Oily and Shinny Text Effect in Photoshop
So, start off by making a new canvas, and fill it with a dark background colour, we used black.
type the word u like… we used customized GauFont PopMagic.

go to layer >> layer styles >> blending options, and set the following settings:
Inner Shadow

Inner Glow

and also…
Bevel and Emboss

Contour Line Inside

Contour

Satin

Colour Overlay

After all these settings, u will have this:

Now, duplicate your layer.
Select the upper (copied) layer and go to Filter Blur Gaussian Blur, and apply THIS BLUR
Reduce the opacity of the blurred layer to about 70%.

That’s it, hope u like the result, please post any questions u have!

Web 2.0 Design – Tutorial for Basics
There are so many tutorials and guides online that teach you how to make effective use of the web 2.0 design. While most these tutorials are useful, at the same time they kill the originality in web design. For example, most “guides” tell you that web 2.0 is about having a glossy badge, stripes background, and bold fonts. Result? There are countless hundreds of designs with badges, stripes and bold big letters… and they are no different from one another. It does not matter if you make a web 2.0, web 1.0, or web 75.0 design, it all comes down to being original and memorable.
However, if can’t really find anything particularly original to symbolize your design, it’s “safer” to go with the current trends of web design. So here is a very small fragment of web design layout, and how to turn a regular layout into a web 2.0 layout.
This is what we had…

And this is what we are going to do…

We are going to work in Photoshop, using nothing but layer styles; focusing on mild gradients and shadows.
Start off by using the Rectangular shape with rounded corners, and drawing a… rectangle.

What we need to do first is give our rectangle some depth and life. Following the principles of web 2.0 design, only shadows, outlining and light gradients will give us this effect. So go to layer styles, and drop a little mild shadow. We used #96aed6 for this purpose.

To give the shape a little depth (so it won’t look like a flat object), add mild inner shadow, with darker tone (we used #304f82 )

Lastly, its important to add a little outlining. We will use the #FFFFFF white color, since our shadows from both sides are darker, we want to have a light and semi visible line that will contour the shape.

Lucky Clover: Download Free PSD
After the successful release of “Precious Heart” on my other blog,
I decided to make a sister icon with a clover leaf. When I was in Prague last time I saw such an impressive variety of Swarovsky glass and it inspired me to make a graphic with similar structure, deep and subtly sparkling. Anyway, the download is free and you can use it any way you like
The preview image is desized, otherwise blog template gets reformatted, you can previous the full version here.



















