Master These Awesome New Skills in April 2019

April doesn’t have to be the cruellest month. This year, why not make it a month to remember by learning something new?

Whether you’re a graphic designer, an entrepreneur, a web designer or a developer, this post will give you some great ideas for learning new skills. We’ll go through some great courses and tutorials on graphic design, web design, coding, photography, and business.

Many of these resources are free, and others are included in a subscription to Envato Elements. So there’s nothing stopping you from picking up a valuable new skill this month. Let’s get started…

1. Design a Flyer

Even in this high-tech age, you often need a good, old-fashioned flyer to print and hand out to people to publicise your latest event. This free video teaches you to create one in Photoshop. Plus you can use it in digital form too. Take the course now.

2. Make a WordPress Drop-Down Menu

Sometimes the simplest things get overlooked. You can find loads of advice online about creating mega menus, burger menus, sticky menus and so on. But what about a simple WordPress dropdown menu? Many themes will come with their own dropdown menus, of course, but sometimes you’ll need to code your own. Learn how to do it in this tutorial.

3. Create a Promo Video for Your Book

If you’ve written a book, you know that the hard work isn’t over when you finish the manuscript. Getting the word out and finding readers is just as hard, and a good promo video can help to build the buzz. You’ll learn how to make one in this tutorial—and you don’t need complicated software or video editing skills to make something professional. Click through to see the cool video you’ll be creating using a simple online video maker.

4. Make a Realistic Photo Manipulation

OK, after three very practical tutorials, it’s time for some fun! This giant dog causing havoc in a Venetian canal is a breeze to create in Photoshop. Well, it’s a breeze when you have an expert telling you exactly what to do step by step, which is exactly the case here. Get the instructions.

5. Create a Cinematic Text Animation

The cinema has its own instantly recognisable style of text animation: big, bold and shiny. Learn how to create those awesome moving titles with the light glinting off them in this free YouTube video course.

6. Make a Winning Landing Page in Bootstrap 4

Landing pages are all about conversions: persuading your visitors to do what you want, whether that’s buying your product or signing up to your email list or something else. To create a successful landing page with a high conversion rate, you’ll need a professional design. Fortunately, Bootstrap makes it easy to create one, and in this tutorial you’ll learn how to make a beautiful landing page in the latest version, Bootstrap 4. Get started here.

7. Learn Video Editing in Adobe Premiere Pro

This roundup is mostly about the latest releases, but sometimes an older course makes a comeback. This 2017 course on video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro was one of the most popular courses on Envato Tuts+ last month, and it’s easy to see why: it’s basically everything you need to know about Adobe Premiere Pro, with 3+ hours of detailed video instruction from industry expert Dave Bode. Click here to join in and watch.

8. Make a Restaurant Menu Template in InDesign

Whether you’re a restaurateur looking to design your own menu or a graphic designer who’s been hired to create one, this tutorial has you covered. It takes you through the full process of creating not just a professional-looking menu, but an InDesign menu template that you can adapt to use again and again. Find out how it’s done.

9. Learn Photoshop From the Top

This is another older course, but it’s been hugely popular this month—again because it’s incredibly comprehensive, teaching you everything you need to know about Photoshop from start to finish. From the basics of working with layers through to more complex topics like Smart Objects and applying warp effects, this course will get you fully set up to get the most out of Photoshop. Take the course.

10. Create a Simple WordPress Contact Form

Let’s get back to WordPress basics again with the simple tutorial that teaches you how to make a contact form using a free WordPress plugin. You’ll see how to set up the options you need and then display your form on your site. And you’ll also get recommendations for more advanced plugins if you need something specialised. Read the free tutorial.

Want to Learn More?

If these new courses and tutorials aren’t enough for you, check out the full Envato Tuts+ library of more than 1,200 courses and 27,000 free tutorials. There’s sure to be something there for you. Have a look at these recommendations from previous months to get some more inspiration.

Make Your Own Business Cards in Photoshop

If you want to make a solid first impression and spread your professional network, business cards are a great way to do that. And sure, you could use a template or get someone to design them for you, but why not get creative and make your own, from scratch. Watch this free video for full instructions on making your business cards in Adobe Photoshop.

Create an SVG Beating Heart Animation

This was a Valentine’s Day special, but love never goes out of style, does it? In this free tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an animated SVG beating heart to woo your loved one on the digital platform of your choice, and you’ll get the full code to do it yourself. Find out how it’s done.

Make a Time Magazine Cover

Have you ever wanted to be on the cover of Time magazine? Well, instead of spending years working away at achieving something newsworthy enough to be featured, why not take a shortcut and make it yourself in Photoshop? Or, if narcissism isn’t your thing, it could be a great way to make a fun gift for someone special in your life who you think deserves to be given the star treatment. Get the full instructions here.

Use the CSS Multi-Column Layout

If you want to create complex layouts in CSS, you’re probably familiar with floats, Flexbox, or even CSS Grid Layout. But not many people know about a very powerful option called “multi-column”. Learn why you should use it and how to use it in this short but information-packed course.

Make a Sticky Menu in WordPress

Sticky menus are everywhere, from Apple’s website to those of IBM and Ted Baker. They’re usually small, one-line menus that stay visible as you scroll down the page, helping users navigate the site while staying quite unobtrusive. Learn how to make one for your WordPress site in this tutorial.

Find the Best Alternative to Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a great vector design package, but it’s not the only game in town. In recent years, new competitors have emerged that have a lot to offer. So why not explore some of the other options out there by watching the video above.

Create a Photo Campaign for International Women’s Day

It’s International Women’s day on 8 March, so why not support the event by creating a visual campaign to support this year’s theme of “BalanceforBetter? Read this tutorial for tips on creating a successful campaign.

Migrate a WordPress Site

Some things sound so simple, don’t they? What could possibly go wrong when moving a WordPress site from a local development machine to a live server? Plenty, actually. Take this course to let Rachel McCollin guide you around the pitfalls and follow the right process.

Find a Profitable Business Model

Lots of people have business ideas, but sadly, many of those ideas come to nothing. Often, that’s because although people have talent and ambition, they focus more on what they’d like to do instead of getting clear on the business model, i.e. exactly how they’re going to make money. Read this tutorial for a guide to choosing a business model and a look at 15 different models to pick from.

Create a Cool Ice Effect Animation

More animation for you, this time in Adobe After Effects. Take this course to learn how to create a translucent ice animation that you can use for your animation and design projects, without needing any plugins.

Get the Most Out of Gutenberg

WordPress launched its new Gutenberg editor just a couple of months ago, but there are already some useful plugins that take advantage of Gutenberg’s capabilities to offer more than the standard WordPress installation. Take this course to discover how to use plugins to manipulate images, create testimonials, and more.

Paint a Flamingo

This tutorial not only has a beautiful, elegant end result to aim for, but it also teaches you a whole lot about using Adobe Illustrator’s brushes—and even creating your own custom brushes. Learn more.

Add Closed Captions to Social Media Videos

There are loads of good reasons to add captions to your social media videos. The most important, of course, is accessibility—you want to be able to reach the millions of people out there with hearing difficulties. But there are other reasons, too, which this article explains, before explaining how you go about adding those captions. Read about it here.

Learn React While Playing Hangman

React is a wonderful front-end framework for building dynamic single-page applications quickly and easily. This course teaches you how to use it while putting together a hangman app from scratch. You’ll learn how to create a new app project, build out all the components, handle states and styles, and work with web and lifecycle events. Take the course!

Responsive Design in Adobe XD

If you’re creating a website design in 2019, clients will definitely want to know what the site looks like on different devices and screen sizes. A responsive design mockup is a great way to illustrate that, and you can learn how to create one in this free YouTube course.

Add a Music Player to Your WordPress Site

WordPress has its own default media player these days, so why bother with a music player plugin? What do they give you that the standard WordPress option doesn’t? And what about directly embedding audio players from other sites? This article runs you through all the options, clearly explaining the pros and cons of each. Find out more.

Manage a Web Design Project With Paymo

You could be the most talented web designer in the world, but if you can’t manage a project, you won’t be very successful. Web design projects can be large and complex, involving many tasks and sometimes many different team members. This tutorial shows you how to use Paymo to manage even the most complex project with ease.

Create a Cinematic Text Animation in Adobe After Effects

Yep, it’s awards season again. Will Black Panther beat Bohemian Rhapsody? If you’re creating video content to tie in with the Oscars, you’ll love this course on creating a cinematic text animation. Whether you’re creating a movie trailer, an animated sequence or another type of video, it’ll help you create titles that belong on the big screen. Take the full course.

Give Yourself a Deer-Inspired Photo Makeover

Have you ever wondered what you’d look like as a deer? No, me neither. But you will after you follow this amazing photo manipulation tutorial. It shows you how to use Photoshop to combine photos to create this stunning deer effect. Why not try it with your own photo? Find out how it’s done.

Create Popups for Your WordPress Site

Popups can often be annoying, but if done the right way, they can be hugely beneficial for your site while also respecting the needs of your users. This tutorial shows you how to add popups to your WordPress site the right way, using some of the brand new features of the popular Elementor page builder. Start creating great WordPress popups now.

