We all know that hyperrealist icons are over, the new trend now is flat and either hard shadows or super soft and subtle ones. You can also try to mix both styles, there are a lot of people actually doing that and the results are quite beautiful. With that in mind, I decided to give it a try in Illustrator and recreate this effect.

With iOS7 Apple introduced a completely new design for the 6 year old OS. Among all the changes, one that really caught everyone's attention was the blurred background effect. Basically some parts of the UI get a nice frosted glass effect. There are a couple of ways to achieve this effect using HTML and CSS.

Last week we posted about some new trends in icon design and illustration. Today after spending hours watching Breaking Bad, I started to watch it a couple of weeks ago and now I am on season 5 already - I decided to create an illustration for a desktop wallpaper for my laptop and of course share with you the process in Illustrator.

I've alway been a huge fan of Formula 1, I grew up watching the Grand Prix and of course drawing those awesome little cars. One thing that I didn't know much about it was the posters behind the races. With the new movie about the sport opening in a few weeks, Rush, I decided to check out online some images from that time.

It has been quite a long time I've been thinking about creating a design with those very realistic shadows. This weekend I decided to give it a try. I started to think about what would be the best way, manually recreating that would be too much work. So I decided to try the 3D capabilities of Photoshop. It turned out to be the easiest and quickest way. The result was also very good.

Today I want to share this awesome UI kit by GraphicBurger. The style is flat and trendy with a mix of different colors, this is a great set of components that you can use on your next project. Check it out and the psd available for download.

I am huge fan of pixel art, I even dabbled with the form in 2004, however after my studio got robbed, I lost my backup disks including my pixel work and I've never tried it again. As of late, I've been following the work of Alex Griendling and some of his amazing pixel arts.

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo's writers and users.

Last weekend I was playing in Illustrator trying to create a simple wallpaper to use on my phone and tablet. I love geometric patterns, but I hadn't done anything like that in a while. So, I started playing with some ideas inspired by Andy Gilmore. It's really nice to see how the Pattern Tool in Illustrator facilitates the process of creating patterns these days.

It's been quite a long time since I played with water textures. I was checking some amazing artworks on Behance and Pinterest when I saw some examples that really inspired me to try something and learn a little bit more about Photoshop and the Displace filter.

So for this tutorial, I will show you how to create a really cool effect with water texture and the displace filter.

Back from my first visit to Portland, Oregon I got really inspired by the city, especially the rugged Pacific Northwest landscape, the grey colors of the sky, the Willamette River running right through town and the people that make the city unique.

With the announcement of iOS7, Apple revealed a completely new UI for their mobile OS. With the super flat design and thin fonts, Apple said that the design would be adaptable to apps by making some of the basic UI elements transparent, therefore, some of the colors of your apps content would bleed through and define how iOS7 basic components would influence the overall appearance.

The book suggestion of this week is very important read for any designer out there. The book is titled The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand.

A few weeks ago I posted artwork I created for a poster inspired by the Man of Steel movie. I used Pixelmator for that project and got quite a few comments and requests about how to achieve the same effect in Photoshop. As Photoshop doesn't have the awesome Vintage filters that Pixelmator now has, I tried emulating the effect using brushes which I will share with you today.