Getting t-shirts printed is an ideal way to promote your business, organization or event. They are a promotional item that people can actually use, and they have the added bonus of being an advertisement for you. In this post, Adobe Illustrator will be used to create a three-color screen print using a fictional company logo, and have it set up to allow a screen printer to easily print the color separations that create the separate screens for each color print.

Although some printers prefer to create their own separations, it’s always good to understand the process. Be sure to communicate with your printer as they will specify their requirements, and will often give you tips for avoiding potential issues in the process.

In this post we will take a drawn design, scan it and clean it up in Photoshop, then trace it using the Live Trace feature in Adobe Illustrator. Live Trace was introduced in Adobe Illustrator CS2 but is still a powerful tool available in Illustrator CS5. This process really gives an artist the freedom to digitally experiment with drawings of any kind.

The vector art it produces can be used in numerous ways and is easily customized. My motivation for trying this was originally to make a “growing vine”-type animation in Adobe After Effects. I will show a link to the resulting animation at the end of this tutorial, but for now, let’s get started.

Office applications are getting very advanced these days offering all sorts of fancy features for data visualization. Graph generation is a standard feature in desktop applications like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, but it can also be achieved in non-spreadsheet applications like Adobe Illustrator.

If you’re unfamiliar with the process of creating graphs in Adobe Illustrator, this article will help in giving you some insight into the work-flow. It might also help you decide whether Illustrator is the right tool for this kind of assignment.

Adobe Illustrator offers 9 graph types to visualize data. You can choose from the following graphs: column, stacked column, bar, stacked bar, line, area, scatter, pie and radar.

As web designers, we always have something new to learn. Over the last decade our workflow has changed dramatically — it’s become more sophisticated and highly diversified. Not only do we have a much larger variety of improved tools to use; there’s also an endless stream of new techniques emerging and spreading within the web design community via social networks. And this is where the opportunity to learn new useful, practical approaches and techniques comes in.

We can learn by exploring the different design approaches other designers have taken, when solving their problems and apply these approaches to our work to become more productive and skilled. Therefore, our editorial team is permanently looking for interesting techniques, tools and tutorials, which we carefully select and present in round-ups on Smashing Magazine. You needn’t love our lists, but they often will give you some useful ideas and advice.

Below you’ll find an overview of new useful Adobe Photoshop techniques and tutorials that we’ve found and collected over the last months. We sincerely hope that at least some of the techniques presented there will help you improve your graphic design skills in Adobe Photoshop. And sincere thanks to all designers and developers whose articles are featured in this review. We respect and appreciate your contributions to the design community, folks!