Create Style Variations for WordPress Gutenberg Blocks

WordPress made a huge change a few weeks ago with the launch of its new editor, Gutenberg. If you want to get the most out of it, check out David Gwyer’s two-part tutorial on customising block styles. Up your Gutenberg game today. And if you want to find themes that are already optimised for Gutenberg, you can do that here.

Create Complex Layouts With CSS Grid Layout

If you want to get creative in your website designs, you need to know about CSS Grid Layout. It’s the most powerful layout system available, and in this comprehensive YouTube video, Adi Purdila teaches you how to use it. It’s called “A Quick Introduction to CSS Grid Layout”, but I think that’s under-selling it! Watch the hour-long video here.

Make a Creative Religious Calendar for 2019

Calendars usually all look the same, but this one really stands out with its bold, colourful, wheel-based design. So why not learn how to make it in Adobe InDesign? The skills you learn will help you create other diagrams and infographics as well. Read the full instructions here.

Use Audio the Right Way in Websites and Apps

No, I’m not talking about annoying auto-playing background music. Don’t ever do that. This quick tutorial covers some of the most useful ways to include audio in your websites and apps. These tips will help you enhance the user experience and give useful feedback, rather than imposing your random musical tastes on every visitor. Get the tips here.

Get Hapi

OK, a name like Hapi.js just begs for puns, but I’ll leave it there. Express has long been the leading HTTP server framework for Node.js applications, but Hapi.js is probably the most popular alternative, with many devoted followers. Learn about it here—you’ll be Hapi you did (sorry, couldn’t resist!).

Start Colour Grading Your Video

Colour grading sounds like a dull, technical topic, but it can make a huge difference to how your videos look and how your viewers respond to them. So settle in for an hour and a quarter with Dave Bode and learn all the ins and outs of colour grading. Watch the free course on YouTube.

Make an Eye-Catching Movie Poster

If you’ve had enough of all the cute, cheerful holiday-season fare, why not go dark and design a gritty, post-apocalyptic movie poster? It looks complicated, but with the step-by-step instructions in this tutorial, you’ll be able to create it all in Photoshop. See how it’s done.

Make a Winning PowerPoint Pitch Deck

New Year, new projects. Maybe you’re pitching an idea for a creative project, or maybe you’re after something more corporate. In either case, this half-hour course is just the ticket. You’ll come away from it knowing how to create a PowerPoint pitch deck that will convince more or less anyone to do more or less anything. Use this knowledge wisely.

Make Money From Your Website in 2019!

Hey, we all want to do it, right? Take that blog or website and turn it into a money-making machine that will let us do what we really want to in 2019. Well, I can’t promise that this tutorial will get you there, but it’ll certainly give you some useful ideas. Get all 12 money-making ideas here.

Design a Winning Project Proposal

When you’re putting together a proposal, the design really matters. Your prospective client will probably have dozens of other proposals to look through, and grabbing their attention with a clean, elegant design will give you a crucial advantage. This course teaches you how to stand out from the crowd by putting together a great proposal in InDesign.

Learn CSS Animation

Who uses Flash these days? CSS3 gives you so many great animations while providing a seamless experience for users. This free video course lets you build your CSS animation skills by completing six small but useful projects that use CSS animations. Take the free course now.

Build a WordPress Website With Elementor

If you don’t know code, you can still build your own website easily. Just use WordPress and a special builder plugin like Elementor. In this tutorial, Adi Purdila walks you through how to get set up, so you can quickly go from zero to a functioning website—with no coding skills required. Get started here.

Edit Video With Adobe Rush

When Adobe comes out with a new app, it’s worth paying attention. While the company isn’t flawless, it does have a great track record at producing software that becomes the new industry standard. So take the time to have a look at Adobe’s new video editing app, Adobe Rush. Follow this tutorial to see how it works and get up and running quickly.

Make Interactive JavaScript Maps

Maps are everywhere on the web, but how many interactive ones do you see? Learn how to make your maps stand out with interactive features in this fascinating course by Craig Campbell. You’ll use the powerful Leaflet framework to create a map and add a range of shapes, markers, click events, and more. Take the course.

Draw a Peacock

If you’re anything like me, you take one look at an image like this and think, “I could never draw that!” But Monika Zagrobelna’s instructions are so detailed and simple that you may just have a chance of reproducing it—or at least getting close. See how it’s done.

Use MongoDB Stitch in Android Apps

MongoDB Stitch is a powerful serverless platform that can meet all your back-end requirements. This tutorial takes you through every step required to use the platform in an Android app. Read the tutorial to find out how it works.

Animate SVGs

We all know about animated GIFs, but did you know that animated SVGs are a great alternative? You can even use them for things other than cute cat memes. Find out how to animate SVGs in this amazing tutorial by Adi Purdila.

Use Custom Post Types in WordPress

WordPress has so much flexibility built in, but many people never use it. For example, most people stick with the default post type, but you can create your own custom post types to include data that’s useful for your own website, saving you a lot of time. See how to use WordPress custom post types.

Peer Into the Future of Graphic Design

OK, this last one is not a skill, exactly, but if you want to be a designer, it’s essential to keep up to date with trends in the industry. This article takes a peek into 2019 to predict what’s coming for designers. Read Grace Fussell’s predictions for 2019 design trends and see if you agree.

Create a Split Image Poster in Adobe Photoshop

Isn’t this a striking poster? I love the combination of shapes and colours, and the way the image in the center is split into full-colour and black-and-white segments. It looks complex, but in this free tutorial, Laura Keung teaches you to create this poster step by step in Photoshop. Read the instructions.

Edit Video the Right Way in Adobe Premiere Pro

Time for a free YouTube course now. That’s right, you can find a lot more on YouTube than cute cat videos. This comprehensive three-hour video takes you through the nuts and bolts of editing video in Adobe Premiere Pro. It starts with the basics of getting set up and importing your footage, and then it takes you through the whole editing process, right through to the final stage of exporting your finished video. Set aside some time to watch the video, or bookmark it to watch later.

Go Further With Figma

Figma is an incredibly versatile app for designing user interfaces, and it’s quickly becoming a favorite tool for UI and UX designers worldwide. This course helps you learn some of the more advanced aspects of working with it, such as styles and team libraries. So watch Beyond the Basics: Figma to get up to speed. Or try A Guide to Prototyping in Figma for a practical guide to using the software for prototyping.

Make Your Site Accessible for Keyboard-Only Users

Here’s the problem: most web interfaces are designed with mouse cursors and touch interaction in mind, but many users rely on the keyboard to navigate. This tutorial teaches you the important skill of designing for keyboard accessibility. You’ll learn some great techniques for assisting keyboard users and making your sites accessible to a broader audience. Read the full tutorial here.

Create a Scary “La Llorona” Photo Manipulation

With the terrifying trailer for the new horror movie The Curse of La Llorona generating quite a bit of buzz, why not take inspiration from the movie—and the original Mexican folk tale—by creating a “La Llorona” illustration of your own? The best part is that it’s easy to do in Photoshop, thanks to this free step-by-step tutorial by Abbey Esparza. Learn to create the image here. They should definitely have used this for the movie poster!

Build a Real-Time Applause Feature

You know those features on sites like Medium.com that let you recognise a post by clicking the “applause” icon and seeing the number of claps increase in real time? With this tutorial, you can create that feature for your own app, using Angular and Pusher. Get the instructions and source code here.

Master Affinity Designer

Here’s another comprehensive YouTube course for you. This one is 2 hours 45 minutes long, and it takes you through using the Affinity Designer app in all the detail you could possibly need. If you want to get started with this popular alternative to Adobe Illustrator, all you need to do is watch this video.

Test Your Site for Accessibility

Yes, another accessibility post! Why? Because it’s an important subject that’s been neglected for too long. Envato Tuts+ Web Design just devoted a whole week to it—read more here. This post is about testing your site, and what better way to do that than by discovering how we actually do it an Envato? Get the inside scoop from Envato developer Luke Jones.

Create PHP Forms

Forms are not the most exciting aspect of a website, but they’re one of the most important. They let visitors contact you, give feedback, and interact with the site in lots of other ways. This course shows you how to create functional forms in PHP. As a bonus, you’ll get to learn and practise some useful PHP skills too! Take the course!

Write a Letter in the Right Format

We cover a lot of technology topics on Envato Tuts+, so let’s finish with something more old school. You may not need to write many formal letters these days, but you’ll have to do it at some point. And chances are that when you do need to write a letter, it will be important to get it right. Think about a cover letter for an important proposal or an invitation to a prestigious event. Getting the details right is very important, so get the full lowdown here.

Discover a Brand New Design Program

Affinity Publisher is still in beta testing before its official launch, but it promises to be a fabulous alternative to Adobe InDesign. So why not take it for a test drive by downloading a free trial version and following the steps in this tutorial to create a stylish magazine layout. Get started now!

Make a Professional Resume

Are you tired of your job? Looking for a new challenge? If you want to start 2019 in a more rewarding role, you’ll need to start the process now. This free video course takes you through the process of creating a professional resume to kick-start your job hunt in just ten minutes. Just watch the video above, or check it out on YouTube.

Design Your eCommerce Website in Adobe XD

If you need to design an eCommerce site, this tutorial will teach you everything you need to know to get started with an effective prototype in Adobe XD. You’ll get full instructions on how to create the prototype and how to master some key features of the software. Learn more here.

