The other day while watching ESPN, I noticed one of the advertisements for their NBA broadcasts titled “Destination NBA”. At the tail end of the spot they show an image of street signs with the upcoming games and times, with a cool worn/grunge effect to them (here’s a screenshot). Since it seems that I’ve developed a flair for creating graphics with the same grungy look, I decided to try my hand at recreating the signs and at the same time write a tutorial on how I did it. My overall purpose of this tutorial is to show you how you can create the effect on a street sign, not to duplicate the fine work by the ESPN graphics team.

I have included a resources file at the end of the tutorial for you to download if you like. Included in the resources file are a few of the textures that I use along with a few brush sets used in the tutorial. The font used for the tutorial was purchased by me and I cannot share it with anyone, as it would be against the usage policy. With all of the fine details out of the way…let’s get started.

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The crew from Go Media are at it again as they just released their 13th collection of “stock” vector artwork. I use the word “stock” lightly, because their work is anything but! This latest release is chock full of great stuff and includes a total of 137 high quality, detailed vector pieces in seven individual themes. As always you can purchase the entire collection for set 13 or choose to purchase them in their individual packs, but you’ll pay almost $34 more if you were to purchase all seven packs separately. This set includes some very interesting stuff; I’m very interested to see the “Flow” pack in action as it’s got some really cool geometric shapes in flowing patterns…very cool stuff.

I’m not 100% sold on the 3D Skull collection, but I’m guessing with some tweaking and some experimentation they could be used very cleverly to create some cool artwork. The entire set has some really cool stuff in it which includes:

• 3D Skulls (mentioned)
• Robots
• Bound (Vines, Ropes, etc)
• Flow (mentioned)
• Too Sexy (sexy silhouettes – also seen on “Speed Network”)
• XTreme Sports
• Apparel

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In my Week in Review post for October 20th, I mentioned that I had been working on a “secret” project for a client of mine and that we would probably be launching the site on or around November 3rd. Unfortunately, we didn’t make our November 3rd launch…but November 11th is just as good. The project as you might be able to tell was a redesign of Cuzoogle. Cuzzy had been talking about redesigning his site for awhile now and giving it a more updated look. We both sat down (cross-continent) and came up with an interesting layout that would allow for him to put in his necessary ad spots as well as something that looked fan-freakin’tastic!

While this project wasn’t a completely custom theme; we did start off with the basic layout from the Simple Red Theme from Easy Wordpress that Cuzzy had been using. The biggest challenge in getting everything looking as it should were the widgets that Cuzzy uses for advertising. They took some tweaking, but they all fell into place like they should. The new theme is in between Evolutionary and Revolutionary when it comes down to it. Since the original theme had a lot of good quality stuff already built-in, we didn’t need to revolutionize the theme…however, the design elements added were HUGE improvements over the old version.

This is a quick breakdown of all of the new added features… Read the rest of this entry »

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After the success of the RSS Feed Icons – Glassy Set that I released back in June; I have decided to release another set of RSS Feed Icons to the masses. I have been doing a lot of grunge artwork lately with paint spatters, scratches and stains so I figured I would try my hand at putting together a set of Grunge Icons. However, this time I decided to mix it up a bit and include not only the 128×128 icons, but a matching set of 64×64 as well. This set includes the colors that you see above: blue, green, purple, red, orange and yellow. The icons are saved in PNG format with transparency to fit into your design with ease.

Download: RSS-Feed-Icons_Grunge.zip (136 KB)

If you have any suggestions for future freebies, or would like to request a custom design of your own shoot me an email and I will get back to you ASAP! I have opened the doors to the GrandmasterB design center and I am now taking on new design projects. Whether you are looking for custom banner ad design, print or web design…GrandmasterB can do the job. Check out the new Design Services page and see the services I am offering.

~ GrandmasterB

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I skipped the Q&A last week in order to get some good questions rolling in the door and to find a good day of the week to commit to the feature post. I’ve settled on Thursdays for the Q&A with GrandmasterB feature; since it allows me to get things caught up over the weekend and more time to put together a clear and concise answer. Don’t forget to send me your questions and if your question is published you’ll get a free linkback from GrandmasterB and 100 EntreCard credits for your bankroll. Now onto the question for this week.

My boy Cuzzy (Cuzoogle.com) wrote me an email the other day asking me the following question:

I have recently started a new blog and want to set up a google site map. I downloaded the plugin and activated it but I am still having trouble getting my site map to work. It says I need to make sure the file is writeable and this was where I got lost. Can you help?

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