In today’s quick tip tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a cinematic “Transfarmers” Text Effect using the layer styles. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.

• Transformers Solid font
• Dark Metal texture from Texturemate.com
• Brushed Metal Pattern

Step 1

Make a new .PSD document, 1000 x 500 pixels, RGB color, 100 dpi and grey background (color #33333). Create a new layer and fill it with brushed metal pattern from tutorial assets section (any metal texture will do though). Now using the Blending Options, fill this layer with a Light Blue color and set the blending options to “Overlay”. Finally if you want you can add a gradient that include several white and grey tones, with a bright area in order to create a better effect for the background.

Step 2

Now create the text using this font: Transformers Solid. Use these settings: 70 pt – Anti-Alias: Sharp. Now rename this text: “3D”. Then go in the menu Layer > Layer Styles > Blending Options and use these settings:

Step 3

Duplicate the text and rename it “Base”. Right click on his layer and click to “Clear Layer Style” or in the Styles Palette click on the first style “Default style (None)” (It’s the same thing). Now move this text slightly to the right in order to create a “pseudo 3D effect” with the text below (Look the Step image). Then go in the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options and use these settings:

Step 4

Duplicate the text “Base”. Right click on his layer and click to “Clear Layer Style”. In the Blending Options menu on the right set the fill to 0%. Now and use these settings in the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options:

Step 5

Your text effect is almost completed. Now we have to create a text reflection. Insert all 3 levels of the text effect in a group. Duplicate this group. Right click on it and click to “Convert To Smart Object”. Right click on it again and click to “Rasterize Layer”. Then go in menu Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Now move it as the image shown and then with the Eraser Tool delete as long as you want in order to create a realistic reflection. Finally to make the text effect nicer I added some sparks with simple brushes and color lights with soft brushes.

Conclusion

Now your text effect is completed!

Applying the right atmosphere and lighting to your artwork can be a tricky task. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Wojciech Pijecki will explain how to create a mechanically enhanced subject, in a sci-fi environment, using advanced shading techniques in Photoshop. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your photo manipulation and retouching skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

Tuts+ Premium Members can login now for instant access to this tutorial. Membership to Tuts+ Premium gets you access to hundreds of exclusive premium tutorials, top selling ebooks, in-depth courses, member forums, and much more. To learn more about Tuts+ Premium, Take the Tour or Join Today.

Running a design business, either as a freelancer or a small agency, is a big challenge. Getting the most efficiency out of your time is essential, but it’s also very difficult for those who wear many different hats, like freelancers. One of the most common ways of dealing with this challenge for efficiency is to outsource work to others. It could be anything from design work, front-end development, back-end development, marketing, to anything else that needs to be done.

There are some very strong reasons for outsourcing, and likewise the are some equally strong reasons against outsourcing. In this article we’ll look at those pros and cons, which will hopefully prove to be helpful to those who are trying to decide on whether or not to outsource.

Pros of Outsourcing

1. Leverage Your Efforts

Whether you are a part-time freelancer, full-time freelancer, or you run a design agency, the business aspect of your work is just as critical to your success as is your ability to design and/or code. One of the principles that is key to growing a business is that you need to be able to leverage your time and efforts. As a one-man operation you will only be able to earn money for the services that you can provide to clients yourself. But by expanding your business, in this case through outsourcing, you can leverage your efforts and make money based on the work of other people as well.

This makes an assumption that one of your priorities is to maximize income and profits, which may not be the case with all designers. Some designers prefer working on every aspect of client projects rather than outsourcing or hiring employees, even if it means reduced potential for business growth.

2. Potential for Higher Income

By leveraging your efforts through outsourcing you are able to increase the potential income of your business. If you outsource projects, or portions of projects, efficiently you will be able to take on more projects or larger-scale projects. Also, your income potential can be increased if the cost of outsourcing the work to someone else is lower than what it would cost you (in terms of the value of your time) to do the work yourself.

While outsourcing work to others may increase your expenses, it also frees up more time for you to do other things, which should allow you to increase your income. Maybe the time that you save can be used to work on marketing your services, other client projects, developing new products and services, or administrative work related to running the business.

3. Increased Efficiency

Like any business owner, you will never have the time to do everything that you want or need for your business. However, outsourcing some work can help to free up time that will allow you to focus on the things that you determine are most important. The increase in efficiency comes when you are able to spend a little bit of money (comparatively) that will free you up to do work that will help you to make a lot of money (comparatively).

In addition to freeing up time for other work, you can also choose to work fewer hours and use that time that you gain from increased efficiency for time away from work. Most freelancers and self-employed designers work long hours, sometimes by choice and sometimes not by choice. If you’re looking at ways to reduce your hours and spend more time with family and friends, outsourcing is a possibility.