Learn to Use CSS Grid Layout

If you’re still using floats or Flexbox to create grid layouts in your web design projects, there’s a better way. It’s called CSS Grid Layout, and you can learn all about it in this one-hour course. Take the course to master the most powerful layout system currently available.

Create a Hand-Lettered T-Shirt Design

This tutorial is two for the price of one. You get to learn some amazing hand lettering techniques, and you also learn to create a striking T-shirt design in Photoshop, complete with a realistic mockup. Oh, and the tutorial is free, so it’s really two for the price of none. But that doesn’t sound so good… Anyway, start learning here!

Create Advanced 3D Web Animations

Three.js is a powerful JavaScript animation framework, and in this course you’ll learn some amazing techniques for animating complex scenes in Three.js. Take the course to take your animation skills to the next level.

Weave Some Keynote Magic

Do you know how to use the power of the “Magic Move” feature in Apple’s Keynote presentation software? It’s a great way to give your presentations a distinctive, professional look by incorporating some slick animated transitions. Learn how it works in this quick video tutorial.

Create an Email Template—The Easy Way

Email templates aren’t easy to create because they often rely on complex table-based structures. In this course, you’ll learn an easy way to create a beautiful email template by customizing a premade starter template from Envato Elements. Find out how it’s done.

Troubleshoot Your Web Apps With Raygun APM

We’ve covered a lot of design topics, so here’s one for the developers out there. In this tutorial, you’ll see how to monitor the performance of your web apps, identify problem areas, and figure out solutions. It’s all done using the Raygun APM dashboard, and you can get the details in the full tutorial.

Learn Adobe Illustrator From Start to Finish

This course is a comprehensive guide for complete beginners to Adobe Illustrator. It starts with zero assumed knowledge and in over three hours of video lessons, it takes you up to the point where you can create finished illustrations using the Pen Tool, the Curvature Tool, brushes, and more. Take the course to go from zero to competent illustrator in a few hours!

Create a Back-to-School Icon

Since it’s back to school time, let’s start by creating a simple icon to mark the event. Do kids still use rulers and calculators these days, or are they doing everything on their smart watches? In any case, the symbols are very recognisable, and you’ll also learn a lot about creating any type of icon in Affinity Designer. Take the free tutorial to get started.

Design a Corporate Website the Easy Way

When you need to design a corporate website, there’s no sense starting from scratch. Instead, you can give yourself a solid head start by using a UI kit. This in-depth course will teach you what a UI kit is and how to use one to design a corporate website using Sketch. Find out more.

Create a Seamless Real-Time Experience in Web & Mobile Apps

 

Users now expect the same real-time experience across web and mobile apps. Delivering that just got a whole lot easier thanks to this comprehensive series of free tutorials on Pusher and its Channels platform, which allows you to give your users a seamless real-time experience across multiple channels. Browse through the series to get up to speed with this powerful technology.

Create an Awesome Portrait on Your iPad

Can you believe that this stunning portrait was created on an iPad? And can you imagine creating it yourself with step-by-step instructions? That’s exactly what you’ll get in this tutorial. So view the instructions and start using your iPad for something other than Netflix!

Watch the Sketch vs. Adobe XD Face-Off!

Sketch and Adobe XD are both useful programs for web designers, but which is better? What are the pros and cons of each, and how can you decide which one to use? Find out in this video.

Make Some Creepy Halloween Images

Frankly, the scariest part of this tutorial for me was its claim that Halloween is already approaching. Can’t we stay at the beach a little longer? But I have to admit that some of the photo effects you learn how to create in this tutorial are very creepy and impressive. So if you want to get spook-ready well in advance, follow this tutorial.

Make a Flyer

Ah, that’s more like it! A summer music festival, beaches and palm trees… You can really feel the summer vibe in this flyer design. So if you’re not ready for creepy Halloween cats just yet, stave off autumn with this fun flyer design project in Photoshop. As usual, you’ll learn loads of useful skills along the way. So sign up for the course now!

Code With Swift on the Server

Swift is well known as the programming language you use to develop apps for the iPhone and other Apple devices. But did you know that it’s now a server language too? In this tutorial, you’ll learn what server-side Swift is and why you would want to have Swift on your back end. You’ll also see how to get started with the Kitura, Vapor, and Perfect frameworks. Get started with server-side Swift!

Design a Book Cover

People used to dream of having their book published one day. Now, with services like Amazon and CreateSpace, it’s easy to skip the dreaming and go straight to the publishing. But as you’ll see if you browse any online bookstore, getting the cover right is easier said than done. So take this book cover design course to learn how to create a professional-looking book cover that will entice new readers to buy and read your book.

Use an Image as a Base for Your Web Design Project

In web design as in other creative endeavours, getting started is often the hardest part. How do you find inspiration to get beyond that blank page? This video tutorial introduces an interesting concept: using an image as the base for a web design project. It shows you how to pick a good image, pull it into Adobe XD, and use it to create your colour scheme. From there, you can build out the whole site much more easily than you would have been able to with nothing but white space to look at. Watch the video to see how it works.

Create Your Own Smartphone Mockup

Envato just launched a new partnership with Placeit, which makes it easy to create photo-realistic mockups with no design skills at all. But if you want to create a mockup the old-school way, with smart objects and smart filters in Photoshop, then read this tutorial for the full lowdown on how to do it.

Make Your Own WordPress Plugins

Often, the best way to learn something new is by rolling up your sleeves and doing it. And if you have the right guide, you can even get the practical experience without having to waste time on missteps. That’s what this course offers: you get to create a series of practical call-to-action WordPress plugins, with expert guidance to help you through the whole process from start to finish. Take the course to get started right away.

Be Popular in China

Making it big in China is every website owner’s dream. But making it happen is more complicated than you might think. The SEO practices that you’ve followed with Google in mind just won’t cut it in China. Read this in-depth China SEO guide to learn about everything from on-page optimisation to business licenses.

Go Offline

No, I’m not talking about unplugging and going to the beach (although that’s not a bad idea). I’m talking about making your website available even when people have bad internet connections. An offline website? How is that even possible? With the magic of service workers. Learn about them in our new short course, or read an in-depth eBook if you prefer.

Brush Up on Photoshop Brushes

I included this course not just for its pun potential, but also because it’s a really useful guide to getting the most out of Photoshop brushes. If you do any kind of art, design or other creative work in Photoshop, you need to watch this video. Oh, did I mention it’s a free course? That’s another good reason to watch it.

Build Your Own Music Player

Well, this is just cool. I don’t know much about Vue.js, let alone Vuetify.js, but I love the idea of building my own music player. If you do too, and if you know a little bit more about progressive JavaScript frameworks than I do, you’ll love this tutorial. What are you waiting for? Get started already.

Photoshop Your Own Sci-Fi Scene

This amazing sci-fi scene looks impossible to create, but this tutorial makes it easy. All you need to do is download some images and textures, and then follow the step-by-step instructions on how to put them all together and make the necessary adjustments. Find out how it’s done.

Make a Landing Page—the Easy Way

If you need to get a landing page up and running quickly and easily, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just pick a professionally designed landing page template, customise it to meet your needs, and focus your time and energy on the important part: making the page successfully convert. Take this short course to find out how to go from zero to a professional landing page in no time.

Make Kinetic Typography in PowerPoint

Even if you don’t know what kinetic typography is, I bet you’ve seen it. Think about those slick text effects you see on presentations or videos, where text comes together in smooth animations. Well, instead of reading my description, it’s probably better just to watch the video. It only takes 60 seconds, and you’ll not only see what kinetic typography is, but learn how to create it too!

Get People to Register for Your Webinar

Webinars are a great way to build your audience by giving people valuable information. Do it right, and you can convert casual visitors into engaged followers and future customers. But first, you have to get people to sign up. This article gives some great tips on creating an effective registration page that will give you a full set of attendees every time, and it links to some useful resources for building the page. Read the article to find out how.

Design in Memphis Style

Do you like bold colours and playful design elements? Then you’ll love the Memphis Style, created in the 1980s and now back in vogue. From three of our recent tutorials, you can learn what the Memphis Style is, and then make a text effect and a poster in Memphis Style.

Master Variable Fonts

If you do any work with web typography, you need to learn about variable fonts. They’re a fantastic new development that lets you get much more creative with typography than you ever could before—while also reducing your font load time. Get up and running with variable fonts in our comprehensive new course.

Make a Competitive Premium WordPress Theme

We’ve all seen them, haven’t we? Those WordPress theme authors who rake in thousands of dollars from a single popular theme. How do they do it? You’ll get some great tips in this tutorial. Generally, articles only tackle one aspect of theme development: business strategy, technical quality, or marketing. This one covers all three. Read the tutorial to help you create the next hit WordPress theme.

Customize a Logo Sting in Adobe After Effects

Logo stings are those cool animated logo effects that you often see at the start of videos. They’re a great way to communicate your brand in a stylish way that even jaded YouTube viewers will remember. In this course, you’ll learn to create a complex logo sting the easy way, by downloading an awesome template and customising it. For a limited time, the Projection Mapping logo sting template is available for free for you to follow this course and learn. Simply create an account on Elements and then download it for free.

Make a Professional Invoice

I’ve been a freelancer for over a decade now, so I know the importance of getting paid on time. Even if you do all the creative stuff well, you still need to handle the invoicing properly so that your clients pay you before your bills are due. This quick, ten-minute course will help you create a professional invoice in either Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Watch the course now.

