While every seasoned designer wants his or her work to be original and stand out, incorporating separate design elements, vector graphics, brushes, and templates into your projects will speed their completion up and help you work smarter. It is wise to keep all the graphic elements that you have designed handy, so you can always find them on your hard drive and include them in your future work, but you can also find hundreds of websites, which offer premium design graphic packages at very reasonable price. Listed below are some of the places, where you can find just about anything a designer might need – from icons and gradients to premium WordPress themes.

In this tutorial, you will be taught how to mimic the cracked face effect as seen in Natalie Portman’s movie poster, “The Black Swan”.

PHP is a powerful scripting language, which is the driving engine behind most of the today’s dynamic websites. It is estimated that it is used by more than 20 million websites and most of the reputable web hosts have PHP installed on their servers. According to many skilled programmers, the language is fairly easy to master and we have compiled a list of excellent sites, where you can learn PHP on your own and at your own pace.

Portable apps are the apps that run independently from the operating system (although they are normally OS dependent), do not change the system files, and keep all the necessary data in the program’s folders. They are ideal for people on the go, who can simply download and run the programs from external hard drives, flash drives, CD ROMS, and of course, their computers and laptops. These portable apps do not clutter your system and if you decide that you no longer have use for them, all you have to do is delete them without having to worry about incomplete un-installs and left over files. These programs are often scaled down, but fully functional, multi-media players, email clients, instant messengers, graphic viewers, image editors, and office software.

Everyone wants an iPod but did you know you can actually make one using Photoshop? You probably did. There are an almost infinite number of possibilities in Photoshop and that includes the creation of your very own image, and for this tutorial, your very own iPod.

Ruby on Rails or RoR for short is a development framework for the Ruby programming language, which was released in 2004 and it is currently used by thousands of Web programmers. However, mastering Rails is ideal for the novice coders too since it allows them to reuse code, increase their productivity, and develop prototypes rapidly. If you want to start learning Ruby on Rails and find out how this revolutionary framework can help you build powerful applications faster, then check out the following sites.

Computer forensics is a very popular career choice, but what exactly is it? It is more than the stuff you see on CSI, and most likely not as glamorous.

In one of our previous tutorials, we created the spiral galaxy from scratch using Adobe Photoshop. It’s time we head closer to home as we create the moon from scratch with this Photoshop tutorial.

Hard to believe we have reached our 20th round-up of links. It seems like I just started doing this a few weeks ago. This week, as usual, we have a great list of links here for you to check out. A lot of great jQuery and general developer links that share some excellent information. Enjoy!

Processors have come a long way since the days of the 8088 and single core processor. In today’s world we now need to make a decision when installing Windows and other various operating systems. That question is: Should I install the 32-bt version or 64-bit version? Here is an explanation of the 64-bit processor which should help you decide.

In one of our last tutorials, we discussed on how to make your regular digital photographs appear new and HDR-like. For this tutorial, we will be going back a few years and turn any ordinary photograph into an old sepia photo, complete with scratches, dust film and tears.