Are you sick of your type looking plain and boring? Many OpenType fonts have alternate characters built into them that can transform your type into a beautiful piece of art. By using these alternate characters you can add things like flourishes and flair to your type with ease. Some type faces have alternate characters that can help out with legibility at smaller sizes. Even some handwritten fonts have alternate characters to change the style of a characters to make it seem more handwritten. In this article we will take a deep dive into using alternate characters.

Incorporating lighting effects is a great way to bring energy and flow into your designs. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create some amazing lighting effects from scratch using a free open source program and then adding final touches to the image inside of Photoshop.

One of our latest design packs that we just released contained 50 different styles of radial shapes. We received a good amount of feedback and questions on how we created them. In this tutorial, I will walk you through the creation process on how to effectively recreate some perfect radial shapes. Once you have completed this tutorial. I am sure you will be creating some amazing radial shapes to include in your designs.

If you love typography like I do, you are always looking for a new way to funk out your type – just to make it look a little different than the rest. 3ds Max has some amazing and creative ways to make your type look absolutely beautiful! In this tutorial I will show you how to extrude text, tweak it out, manipulate the mesh, and then exporting it out to Photoshop to add in some extra elements. Hope you enjoy it!

In this tutorial, I thought I would show you a simple process of manipulating a image with lighting effects and incorporating brushes too. This tutorial will bid you a step by step guide on how to achieve the illustrated outcome.

Today we have an amazing tutorial on how to create some very evil, bloody, gory text that even has snake horns and skulls in it. This tutorial includes a video, just in case you don’t understand how to do something or you just prefer to watch me do it. You will learn some exciting new techniques that you can use on your next dark design or Halloween poster.

I’m going to show you how to make a 3D text shatter effect. This effect is made in two programs, Cinema 4D and Photoshop.If you haven’t heard of Cinema 4D before it is a relatively easy to use 3d application, it is quite similar to 3dsMax or Maya. I will go pretty in depth with the Cinema 4D part, for all the inexperienced users, so bare with me if I go too slow. Now enough chit chat, let’s jump in.

In this tutorial we will walk through the process of creating a grunge poster. We will cover techniques like creating diamond shaped patterns, knocking out white backgrounds and keeping layer transparency. This tutorial includes a text version as well as a video version. Both cover the same techniques so take what you prefer and enjoy!

In this tutorial you will learn how to create some Flat 3D using only Photoshops Brushtool. In the past I used to use just an action to duplicate and move but this way is much more easier and give you more flexibility.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use Cinema 4D and Photoshop CS4 to make some graffiti letters. We will extrude the letters and tweak them out. After the baseline render is done we will import it into Photoshop and add some outer strokes and grime.