Go Further With Gutenberg Blocks in WordPress

If you work with WordPress, you probably know that a major overhaul of the classic post and page editor is coming soon. Although many articles present it as a problem (how do you get ready for it, how do you make sure your themes are compatible, etc.), it’s actually a great opportunity to offer a whole range of new functions to your theme and plugin users. Read this tutorial in our Gutenberg series to learn about extending custom Gutenberg blocks. Or take our new in-depth course, Coding Blocks for WordPress Gutenberg.

Make Great Landscape Photographs With Your Smartphone

Smartphones are great for casual photography, but can they really compete with digital SLR cameras for shooting landscapes? The answer, as you’ll see in this tutorial, is a resounding yes. You’ll learn some tips and tricks that will take your landscape photography to the next level, with nothing more than the phone in your pocket (although a tripod and access to Photoshop will also help!). Get started here.

Learn Node.js From Scratch

What do you mean, you don’t know Node.js? It’s a massively popular open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that will take your JavaScript development to the next level. If you’re a Node.js beginner (or a more experienced developer who needs a refresher), this two-hour introductory course is perfect for you. It’ll take you through Node.js concepts from the ground up, while introducing you to some great tools for Node.js developers. Take the course here.

Create a Rainbow Pride Text Effect 

We ran various tutorials to celebrate Pride Month in June, including this great little piece on creating a rainbow text effect. It doesn’t matter that June has now ended—any time of year is a great time to show your pride or solidarity. Plus you’ll pick up some great Adobe InDesign skills if you follow along. Get the step-by-step instructions.

Go Live!

Live streaming can be a great way to boost your online profile, connect with your fans and followers, and reach out to a new audience. But it can also be completely terrifying. In this tutorial, you’ll learn why you should do live streaming or screencasting, and you’ll pick up some great tips on how to do it, from the tools and equipment you need to the techniques that will help it go smoothly. Find out more.

Create Custom Blocks in WordPress Gutenberg

If you use WordPress, you’ve probably heard all about Gutenberg, an entirely new editing experience coming to WordPress later this year. Most of the articles so far have focused on adapting to it and dealing with issues, but what I like about this tutorial is that it focuses on the opportunities Gutenberg offers. Specifically, it shows you how to create your own custom version of a block—the drag-and-drop unit that Gutenberg is built around. With custom blocks, you can offer truly unique experiences in your themes and plugins. Find out how.

Learn Photoshop From the Ground Up

We often focus on new technologies in these posts, but sometimes it’s good to get a refresher on something that’s been around a long time. This comprehensive three-hour video-based course treats Photoshop as if it’s a new piece of software, introducing it to you from start to finish, with no prior knowledge assumed. This is a perfect way for beginners to master Photoshop, whether you’re a designer, photographer, marketer, or hobbyist. Take the course to learn about layers, adjustments, masking, Smart Objects, and a whole lot more.

Code an Image Gallery Android App With Picasso

If you’re creating a mobile app, you’ll probably need to load images at some point. This tutorial teaches you how to do it quickly and easily with Picasso, a popular open-source Android library for loading both local and remote images. It gives you an introduction to what Picasso is and why you should use it, and then it takes you step by step through the process of using it to create an image gallery app. Get the full instructions and source code here.

Make a Website Using a Responsive WordPress Theme

If you’re a small business owner or freelancer who wants to set up a professional-looking website quickly and easily, this short course is perfect. You get to see the full process of creating a site using a premium WordPress theme. You’ll install and activate the theme, configure the options, and then create the home page, menu and hours page, contact page, and so on. Take the course to get started.

Think Like a Designer

When you hear the phrase “design thinking”, what comes to mind? Maybe putting good design and aesthetics at the centre of whatever you’re working on? That’s not a bad definition, but this tutorial argues for something different. Design thinking is about seeing everything from the customer’s point of view and designing everything with a view to what the customer needs and wants. Read the full tutorial to learn more about how it works and what the implications are for designers.

Use Regular Expressions in JavaScript

The most exciting tutorials are usually the ones where you build something. This isn’t one of those. There isn’t even a good preview image to show. It’s very much about the nuts and bolts of code, and yet those nuts and bolts are very useful indeed. With regular expressions, you can manipulate strings of data in pretty much any way you want, allowing you to find matches, replace parts of the string, and much more. Read this beginner’s guide to get an idea of what’s possible.

Make Extra Income From Side Gigs

Are you a designer? Do you want to make some extra money? If you answered “Yes” to both those questions, then this tutorial is for you. In it, you’ll learn about ten different ways of using your talent to bring in income from side gigs. Teaching, writing, consulting, merchandising, and more—these ideas will get you thinking about new possibilities for your design career. Read about all ten side gigs here.

Create a Porg

We couldn’t let May the 4th go by without a Star Wars tutorial, could we? And what better choice this year than those cute, fluffy porgs? This is actually a two-part tutorial. First, you can learn how to draw a porg by slowly adding simple shapes and then shading. Then you can take that drawing and create a beautiful vector illustration in Affinity Designer.

Break the Grid With CSS Grid Layout

Traditional grid-based layouts have a lot of advantages, but you also end up with a lot of websites that look pretty reminiscent of other websites. If you want to make an impression, try breaking the grid. This course shows you exactly how to do it using the CSS Grid Layout model. Learn the full process with video instructions here.

Animate an Explosion!

Boom! The explosion effect above looks complicated to create, but it’s actually quite simple to build it using the Toon Boom software. You’ll get the step-by-step instructions in this tutorial, and you can use the skills you develop to build all kinds of different animations. Read the tutorial to get started.

Get to Grips With WordPress Gutenberg

If you use WordPress to create or update websites, you’ve probably heard about a massive change that’s coming soon. The update, codenamed Gutenberg, will change the way you create and edit posts and pages—probably for the better, but with some major adjustment required. Take the course to see how it will work.

Also check out these helpful Gutenberg articles:

• What Is WordPress Gutenberg?
• How to Prepare Your Plugins for WordPress Gutenberg
• WordPress Gutenberg Block API: An Introduction

Draw a Puppy

Who doesn’t love puppies? Just look at how cute and chubby that little guy is. But seriously, there’s more reason to take this tutorial than just the cuteness factor. You’ll also see how to break down a fairly complex thing like a puppy into simple ovals and lines so that you can draw it easily. Read the instructions here.

Create Double Exposure Effects in Adobe Photoshop

Double exposure effects, where multiple images are blended together, can be very visually powerful. But there’s more to creating them than simply slapping one photo on top of another. This course takes you through three separate examples to give you a comprehensive understanding of the dos and don’ts of double exposures. Take the course to discover how it’s done.

Create Accessible WordPress Themes

Accessibility is crucial when designing WordPress themes in 2018. But how do you ensure your theme is fully accessible to everyone? This tutorial guides you through the essential steps, from using semantic HTML to checking for color contrast and avoiding repetitive link text and more. Read the tutorial to get up to speed.

Master the New Bootstrap 4 Grid System

Bootstrap is an incredibly popular framework for building websites, and the new version 4 comes with a lot of changes. One of the biggest is a complete revamp of the grid system. Take the course to learn all about the changes and practise using the new system.

Do Better Market Research With Focus Groups

No matter what industry you’re in, knowing what your customers want is a pretty essential part of staying in business. You’ve probably heard of focus groups and how big companies use them to decide which variant of a product will work better. But did you know that small firms can use them to? Do you know how to set one up and use it effectively? If not, read the tutorial to find out.

Get the Most Out of Medium Telephoto Photography Lenses

Sometimes, having the right piece of gear can make a real difference to the quality of the images you produce. But with such a wide array of cameras and lenses out there, it can be tough to know where to start. This video tutorial breaks it all down for you, showing you the benefits of a medium telephoto lens and how to get the most out of it. Watch the video to get clued in.

Upgrade to Java 8 for Android App Development

The technology updates seem to be coming thick and fast. Along with Gutenberg and Bootstrap 4, there’s also Java 8 to look out for. Although Java 8 has actually been around for a few years now, Android app developers couldn’t use it until recently. However, in version 3.0, Android Studio started supporting Java 8, and this short course shows you how to add Java 8 to your Android Studio projects and upgrade your code to take advantage of all its new features. Take the course to prepare for the upgrade.

Create a Cute Spring Illustration

No drawing skills required! You can construct this cute illustration using simple shapes and tools in Adobe Illustrator. Get the full step-by-step instructions to see how it’s done.

Design Better User Experiences for Global Audiences

Creating an engaging user experience (UX) is hard enough anyway, and it gets even tougher when you have to consider the different cultural contexts of people around the world. This short tutorial introduces you to some important best practices. It’s also worth reading up on what dark UI patterns are and why you should avoid them.

Create a Photorealistic Digital Painting in SketchBook Pro

Fruit? Really? Yes—there’s a good reason why painters have honed their skills for centuries on this classic still life subject. Fruit gives you a variety of colours and textures to work with, and its various surfaces reflect light in different ways. This tutorial takes you through the whole process in detail, using techniques from 3D modelling to make the end result look incredibly realistic. By the end, you’ll be ready to use the same techniques to paint any subject you want. Follow all the steps here.

