It’s a few days behind schedule, but we’ve rounded up our favorite tutorials, articles, and freebies from around the web for the month of October!

Our Tutorial Picks

Each month, we try to pick tutorials that are outstanding in quality and usefulness. We tend to pick tutorials that encompass design, although we let a few others slip in if they are really great! If you found any that we may have missed, feel free to share them in the comments!



The O Series Tutorial

James White guides us through his process used to create a series he recently worked on and shared over at Signalnoise.com.




Smoke Type in Photoshop

Learn how to create a smoke typography effect playing with some brushes and adjustment layers in Adobe Photoshop.




Make a 3D Colour Explosion

Learn how to how to blend vector images and Photoshop trickery to create jaw-dropping 3D colour explosion effects.




Using Layer Comps for Design in Photoshop

Andrew Houle runs through a process of creating layer comps that help us develop designs that are most fitting for ourselves and our clients.




Inking and Coloring the Comic Strip “The Brads”

Author of “The Brads”, Brad Colbow, walks us through the steps of creating a comic strip using Illustrator’s Pen Tool, custom brushes and masking features.




Highlight Wordpress Categories on Single Posts

Learn how to highlight the category a single post belongs to in Wordpress for a better user experience, and to assist in navigation.




Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

Learn how to create an easy to use write panel that makes it easier to work with custom fields in Wordpress. Great for working with post thumbnails for Wordpress.




Design a Halloween Pumpkin Wallpaper in Photoshop

Learn how to take a pumpkin, carve it up, and make it glow, all from the comfort of your home… oh, and Photoshop!




Create a Vibrant Modern Blog Design

This tutorial covers the process of designing a vibrant and colourful modern blog layout in Adobe Photoshop from a blank canvas to the final product.




3 ways to apply a line pattern effect on text in Illustrator

Veerle’s got 3 different techniques for applying a line pattern effect on any text in Illustrator. Worth checking out if you’re getting into the groove of Illustrator still!

Inspirational, Resource, and Useful Picks

Being a designer can be tough. Half the battle of creating something is simply finding a good source of inspiration. These links are intended to help get yourself motivated, help you along the way, and get the creative process rolling!



Setting Your Prices: 10 Questions to Ask Yourself

How does one go about finding the perfect price to charge their clients as a freelancer? Danny Outlaw’s got 10 questions you can ask yourself to help find that sweet spot!




White Space - It’s so underrated

As always, a great read from ImJustCreative.com. This post examines the qualities which often break blogs and other sites, namely white space, or a lack thereof.




Top 10 Photoshop Tutorial Sites

A collection of excellent Photoshop websites worth bookmarking… not that making the list makes us biased or anything!




Coming Up Next Wordpress Plugin

This plugin takes your next scheduled posts and show them to your visitors. Great for bloggers who schedule posts ahead of time.




Free Grunge Font: DiaD

This free grunge font comes from an amazing font designer by the name of Carlos Fabian Camargo Guerrero, from Bogota Columbia. He has quite the collection of fonts for sale on his website www.andinistas.net.




Heart: A Free Social Icon Set

Heart: A set of 22 social icons in .png and in resolutions 16×16, 32×32, 64×64. This set was designed by Aravind Ajith, the creator of TheDesignSuperHero.com.




Free Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set for Bloggers

This set of free hand drawn doodle icons includes 14 graphics tailored specifically for bloggers. Including social media graphics for Delicious, Design Float, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati and Twitter as well as commonly used icons such as RSS, Home, Comments, Contact and Wordpress.




Feed Me Animals: A Free RSS Feed Icon Set

This set contains 5 original RSS-feed icons. The icons are available in in .png, .jpg, .eps and .psd.




BB Free Font: Conglomerfont

Conglomerfont is a free font created by the design community from all over the world, on nearly every continent via email. Tons of type was coagulated from email submissions into a single font, hence the name, Conglomerfont.




20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know

These are the top 20 Ajax effects that every web developer should know. They’re essential parts of any web developer’s toolbox.




10 Tips to Avoid Designer’s Block

How do you get there? How do you stay there? How do you avoid designer’s block? It’s not possible to dial in design perfection each time you sit down at your desk, but here are a few things you can do to help.




10 Helpful Resources for Cross Browser Testing

This post takes a brief look at 10 of the leading resources for making your browser testing less time consuming and more productive.




9 Brilliantly Designed Portfolio Websites

In this article, 9 Brilliantly Designed Portfolio Websites are presented so you yourself can see what makes a portfolio great.

Send us your September Picks!

Keep an eye out for brilliant posts this November. We’d love to hear if you find anything, or if you publish something of your own that our viewers might enjoy. You can grab us on Twitter, our Forums, or by using our Contact Form.