4. Allows You to Focus on Your Strengths

One of the downsides to being a freelancer is that you have to do everything for your business, whether it is an area of personal strength or weakness. By outsourcing some work that is not in your strongest areas you can free up more time to work on the things that you love, and in areas that you excel. Some freelancers choose to hire virtual assistants to handle as much of the administrative work as possible, freeing them up for more creative work. Some designers may not be as adept at coding and may choose to outsource development services while focusing on the visual design instead.

Even if outsourcing doesn’t increase your income, if it helps to make your work more enjoyable by eliminating or reducing some of the things you dislike, it may be worth doing.

5. Turn Away Fewer Clients

Many freelancers and small design agencies wind up turning away a lot of potential clients for any number of reasons. It could be a lack of time to work with all the potential clients, lack of experience or skill in a particular area, lack of desire to work on a certain type of project, or a client whose budget is too small. All of these issues can possibly be addressed by outsourcing, meaning that you could provide a solution to more clients, even if you are not doing all of the work yourself.

Turning away fewer clients also means that you’ll have more paying clients. If you can manage to outsource projects efficiently and effectively, it can result in a higher income, even if it is from projects that you wouldn’t want to accept without the possibility of outsourcing the work.

6. Segmenting Projects is Possible

Outsourcing work doesn’t mean that you have to outsource the entire project. Especially when it comes to web design, there are opportunities and possibilities for outsourcing a particular segment of the project. An example that many freelancers do is outsourcing of coding work. There are countless PSD to HTML service providers who are able and willing to take your designs and turn them into working, coded pages. The price varies from one provider to the next, but in many cases you could get the coding work done for much less than if you did the work yourself (in terms of the value of your time). It’s not ideal for all situations, but many designers find it to increase their efficiency. In this case you would still be dealing with the client directly and you would be doing most of the work on the project yourself, you would simply outsource one aspect of the project.

7. Transition from Freelance to Agency

If you are currently freelancing and you would like to run a design agency with employees at some point in the future, outsourcing can help with the transition. Very few freelancers or independent designers have the financial capability to take on an employee with a set salary and benefits without funding, but outsourcing work is much more feasible. While outsourcing you can get a feel for who you might like to hire as an employee when the time comes, and you can work to increase revenues and build the business to a point where you could hire an employee.

Cons of Outsourcing

1. Your Reputation Depends on the Quality of Others’ Work

When you are outsourcing part or all of a client project, the client may or may not be aware of it. Either way, your reputation is at stake. One of the most significant reasons that designers choose not to outsource is because of concerns over the quality. There are plenty of people that you could outsource to who would do a great job for you and your clients, but there are also others that wouldn’t live up to your expected level of quality. Finding the right people to work with is not always easy.

If you outsource work and the project doesn’t meet the deadline or doesn’t turn out as the client had expected, your reputation can take a hit. This is especially true in situations where the client doesn’t know that you are actually outsourcing, because they will think it is your own work that is lacking. Even if the client does know that you are outsourcing, they are trusting you to manage and oversee the project, in which case you are still responsible for the results.

2. More Administration and Oversight Work

While outsourcing can help to free up some of your time, it also means that you’ll have more administrative and oversight responsibilities. This includes paying invoices and added financial record keeping, finding and interviewing the right people, communication, and in some cases supervising progress. Ideally you can find people who need very little supervision whom you can trust to do quality work, but those relationships usually take some time to develop.

3. Can Make You a Middleman in Communication with the Client

In most cases, when you are outsourcing work you will still want to be in direct communication with the client, which means that you will be a middleman of sorts. Communication becomes more challenging when layers are added, so it becomes even more critical in this situation. You may be gathering feedback from a client and passing it on to whoever is doing the work, which increases the possibility for miscommunication or misunderstanding. Additionally, it means that you’ll still be dedicating time and effort to the communication rather than being able to pass it off to someone else.

In some cases you may be able to have the client and the service provider communicate directly, but this is not always possible or practical.

4. Reduced Control Over Meeting Deadlines

Being able to meet deadlines is a critical to keeping your clients happy. As you outsource parts of the project, or the whole thing, you will have less control over when the work is complete, as you will be relying on the person that you have hired. This is just one of the reasons why you need to be very careful about hiring the right person. Also, it’s a good idea to build in some time for unexpected delays by setting a deadline for the service provider that is at least a few days prior to the real deadline of the client. That gives you time to review the work and to deal with any setbacks.

5. It Takes Time and Effort to Find the Right People

Outsourcing is, of course, most effective when you are working with the right people. Ideally, you’ll have qualified service providers that you can work with on an on-going basis rather than needing to find someone specifically for each project. Outsourcing becomes a lot more practical, efficient, and profitable when you already have the right person for the job.