Create a Small Business Branding Package the Fast Way

If you’re a small business owner or freelancer who wants to create professional branding materials quickly and efficiently, this quick ten-minute course is for you. You’ll learn how to select appropriate templates from Envato Elements and bring them together to form a cohesive brand identity that instantly builds customer trust. Take the course now.

Manage Storage on Your iOS Device

Does this sound familiar? You buy a phone or tablet, it comes with a ridiculous amount of storage that you’re sure you’ll never end up using. Then, within no time, you get messages popping up saying the device is full. This tutorial takes you through some useful steps to avoid that problem for iOS devices by freeing up space and using storage more efficiently for common problem areas like photos and music. Learn those iOS storage secrets here.

Learn PHP for WordPress

For me, the attraction of WordPress is that it lets you build sophisticated websites without having to understand PHP, the underlying programming language it’s built with. You can bolt together themes and plugins, tinker around with a few settings, and you’re good to go! But, of course, if you want to go to a deeper level of customization or become a WordPress developer, you will need to learn PHP eventually. This course is a great introduction, letting you take your first steps with PHP in the familiar environment of WordPress. No more flaking out and using the Customizer—go ahead and take the red pill to see what’s really happening under the hood.

Overcome Your Cognitive Biases and Design Better Websites

If you want to be a great web designer, you probably think you need to learn all the latest CSS and JavaScript tricks and master the latest frameworks. While all of that is useful, you’ll also need to do something more important and often more difficult: know your own cognitive biases and work to overcome them. This fascinating tutorial digs into some of the weird biases lurking in our brains and shows how they can affect your work as a web designer. Read the tutorial to learn about your biases and master them so you can design better websites.

Code a React App With GraphQL

Often, the best way to learn something is to get your hands dirty with a practical example. In this course, you’ll be building a trip-planning app for the Finnish public transport system. Along the way, you’ll learn how to seamlessly retrieve and integrate live server data into your app, while structuring your queries, accessing real-time data, and handling errors. You’ll also get to know the quickest route from Mäkkylä to Espoonlahti. Take the course to start building and learning today.

Create a Shatter Effect in Photoshop

A shatter effect is a powerful visual metaphor that you can use in a range of designs to illustrate progress, change, or breaking through boundaries. This tutorial shows you how to create the effect easily in Photoshop, starting with a stock image and creating a special “shatter brush” to let you apply the effect, before making all the necessary adjustments so that it looks realistic. Get the full instructions here.

Create a Weight Tracker App With Cloud Firestore

Cloud Firestore is an easy, secure way to store your Android app’s data in the cloud. This tutorial shows you how to use it to create a simple weight tracker app. You’ll learn how to set up user authentication and a basic user interface to make a fully functioning app in a surprisingly short amount of time. See how it’s done.

Animate a Rubber Hose Character in Cinema 4D

The simple, fluid “rubber hose” style of animation is a great way to learn the basics of animation without worrying about the detailed anatomy of your characters. And although the characters are often simple, their movements can look very realistic. This course shows you how to animate a rubber hose character in Cinema 4D, giving you a perfect introduction to 3D animation along the way. Take the course now.

Create a Truly Terrifying Photo Manipulation

Too often, things like this get published around Halloween, but I think we should be able to scare the bejesus out of each other all year round. As well as being nightmare-inducing, this photo manipulation project is a great way to learn about techniques like using colour grading to add atmosphere and mood to a scene. Read the tutorial to start assembling this scene step by step.

 

Build a WordPress Portfolio Site in 1 Hour

A portfolio website is a must for people in all kinds of different industries. It lets you pull together your work and show it off in a visually engaging way. This course shows you how to create a portfolio site the easy way, using WordPress and a pre-designed portfolio theme. Take the course to build a great-looking site in just an hour.

Create a Surreal Portrait in Photoshop

Some designs are so striking that you just think, “Wow, I could never create that.” Well, I do, anyway. But this tutorial breaks the whole process down into easily manageable steps. If you’ve got a copy of Photoshop and some time available, you can work your way through this and create a stunning photo manipulation with a stitching effect. Get the full set of instructions.

Build a React Component

Are you up for a challenge? This post sets you the challenge of building a React component for displaying a Twitter avatar, and then you can either work on it by yourself or watch the video to see how it’s done. Take the challenge here.

Brush Up on Your Illustrator Skills

Adobe Illustrator is one of those programs that you can use for years without discovering all its features. This course takes you through 10 essential design tips to help you get the most out of Illustrator and bring your creative ideas to life. Take the course to discover all 10 tips.

Get Up to Date on SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of those subjects that changes all the time. That’s why Envato Tuts+ publishes annual reports on The State of SEO. Check out the latest SEO report for 2018 to discover the ins and outs of AJAX crawling, artificial intelligence and more.

Create an Online Store With Shopify

If you want to set up an online store or monetise an existing site, Shopify is a popular solution. This course makes it easy for you to get up and running with your own online store. Take the course to watch 12 detailed video lessons that will take you from zero to a functioning store in no time. Bonus: the sample store you’ll be creating is a pet store, so plenty of scope for cute dog photos!

Replace a Laptop With an iPad

Haven’t we all dreamed of leaving the laptop behind and going for the simplicity and comfort of an iPad? For “power users” like professional graphic designers and coders, this may not be practical, but for many of us, an iPad can now handle most if not all of the tasks we use our computers for. So if you’re ready to slim down, read this article for details of how to make the switch successfully.

Learn Vue.js

Vue is a progressive framework for building user interfaces using HTML and JavaScript. In this short course aimed at designers, you will learn the basics of pulling data into your web pages using Vue’s simple templating syntax. Take the course now.

Master Lightroom’s New Dehaze Tool

Take a close look at the image above. The left half is how the photo originally looked, and the right half has had the Dehaze tool applied to it in Adobe Lightroom CC. As you can see, it’s a powerful tool, and this tutorial teaches you exactly how to use it. Read the tutorial to get up to speed.

Create a Modern Restaurant Website

What I like about this tutorial is that it goes beyond the technical aspects of building a website to deal with the whole process, from defining your target audience through the design of the site and then marketing and content creation. While some of the tips are specific to restaurant websites, others could be applied to a range of other business websites. Read the article here.

 

Learn to Design for Colour-Blind People

If we’re putting something out into the world in the year 2018, it really should be accessible to everyone. What I like about this tutorial is that it explains in lots of scientific detail what colour blindness is and how things look to people with different kinds of colour blindness, and then it goes on to give tips on what you can do to make your designs easier for everyone to view. Read the tutorial to learn how to tell protanopia from deuteranomaly and cater for people with either of them.

Switch From Font Icons to SVG

Icon fonts are popular among web designers, and for good reason. But did you know that SVG can sometimes be a better choice for handling icons? Take the course to find out why you should consider using SVG for icons and to learn the practical steps for switching from icon fonts to SVG.

Make an Unbounce Landing Page

A well-designed landing page can make a huge difference to your website, enabling you to steer visitors clearly towards the action you want them to take, whether that’s signing up for your mailing list or buying your latest product. Luckily, Unbounce makes it easy to create the landing page you want, and this tutorial shows you exactly how to do it. Start creating your landing page now.

Create an Artistic Collage in Photoshop

Feeling creative? This next tutorial is perfect for anyone who wants to experiment with new artistic techniques while picking up some tips on Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom too. Juxtapose jarring images and symbols, mix in some bright colours, and create a striking result. Get the step-by-step instructions here.

Build a CMS With Laravel

Or for a very different kind of creativity, why not learn to build your very own content management system? This is a really comprehensive course that includes 23 video lessons with a total viewing time of over four hours. It’s recently been updated with brand new lessons to take advantage of the latest features in Laravel 5, so why not take this comprehensive course and learn pretty much everything there is to know about creating a CMS with Laravel.

Colour Correct Video in Adobe Premiere

Don’t you just hate it when you shoot video that looks perfect in every way—except that the colour balance is off? Problems with tone, white balance and other colour settings are common when shooting video, and they can ruin the end result. So watch this free video to get instructions on salvaging your work by adjusting the colour in Adobe Premiere.

Create Cool Text Styles With SVG

Remember that earlier I was extolling the virtues of SVG for fonts? Well, it turns out that you can create some pretty amazing text effects with it too. Bubble bevel, anyone? Chunky metal? Or how about a neon light effect? Take the course to complete five practical projects that will teach you a whole lot about using SVG to manipulate text.

Create a “Celebration” Illustration

The holiday season may be over, but hopefully there’ll still be plenty of reasons to celebrate in the year to come. So why not celebrate with this elegant champagne illustration? What I like about it is that it’s built using just basic shapes, tools and effects in Adobe Illustrator—no drawing skills required! Find out how to do it.

Build Your Own Web App With Flask

Sometimes, the best way to learn is by getting your hands dirty and doing something. Flask is a popular microframework for creating web apps in the Python language, and this course teaches you how to use it to build your very own file-based wiki app. Watch the free preview to find out more.

Write a Great Motivational Speech

Whether you see yourself pacing around the stage at TED or simply want to deliver a compelling speech at work or school, this tutorial is packed with tips to help you put together a killer motivational speech. Read the tutorial to learn not only how to engage your audience, but how to inspire them.

 

Master Photo Manipulation Techniques

The great thing about photo manipulation is that if, like me, you can’t draw to save your life, you can still create some amazing scenes like the one above, just by merging photos together and applying some effects. There’s a bit more to it than that, of course, but this tutorial breaks it all down into easy steps. So why not learn photo manipulation today?

