The P2H.com blog

Are you a graphic designer looking for either inspiration for a project or help from your peers on how to do specific tasks? Then you are probably looking for some of the top graphic design blogs. We will show you four great graphic design blogs and tell you what information or resources they have for you.

These sites are also in no particular order and they all contain unique information as well as some overlapping information. We are also always on the lookout for the latest and greatest sites, so if you know of any that did not make this list please feel free to leave us a comment below.

1st Web Designer

The first site up is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/ and they have all types of resources with regards to graphic design on the web. Here you will find inspiration, methods, and resources for a wide range of graphic design work. To read only design related posts you can go to their design category using this URL. Below you can see a screenshot of their home page:

Some of their recent design posts include Brilliant Tips and Guidelines for Professional Logo Design, a post on how to create awesome professional logos.  They tell you about common mistakes, suggest software to use, and explain how to design your logos. This is an in-depth piece that offers all kinds of wonderful information.

Another recent post whose title grabbed me was: 9 Etiquettes And Tips of a Photoshop Rockstar Designer. This post goes over some essential workflow tips for beginners and experts alike, including:

• Object Oriented Photoshopping
• Naming conventions for layers and sets
• Ability to replicate and practice
• Usage of paths and pen tool
• Effective usage of adjustment layers and styles
• Guides, Grids and notes
• Workspace Management
• Shortcuts, shortcuts and shortcuts
• Last but not least … respect and respond to your critiques!

Each of these posts are essential to being a great graphic designer. Even if this is not your full time job, these tips and tricks will aid you in any design work you do.

With post titles like those I quickly became a subscriber, reading their RSS feed on a regular basis.

You The Designer

Next up is a website called http://www.youthedesigner.com/. This site is geared towards all things graphic design. You will find resources, job listings, free vector image downloads, a forum to ask and help answer questions, tutorials, and resources. This site is chock full of content. If you are looking for a unique Twitter logo for your personal blog, where do you go? Do you Google Image Search it and use something that you find? Or do you choose one of these awesome icons from their recent post on Free Twitter Icons?

Maybe you do not want to use their pre-made icons, so instead why not modify one of theirs and add to it? Graphic design is all about inspiration!

Looking at YouTheDesigner’s tutorials you can see that they have lots of cool tutorials that can guide you through difficult tasks. Some examples of recent tutorials from YouTheDesigner are: A Showcase of Poster Tutorials in Photoshop, Compilation of Fresh Adobe Illustrator Tutorials and 30 New Tutorials for Manipulating Photos in Photoshop. Each of these tutorials offer all sorts of technical know-how and graphic design goodness. The last one contains 30 individual tutorials for manipulating photos in Photoshop including some really out of this world techniques:

Some people work for 10 or more years before being able to pull off tricks like the ones above. Use the information at your finger tips to benefit from other users expertise in graphic design. You can view the tutorial on embedding a Planet transparently into a image for manipulation here and the Manipulate water to create a slash effect in your design here.

Abuzeedo

Another great site for digital inspiration is a website called: http://abduzeedo.com/. This web site offers tutorials, inspiration, wallpapers and interviews with members of the graphic design community. You can see a shot of their home page below:

If you are looking for high resolution textures or design inspiration then you have found a website to bookmark. They offer a teaser RSS feed so I can keep tabs on the website and check out what is relevant to the projects I am working on. Some of the wallpapers that they have are simply unbelievable and very original. Others are grabbed from places you would never have imagined. Check out the example below that was created from a still shot of a music video!

They offer up a little background so to speak on the background. They describe it as follows:

The wallpaper of this week is a still frame from the music video called “Jardim das Delícias”, produced by Cafundó Creative Studio. The video is one of the six Brazilian animation competing on the portfolio category in the Anima Mundi Festival 2010.

The web site offers up a desktop version as well as a version for your iPhone. You can grab either of them from this link here. If you want to see their tutorials you can check them out here.

Psdeluxe

If you are like me then you do all your graphic design work in Adobe’s Photoshop. A good website for finding  Photoshop tips and tricks is http://www.psdeluxe.com/. They offer up information on how to do many Photoshop tricks like creating colorful 3d text effects and learning all the shortcut keys; there has even been a recent post on where to find 50 graffiti fonts. Those are very eclectic posts and if you need to do it in Photoshop chances are they have a post on it.

You can see the PSDeluxe home page below:

You will notice they have tabs for tutorials, articles, freebies, PSD files, and icons. This is a great site to bookmark for when you need it.

I use these four websites regularly as do a lot of my graphic designer friends. These are just a few of the great free resources which can help you find the graphic design information you are looking for. I wish all these free tutorials and articles were around when I was learning Photoshop back in the late 1990’s. Back then it was either shell out money for a book or learn it yourself via trial and error! We have sure come a long way since then.  If you know of other similar resources please let us know by dropping a comment below.