Unfortunately, finding the right person (or people) can be a real challenge, and you may go through some bad experiences along the way. During this time it means that you’ll be dedicating extra time for finding the right people and evaluating their work. At this stage you may find that outsourcing actually takes just as much time as doing the work yourself. The upside, of course, is that once you’ve found the right people it takes much less of your own time and becomes more profitable.

6. Potential Instability of Your Team

The challenge doesn’t stop with just finding the right people. You’ll also have to keep them as a part of your team once you have found them. With outsourcing, you may be working with different people all the time. When you’ve found someone that is good to work with, they may move on to a different path in their career and you may have to find a replacement. There is often less stability and more turnover than you would have if you were hiring an employee.

7. Clients May Not Be On Board

Some of your clients may have chosen to hire you because they are familiar with your work and they really felt that you would be great for their project. In situations like this, the client will want to work with you, not with someone to whom you are outsourcing the work. Of course, there may be parts of the project that you could outsource without having any real impact on the client, and they may not even know about it, but it’s still something to keep in mind.

As a general rule, if you build your brand around your personal skills, expertise, and experience, outsourcing work may seem deceptive to clients. This will also depend on what parts of the project you are outsourcing. As a designer, you will be hired for your creative abilities, so outsourcing the visual design would more be more likely to cause conflict than outsourcing coding.

You Must Decide for Yourself

As with just about anything in life, the pros and cons mean that there is no absolute right or wrong decision when it comes to outsourcing. You’ll need to weight the pros and cons and see how they fit with your goals, your process, and your way of doing business. If you have words of wisdom from your own experience, please feel free to share in the comments.

Final Image Preview

Step 1

Start by creating a new document with 1000×300 pixels. Set foreground color to #000000 and background color to #00ae0f. Select Gradient Tool and create a linear gradient.

Step 2

Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper with following settings (Fiber Length: 5, Brightness: 53, Contrast: 73):

Step 3

Select Horizontal Type Tool, font Arial Black with 170 pt and update foreground color to #00b75a. Write something like I did.

Step 4

Merge all layers (Layer > Merge Layers). Rename layer name to “Original”. Duplicate layer using Ctrl+J and apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on duplicated layer (Fiber Length: 50, Brightness: 0, Contrast: 73).

Rename duplicated layer as “1″. This layer will be our first frame of the animation. Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “2″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 50, Brightness: 20, Contrast: 73).

Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “3″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 50, Brightness: 30, Contrast: 73).

Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “4″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 50, Brightness: 40, Contrast: 73). Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “5″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 50, Brightness: 50, Contrast: 73).

From now on we will work with Fiber Length. Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “6″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 40, Brightness: 50, Contrast: 73).

Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “7″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 30, Brightness: 50, Contrast: 73).

Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “8″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 20, Brightness: 50, Contrast: 73).

Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “9″. Apply Filter > Sketch > Water Paper on this layer (Fiber Length: 10, Brightness: 50, Contrast: 73).

Duplicate layer “Original”, move it on top of all layers and rename it to “10″.

Duplicate layers “1″ to “9″ and place them as I did.

Step 5

Turn off all layers visibility except layer “1″. Select Window > Animation to open animation panel. Click on button highlighted on screenshot below to convert the timeline to a frame animation.

Update looping options to “Forever”.

Increase delay to 0,2 on frame “10″ of animation.

To complete tutorial save animation bu going to File > Safe for Web And Devices. Don’t forget that image must be a GIF.

Final Image

We recently showed you the first sneak peek of Photoshop CS6 by Senior Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. Today, Photoshop Product Manager Zorana Gee released a new video showing even more features of CS6. In this video Zorana will explain two really nice enhancements to Photoshop; Background Save and some performance tweaks to Liquify.

The first feature that Zorana shows is Background Save. This is a feature that many users have been asking for. It will allow you to save your file and then continue working while the file is being saved.

Another fantastic feature that Zorana demonstrates is a performance tweak to Liquify. If you’ve ever worked in Liquify, you know that you can’t expand your brush beyond 1500 pixels. This is frustrating if you’re working on a really big image. In this video, Zorana works well beyond 1500 pixels. In addition, the Photoshop team has also improved the performance of Liquify so that it doesn’t tile. You can now use Liquify in real-time with no lag.

Layer comps are a great way to organize content inside Photoshop files. They allow you to save multiple design ideas in a single PSD while reducing the need to create duplicate layers. As you’ll see in this tutorial, layer comps can flow from Photoshop to InDesign making your workflow even more efficient. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

• Nitexpress Party Flyer

Twitter provides designers (and other service providers) with the ability to communicate and network in a way that can be really productive for business. However, spending too much time or not having a specific purpose with social media can become a major drain on your time. There are plenty of tools and resources available that can help you to get more out of Twitter in less time. In this post we’ll profile 15 of those efficiency tools for Twitter users.