Make a Professional Resume in 10 Minutes

Along with making New Year’s resolutions, another popular activity at this time of year is making a new career move. If you need to update your resume to propel you towards that dream job in 2018, this short course is for you. Building on a professional template from Envato Elements, you’ll learn how to create a resume that is clean, targeted, and highlights your skills and abilities. Take the course to give your career a boost this month.

Learn Natural Language Processing (NLP) in iOS 11

Machine learning is a hot topic right now, and it’s only going to get more important as time goes on and the possibilities and capabilities of the technology multiply. This tutorial will help you surf the crest of the wave by introducing you to natural language processing, a key element of machine learning. Essentially, it’s the means by which computers understand human speech—not just grasping the basic meaning, but doing complex things like analysing sentiment and pulling out key information. Read the tutorial to find out more about how it works and to get some practice using it in iOS 11.

Take Better Photos by Knowing the Sun’s Position

We’ve all seen great photos ruined by the sun being in the wrong place—usually right behind our beautiful subject, making it into a silhouette shorn of all its details. Of course, the sun is never really in the “wrong place” at all. It moves predictably around the sky, and there will be a time of day—or a different season—in which you can get the shot you want. Read the tutorial to find out how you can use a simple web app to plan your photography shoots with the sun in mind.

Design a Mobile UI in Sketch

Sketch is a powerful digital design application, and it’s perfectly suited to those who design user interfaces for web or mobile apps. In this course, you’ll learn how to create a mobile UI design in Sketch, working from an initial wireframe all the way through to a completed design.

Make a Climate Change Infographic

Here’s an idea for the New Year: do something to help future generations have a habitable planet on which to make and break their own resolutions. An infographic is a great way to communicate complex information and statistics in an engaging way, and this tutorial teaches you how to create one in Adobe InDesign. Find out how it’s done.

Build a Branding Package the Easy Way

Branding is a powerful tool for building a company’s reputation—some of the major world brands are worth billions of dollars. Having a consistent and professional branding package across print and web can really help set a business apart from its competitors. This course teaches you how to create this package on a budget by using Envato Elements and Affinity Designer. You’ll produce a logo, branding colors, a customized website, a business card, a Facebook cover design, and more. Get started here.

Create an Android Music Player App With Anko

Anko is a Kotlin library that makes it easier to build Android apps. What better way to learn it than by getting your hands dirty building a music player app that can automatically pick and play random songs from the user’s device? It’s quite a complex app, but the tutorial makes it easy to understand. Get the full instructions and code.

Design for Visual Impairment

If you have a website or do any kind of design work for the web, you should be conscious of how to design sites that everyone can view easily—including the millions of people with color blindness, low vision, blindness, or other visual impairments. If you’re not, or if you need a refresher, then read this accessibility tutorial to make sure you’re not inadvertently excluding potential visitors and customers through simple but common design flaws.

Learn the Fundamentals of JavaScript

There are lots of JavaScript tutorials and courses out there on the web, but many of them deal with a particular aspect of the language and assume some pre-existing general knowledge. It’s quite rare to find a systematic guide that teaches you the language from the ground up. This JavaScript Fundamentals course does exactly that. It starts with the basic concepts and builds slowly over the course of 7 hours and 61 separate lessons to teach you more complex topics and show you how to use JavaScript in practice. If you want to code for the web, you need a solid understanding of JavaScript, and this course is perfect. Take the course to start learning today!

 

Create Your Own Color Font

In case you haven’t heard the news yet, color fonts are shaping up to be one of the hottest design trends of 2018. This tutorial teaches you how to create your very own color font using the latest version of Adobe Illustrator and the powerful Fontself extension. So why not learn this important new design skill?

Learn Gravit Designer

Speaking of new skills, have you tried Gravit Designer yet? It’s a completely free vector application that was launched earlier this year. It’s available in the browser as well as on Linux, Mac, ChromeOS and Windows, making it arguably the most accessible application of its type in the world. Learn how to use it in this thorough introductory course.

Build a Slack Bot With Python

If you do any kind of online collaboration, you’ve probably come across Slack. It’s used by over 50,000 companies—and yep, Envato is one of those. This tutorial shows you the code and takes you through all the steps to build your own unique integration with Slack, using Python for the logic. Learn the steps here.

Master PowerPoint Templates

We all know that a presentation looks smarter and more coherent when we use a well-designed template, don’t we? But getting the most out of a PowerPoint template is another story. This in-depth video course shows you how to create a polished presentation from start to finish, using the popular X Note template as an example. So take the course and move your presentations to the next level.

Speed Up Your Design Process With Studio

More new design software for you to learn. Studio is a free online UI design tool, ideal for web designers or anyone else designing for digital products. Watch the video to get up to speed with Studio quickly and easily.

Stabilise Your Video Footage

Have you ever taken some great video footage, only to find that it is too shaky to be usable? Unless you use a tripod or have the steady hands of a neurosurgeon, the answer is probably yes. Luckily, Apple’s Final Cut Pro X has stabilization processing built in. Find out how to stabilise your video footage in this video tutorial.

Understand Basic Typography

Any designer will tell you that typography is crucial to good design. From company brands to newspaper headlines to advertisements to websites, you can see the power of typography in action everywhere. But, like any specialised field, typography has its own vocabulary, which can be confusing for beginners. Watch this 60-second typography video to learn how to tell your counters from your spines and your stems from your shoulders.

Type International Characters More Quickly

If you often switch between different languages (or if you just enjoy using words like “smörgåsbord”), you’ve probably encountered the annoying situation of taking ages to type a letter with an accent that’s not included on your standard keyboard. On a Mac, of course, you can hold down the key and see a range of common accents, but that can still take a while. There’s a better way, involving automation apps. Learn the shortcuts here.

Design Icons With Adobe XD

In the wake of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and all of the associated consumer frenzy, you may well be sick of 2 for 1 deals. But this course offers genuine value, by allowing you both to brush up your icon design skills and to learn Adobe XD at the same time. Take the course to get instructions on using Adobe XD to design a range of useful icons.

Learn to Code Securely in Swift 4

If you want to create apps for Apple devices from watches to iPhones, Swift is the programming language to use. With version 4 only released a few months ago, now is the perfect time to get up to speed with secure coding in Swift 4. Read the in-depth tutorial to learn about concurrency, race conditions, Grand Central Dispatch, and more.

Master PHP

Take a look at your favourite website. There’s a good chance that it was built with PHP. This powerful programming language created a big proportion of the web, and it’s easy to learn and easy to use for writing web applications. In this comprehensive, seven-hour video course, you’ll learn all the fundamentals of PHP, from the basics of using variables and writing loops and functions up to coding classes for simple object-oriented programming (OOP). Along the way, you’ll learn all the most important skills for writing apps for the web. Take the course to get started building your own web applications.

Create an Inspirational Photo Grid for Instagram

You’ve probably seen them before—those grids of beautiful photos, often accompanied by an inspirational message. This tutorial shows you how to create them yourself, either in Photoshop or with a simple grid-building app. It’s quite easy, and the results can be impressive. So why not give it a try?

Draw a Mandala

This tutorial hits the trifecta—you can learn a new skill, explore your creativity, and relax at the same time! What’s not to like? Drawing a mandala can be very therapeutic, and although it looks complex, it’s actually quite simple to do. So learn all the steps and start sharpening your drawing skills while relaxing your mind.

Use Gulp to Speed Up Your Web Design Work

If you’re a web designer, you’ll want to learn about Gulp, a simple JavaScript task runner that can really speed up your work and save you a lot of time. Take this in-depth course to discover what Gulp is, how it works, and how you can set up some super-efficient workflows for handling CSS files, JavaScript files, images, and more.

Pay Tribute to a Hitchcock Classic

I love old movie posters from the 1950s and 60s. The tools available to designers back then were so much simpler, but there were no limits to their creativity, and some of the results were just fantastic. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a movie poster paying tribute to the classic Vertigo poster designed by Saul Bass. You’ll learn a lot about Adobe InDesign along the way, while also doing some Photoshop and Illustrator work. So get started on this wonderful project, and upload your own version in the comments for others to take a look at.

Confront the Command Line

If you use a Mac, you’ve probably come across the “Terminal” icon, and if you’re like me, you’ve probably ignored it. But the Terminal gives you unfettered access to the deeper reaches of your Mac via the command line (if you remember MS-DOS, think of that classic C:\> prompt and the commands you used to enter). You can do some pretty useful things that just aren’t possible with the usual graphic interface (such as “caffeinating” your Mac). So take this beginners’ tutorial to discover some nifty examples and get started using the command line.

Design a Landing Page With Adobe XD

It’s still quite early days for Adobe XD, Adobe’s user experience design software, which only came out of beta a few weeks ago. So why not be one of the early adopters? This course shows you how to use Adobe XD to wireframe and design a landing page from start to finish. Take the course and build your skills in this useful application.

Create a Spirit Day Text Effect

Envato Tuts+ ran quite a few tutorials and articles last month to mark Spirit Day. Although the day has now passed, this tutorial will still teach you some useful skills for creating text effects in Adobe Illustrator. Plus you’ll be prepared for next year’s event, which will probably come around again sooner than you expect! Find out how to create the effect.

