframes
Move to the end of the timeline and add two more keyframes. For these, change the values of the displacement to 300.
Move to the beginning and change the displacement values to 300 as well.
Select all keyframes, then with the right-click select Keyframe Assistant and then select Ease Ease.

Step 13

Let’s make the ocean fade in and fade out. To do that is quite simple.

Select the Ocean Layer and go to the 0s of the timeline. Expand the layer and select Transform>Opacity.
Click on the little stopwatch icon to add a keyframe.
Move to the 2s time and click on the “add keyframe” diamond icon.
Move to 8s and add another keyframe.
Move to the end of the timeline and change the opacity to 0%. It will automatically add a keyframe.
Select all keyframes, then with the right-click select Keyframe Assistant and then select Ease Ease.
With the keyframes selected, copy them. Select the Logo layer, go to Opacity and paste them to replicate the keyframes on that layer.

Conclusion

The effect is pretty much done. You can adjust the timing and add more finesse. That for me is the most challenging part, so have fun and let us know if you have any questions.

Download After Effects File

 

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