Connect with us on Twitter: @vandelaydesign.

HootSuite
HootSuite allows you to manage multiple social media profiles from one dashboard. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and more. You can schedule tweets to be sent at a specific time in the future, monitor mentions, send and read direct messages, see how many people click on links in your tweets, and more. The features mentioned above are all available on the free plan. A premium plan is also available for $5.99 per month that ads features for teams and provides Google Analytics integration.

TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a popular web app and desktop app. It provides you with customizable columns to view what’s most important to you, and filters to see the exact content that you need.  Tweets can be scheduled for the future to get the most exposure. You can manage unlimited accounts with this free app.

Buffer
Buffer allows you to add tweets and Facebook posts to your buffer and it will automatically schedule them to be sent out throughout the day. So rather than being on Twitter, of Facebook, all day, you can simply fill up your buffer and let it do the work throughout the day.

Tweriod
Tweriod is a simple, but helpful, tool. It analyzes your tweets and your followers tweets to find the time of day that will give your tweets the most exposure. Knowing this info will allow you to schedule your most important tweets when they will be seen by the most people.

TweetsMap
If you’re curious about where you Twitter followers are from, TweetsMap will quickly gather and display that data for you.

ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter is a helpful free tool that will allow you to clean up your Twitter account by finding inactive people that you follow and find users that aren’t following you back. You can also search within your Twitter stream and link Google+ to your Twitter account.

Commun.it
Commun.it is an advanced tool that focuses on helping you to manage your community more efficiently. You can see a feed from top influencers and top supports that have engaged with you recently, view all of your engagements with a user in one thread, discover new leads that have shared links to your site, and more.

Tweepi
Tweepi allows you to flush those who haven’t followed you, reciprocate to those who are following you, unfollow inactive users, and helps you to discover new people. Pricing starts at $7.49 per month with a limited free plan available.

MarketMeSuite
MarketMeSuite is a free social media dashboard that includes many features for Twitter users, including managing conversations, managing multiple accounts, schedule tweets, using geo-targeting to find local connections, and much more.

Twilert
Twilert sends you alerts by email when someone’s tweet contains your brand name, product name, or any word/phrase that you setup (similar to Google Alerts, but for tweets).

BirdHerd
BirdHerd is a Twitter app created specifically for groups and teams. Multiple people can update a single Twitter account with BirdHerd. You can also use whatever Twitter client you want for updating the group account.

GroupTweet
GroupTweet is another app for groups and teams. Optionally, tweets can be moderated before being posted if you want to retain full control over the group’s posts. Like BirdHerd, you can also use any Twitter client with GroupTweet.

Twhirl
Twhirl is a desktop client that will display notifications  for new messages and tweets. You can use your choice of several URL shorteners, find tweets that mention you, and more.

Twtpoll
Twtpoll helps with engaging your followers by allowing you to create polls and surveys.

dlvr.it
dlvr.it automatically delivers your blog content to Twitter. You can set up specific times for it to check your blog for new content to share.

For more social media-related resources and content, please see:

• 21 Resources for Effective Facebook Fan Pages
• 40 Sets of Free Social Media Icons
• 5 Steps to a Stronger Social Media Presence

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

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  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

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  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

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  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

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  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

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  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

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  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

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  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

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  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

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  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

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  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

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  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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Behance has launched a new student initiative called the Student Show Gallery, which aims to showcase the world’s next generation of creative talent. Membership is free! As a member, your work may be featured, “appreciated”, followed by fellow creatives, and noticed by recruiters. You’ll also receive updates on student competitions and exclusive discounts from some of the world’s top creative brands.

In fact, at the moment there’s a Student Showdown ongoing that you can participate in right now!

Entry to this competition is free, and the current submission round runs from January 11 to February 20, 2012. To participate, all entrants must be currently enrolled in school or graduated within the last 3 months. Check the competition details to see how the series works what great prizes and perks you can get! New competitions are hosted periodically based on creative field or concept, so keep checking back with the Student Show Gallery for updates.

The Behance Network receives millions of visitors each month, and Student Show is the only program that’s exclusively for students. Why wait until graduation to get your work out there? Start now!

The Photoshop team is looking for their next evangelist. They just announced a contest asking for Photoshop users to submit their own hidden gem tutorial, and we would like the winner to be a Psdtuts+ reader or author! A hidden gem video needs to explain a lesser known feature or workflow of Photoshop. Each video would need to be 2 minutes or less and would need to mention “hidden gems.”

To see more examples of what a hidden gem video would look like, take a look at Bryan O’Neil Hughes’ series. The winning entry will win a trip to Photoshop World. For more information take a look at this post and the video below. Rules are listed here. Good luck!