Childproof Your iPad

Those newspaper stories about kids running up huge credit-card bills on their parents’ iPads are fun, aren’t they? But they’re probably not so much fun for the parents involved. If you have kids or know someone who has kids, there’s a high chance that your beloved iPad will fall into their hands one day. So take this tutorial and find out how to protect your iPad from damage (both internal and external), as well as protecting kids from coming across bad stuff on the internet.

Learn the Kotlin Programming Language

Kotlin is a new programming language for coding Android apps, and it’s way more concise and secure than traditional languages like Java. This course teaches you everything you need to know to get started coding in Kotlin, from the basics of getting set up and writing your first code right through to advanced features like lambdas, higher-order functions, and using Java and Kotlin together in the same app. Take the course and add a powerful new language to your toolkit.

Learn Creative Typography

Think of creative designs, and maybe you think of a creative use of images, shapes, and colour. But you can do a lot with plain old letters, and this course shows you how. You get to play with typography and develop your creativity as you create a concept-driven typographic artwork. Take the course to give your creativity a boost this month.

Turn Your Cat Into a Zombie

Yes, Halloween is coming around again, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to turn your cat into a zombie. In fact, this tutorial shows you how to turn any portrait, whether human or animal, into a terrifying, dead-eyed, blood-spattered zombie. Even if you hate Halloween as much as I do, you’ll still pick up some useful Photoshop techniques in this one. So take the zombie-making tutorial and see how it’s done.

Beef Up Your WordPress Security

If, like me, you run a WordPress site, you probably alternate between feeling good about the number of websites that use your chosen platform (currently 28% of the web and rising) and feeling worried about the constant security threats. Take this short course to learn the key steps you should take to make your WordPress site much more secure.

Create an Android App That Recognizes Images

OK, the simple app created here doesn’t look as good as the zombie cat, does it? Fair enough. But once you’ve learned the skill of incorporating image recognition into an Android app, there are so many possibilities for more complex apps. This tutorial shows you how to use machine learning to recognize the content of images with the IBM Watson Visual Recognition service. Get the step-by-step instructions and code samples here.

Draw a Monkey

Drawing tutorials can be frustrating—they sometimes seem to be written for people who already know how to draw. But this tutorial is truly for beginners, and it breaks the whole process down into simple shapes like ovals, curves, and crosses. It’s a great way of learning to draw, and it may just help you see the structures behind objects so that you can draw things other than monkeys. Read the full instructions.

Optimize Your Website Without AMP

Google’s AMP is awesome! It’s a great way of optimizing your website with simple plug-and-play code. Why would you want to optimize a site without it? Well, actually there are several reasons, and you’ll learn more about them in this course. You’ll also learn exactly how to convert an existing AMP-based site to use non-AMP equivalents, helping you to make your site blazing fast while keeping total control. Take the course to find out more.

Make a Professional Business Card in 10 Steps

Lots of people just use generic business cards, but if you really want to make an impression, it’s much better to do it yourself. You get a chance to showcase your creativity while ensuring your business card sticks out from the crowd. It doesn’t have to be complicated either—this tutorial shows you how to create a great-looking business card from scratch in Adobe InDesign in just ten steps. Find out how.

Create a Job Board Website With WordPress

A job board is a great type of website to build for any industry or niche—it allows you to provide really useful information (everybody likes to be able to find job opportunities), and your traffic and referrals can grow fast. This tutorial shows you how to create one using a WordPress theme and some simple customisation, with no coding skills required. Start creating your job board website here.

Use Swift Design Patterns

In the world of coding, design patterns are incredibly useful ways of solving common problems that arise in development. But they can be abstract and hard to grasp for beginners, and you can end up struggling to tell your factory from your facade. This comprehensive, 24-video, 3.5-hour course will set it all straight, with detailed explanations and examples of how each pattern can be used in the Swift programming language. Take the course here.

Create a Plastic Jelly Style

Wait, doesn’t that style look a bit dated? More 2007 than 2017? Yes, well spotted! This last tutorial is a bit of a nostalgia trip. Tuts+ turned 10 years old in September, and to celebrate, we decided to recreate the very first tutorial on the site, by Envato founder Collis Ta’eed, but this time using up-to-date techniques in the latest version of Adobe Creative Suite. So step back in time with us, and start making plastic jelly like it’s 2007!

Create an Android Instant App Feature

If you’re not up to speed with Android’s new Instant Apps feature yet, this tutorial is ideal for you. Instant Apps let people load entire sections of your app on demand, just by tapping a URL and without having to download the full app. This gives you a great opportunity to get your app in front of as many new users as possible. Learn how to create an Android instant app feature here.

Create a Modern Business Card Using Adobe Photoshop

Yes, we do live in a world of social media and online connections, but a good printed business card is still as important to today’s freelancer or business owner as it was to Don Draper in Mad Men. Learn how to create your own professional business card design in this step-by-step Photoshop tutorial.

Use Linux for Web Design

If you’re a web designer, your choices are not limited to macOS or Windows. You can also work very effectively in Linux, and in fact there are some real advantages to doing so. Take the course to find out all about using Linux for web design.

Improve Your Email Open Rates

No matter what kind of work you do, I’m willing to bet that you send emails, and that you want people to open them. This tutorial shows you 10 simple steps you can take to improve your email open rates. Who knew that the way you capitalise your subject line can make more people open the email? I didn’t, but the data suggests it’s true. Read the tutorial to discover all 10 email tips.

Create an AI-Powered Chatbot

Artificial intelligence is here—and I’m not talking about those dumb social media algorithms that collect masses of data on you and yet still can’t arrange your feed in the right order. I’m talking about chatbots that can hold increasingly realistic conversations with us. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a simple conversational chatbot using the IBM Watson Conversation service. The best part, for me, is the way it serves up inspirational quotes. Get the step-by-step instructions here.

Learn About HDR Photography in 60 Seconds

Sometimes you just don’t have a lot of time to spend learning something new. But everyone can spare a minute, can’t they? That’s the idea behind the Tuts+ 60-second videos—you learn a new skill or technique in just one minute. In this one, you’ll get an introduction to HDR photography. Watch the 60-second video here.

Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation

What do you get if you take a photo of the sky, put it in Photoshop, and add photos of a cat, a wall, some trees and a bunch of fish on top? The result, for most of us, will be an amateurish mess. But with the techniques covered in this tutorial, you’ll get the bizarre, impossible and yet weirdly realistic scene shown above. Click here to learn how it’s done.

Learn React Through 5 Practical Examples

React is one of the most popular web frameworks, and if you want to learn to use it, what better way than through some practical examples? In this course, you’ll build a digital clock, an Ajax-powered navbar and more, and in the process you’ll learn all the basics of coding React components from JSX and managing state right through to higher-order components and lifecycle methods. Sign up for the course.

Understand How the WordPress Loop Works

If you’ve been working with WordPress for any length of time, you’ve probably heard about the Loop. But do you really understand what it is and how to use it? This short, ten-minute Coffee Break Course will get you fully up to speed. Start learning about the WordPress Loop.

Create Your Own Stress Cave

It’s great to learn new technologies and computer skills, but it’s no use having these skills if you’re too unproductive to use them. In a busy work day, it’s easy to get derailed by stress and its close companion, procrastination. So read this quick productivity tip to learn how to take a step back into the stress cave and take some simple steps to help you see the right way forward.

Create a Haunting Photo Manipulation

Photo manipulation is a wonderful way to create whole new worlds from your imagination, without needing to draw or paint anything yourself. In this tutorial, you learn how to take seven different photos and blend them together into one weirdly haunting scene. Get the step-by-step instructions here.

Animate Icons!

Sometimes good design is eye-catching, but other times it’s almost unnoticeable. A well-designed icon may not win any great plaudits, but it’s one of the little details that adds up to a better user experience for your website, app, game, presentation, etc. So why not take things to the next level by adding animation. Take the short video-based course for full instructions on creating icons in Adobe Illustrator and then animating them in After Effects.

Draw Hair in 4 Different Styles

Did you know that the average human head has about 100,000 individual hairs? What that means is that if you want to draw someone’s hair, you can’t draw separate lines for each strand—you need to learn some tricks to create the illusion of 100,000 hairs while using far fewer lines. Take this drawing tutorial to see how it’s done.

Get Up and Running With Sketch

Most of these design tutorials and courses use Adobe software because it’s so popular and offers so many features. But Adobe is not the only game in town. Take this comprehensive, 17-part video course to get up and running with Sketch, a powerful digital design application that’s great for icon design, web design, and more.

Learn the Quick Way to Create Professional Logos

Have you ever had one of those annoying clients who demands double the work in half the time? Of course you have. Here’s a trick for icon designers: have a few flexible logo kits ready to customise so that you can meet even the tightest deadline. Take this short course to learn how to create the three building blocks of a successful logo kit.

Paint “Love” in Sign Language

OK, I’ll be honest—I’m mostly just including this one because I love the end result. But it does also teach some really useful digital painting skills. Look at the dramatic lighting and the realistic textures of each hand; those are some techniques you could use in a wide variety of projects. See how to create this painting from scratch.

Make an Animated GIF

Whether you love them or hate them, animated GIFs are all over the web. This tutorial shows you an easy method of putting together an animated GIF in Adobe Photoshop. The example is of a wolf’s glowing eyes, but feel free to use the same techniques for laughing dogs, weird celebrity mashups, or whatever your heart desires. Start animating your GIFs here.

Go Back to the Nineties

The 1990s are popular again! Who knew? As far as I remember, the 1990s weren’t even popular in the 1990s. But if those headache-inducing colours and shouting fonts give you a flood of happy nostalgia, this is your chance to step back in time to the days of oversized cargo pants, overused fluorescent colours, and Hootie & the Blowfish. (Oh, and you can also learn some useful flyer design skills in Adobe InDesign.) Enter the time machine here.

Send a Ransom Note

Well, no—don’t actually send a ransom note, OK? That would be creepy. But this tutorial does teach some useful skills to help you manipulate fonts and work with shapes and textures in Photoshop to create a realistic text effect. Take the tutorial to learn how it works.

Create a Realistic Mockup

If you’ve ever worked in product or packaging design, you know the importance of a good mockup. Clients often struggle to see the potential of a design until you show them how it will look in the real world. This final tutorial in our list teaches you to create your own wine-bottle mockup from scratch in Photoshop. Along the way, you’ll learn how to manipulate photos, create realistic shadows and reflections, add lighting, and more. Ready to get started? Click here for the full instructions.

Publish Facebook Instant Articles

OK, it’s true that Facebook’s “Instant Articles” feature has been controversial, and you may not love the idea of having your content living on Facebook’s platform instead of your own. But the advantage is that readers get to access your articles at a lightning-fast speed, and your content fits in seamlessly with the Facebook app, making for a great user experience. And whereas at first it was only for large publishers, now it’s available for all of us. Get a step-by-step guide to publishing Instant Articles in this tutorial.

Master Affinity Designer

Just when Adobe seemed to have the vector design market locked down, along came Affinity Designer a couple of years ago, winning a whole host of new admirers among web designers and graphic designers. If you haven’t tried it yet, this course is a perfect way to find out what all the fuss is about. You’ll learn Affinity Designer from the ground up—and the course was recently updated to cover new features like artboards, constraints, symbols, and some powerful new typography tools.

Use Style Guides for Accessibility

Keeping your skills current is not just about learning new technologies. It’s also about important concepts like accessibility. Making your sites accessible to as many people as possible is not just the right thing to do; it also makes business sense. You work hard to attract visitors, so why turn some of them away because you’ve failed to make the simple changes that would allow them to view your site? I like this quick tutorial because it shows you how to create a style guide for accessibility, while also introducing you to some important accessibility concepts and techniques along the way.

Build an Onboarding Tour Using JavaScript

I don’t much like the word “onboarding”, but I do love those interactive tours that pop up when you visit a new site or app, showing you how everything works with simple boxes that you can click through (or click out of) at your own pace. This short course shows you how to build your own tour from scratch, using HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.

Design Better Logos

Logo design is one of those things that may well be handled by a specialist graphic designer, but it’s always a useful skill for a web designer to possess. You’ll also get a useful rundown of the major tools, panels and features in Adobe Illustrator, which will be useful for other design tasks beyond logos.

Manipulate Colors in JavaScript

It’s good to learn new skills, but it’s even better to build something useful. This screencast ticks both of those boxes. Take a look at the demo—a neat little tool that lets you select a starting color and have a tasteful color scheme generated for you. You’ll learn how to create that yourself, using the Chroma.js library.

Get Hands-On Practice With the CSS Flexbox Model

Flexbox is a relatively new layout mode in CSS3, and as the name suggests, it can give you some wonderful flexibility in your page layouts. This popular course lets you get your hands dirty by tackling six projects designed to help you learn Flexbox thoroughly. And now it’s been updated with two more bonus projects on modals and sliders, so it’s an even better way of getting up to speed.

Work Better With Other People

No matter how well you know the ins and outs of CSS, the reality of working as a web designer is that you’ll have to deal with other human beings at some point, and that’s when things can get so complicated that you end up yearning for the comfort of your code editor. This tutorial looks at some useful ways to get the content of a website prioritized among multiple members of a team with the least fuss.

Build Forms With CSS Grid

Yes, I know. Forms are not the most exciting topic in the world, are they? But the attraction of this tutorial is not the forms, but the way you create them—using the CSS Grid Layout Module, another quite recent addition to the web designer’s arsenal. It shows you how to create a form the “traditional” way, using floats, and then how to achieve the same end result using CSS Grid.

Get a Refresher on the Basics

With so much new stuff to learn, sometimes it’s valuable to go back to basics and make sure you’ve still got a solid grasp of the essentials. Or maybe you’re just getting started and want to avoid some of the most common mistakes. Either way, these 10 simple design pointers from Tuts+ Web Design Editor Ian Yates will help you make sure you’re on the right track.

Keep Your Mac Efficient and Well Maintained

Have you ever taken your Mac to an Apple store and seen the “genius” running a diagnostic test on your computer? This post shows you how to run that test yourself and interpret the results, as well as checking the health of your hard drive—all without the help of a lanyard-wearing hipster genius.

Design a Vintage Music Festival Flyer

Here in the northern hemisphere, summer is just around the corner, and festival season will soon be in full swing. I love the summer colours and the vintage VW campervan in this design—but more importantly, the tutorial teaches you some great skills in Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. If you’re shivering in the southern hemisphere right now, just think of this one as forward planning.

Add MailChimp Signup to Your WordPress Site

Some Tuts+ courses are several hours long and cover lots of ground, but this one is very short (just six minutes) and very simple. It teaches you something that sounds straightforward but can cause headaches if it’s not done right—how to add a MailChimp signup form to your WordPress site. In six minutes, you can get your site fully set up to start gathering email subscribers. Not bad, huh?

Know When to Fly Your Drone

I love watching aerial video footage. There’s something so calming and majestic about seeing the world from the perspective of a bird. In this video tutorial, you can learn about the best times of day to fly your drone for filming purposes (and in a companion tutorial, you can learn about the pros and cons of different weather conditions). I’m sure it’s all useful information, but I like the tutorials purely for the eye candy.

Make an Explainer Video

Have you noticed that explainer videos are everywhere? And they all have the same annoyingly cheery music? In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to put together a good explainer video for your company or personal site. My one gripe is that it’s a written tutorial—being a fan of recursion, I’d have preferred an explainer video on how to make explainer videos. But it’s still a good post. Check it out.

Convert a Photo Into a Charcoal Drawing

Charcoal drawings look amazing, but creating them involves both getting your hands dirty and spending years on the painstaking and often frustrating process of learning to draw. This video shows you how to skip both of these steps and just create a cool charcoal drawing from any photo with a simple Photoshop action.

Create a Split-Screen Slider With JavaScript

I love the split-screen effect here—as you drag your mouse across an image, a line splits the screen and it changes from colour to duotone. Try the demo at the top of the tutorial to see how it works! Then you can learn the process of creating it, with both a screencast and written instructions to make it easy to understand.

Design Buttons, Textures and Icons for Video Games

The thing about what video-game designers call “UI assets” (and the rest of us call “buttons, icons and stuff”) is that, if they’re designed well, you probably don’t even notice them. But if they look clunky, they can ruin the gaming experience. This course teaches you how to design them well. Plus the aesthetic reminds me of playing The Secret of Monkey Island as a child. Remember Guybrush Threepwood, anyone?

 

Record Vocals Like a Professional

Want to be the next Lana Del Rey or Justin Bieber? Or maybe you even have some more up-to-date cultural references. In any case, this tutorial will teach you everything you need to know to record professional vocals using just your computer and some simple equipment. Then you’ll be well on your way to YouTube stardom—all you need to do next is….

Make a YouTube Banner

Even with the most professionally recorded vocals, some of your potential fans may be put off if your YouTube banner looks as if it was designed by a hyperactive child with unsupervised access to Microsoft Paint. This tutorial teaches you to put together a simple banner for a YouTube channel using stock images and basic tools in Adobe Photoshop.

Draw a Skull

Macabre? Perhaps. But what I like about this tutorial is that you can produce a great end result even if you have zero drawing skill (yes, that would be me!). Monika Zagrobelna breaks the whole process down into such simple steps that you really can’t go wrong. If you can draw lines and circles and have access to a pencil, you can draw a convincing human skull.

Tell Your “em” From Your “rem”

If you’ve even dabbled in web design, you’ve probably come across the “em” and “rem” units of measurement. But what are they? What’s the difference, and when might you want to use each one? This one-hour course will get you crystal clear.

Solve Android’s Most Common Error Messages

Stumped by a ClassCastException? Tearing your hair out over a missing R.layout.main? Wondering who in Android-land thought that “Only the Original Thread That Created a View Hierarchy Can Touch Its Views” would be a helpful error message to give to human beings? This article demystifies 13 of the most common error messages to plague Android developers.

Hit Inbox Zero

I’ve saved the best for last. While we may love to be able to draw, paint, create apps or become a YouTube star, I think a lot of us would settle for an empty email inbox. This tutorial will teach you how to reach the “You have no messages” promised land. You can also grab a free eBook for more detailed email mastery tips.

There’s More…

This post has just skimmed the surface of what Tuts+ has published recently, and in the full archives going back ten years, there’s even more. So if you don’t see what you’re looking for in this post, you can search the full Tuts+ library of more than 1,200 courses and 27,000 tutorials to find exactly what you need.

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