One of the best ways to learn is by practicing and trying to recreate styles and effects that you like. We have been doing this here on Abduzeedo since the beginning, always adapting a little bit to add our own unique flavor. The goal is to learn the details behind a style or composition so we can apply some of that to our future work.

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.

This December Abduzeedo celebrates its 7th anniversary. In the end of 2006, after the robbery of our design studio, I decided to start a simple blog to share inspiration, experiments and to try to be more active in the community. Today, after 7 years, we have met so many amazing people but most importantly, we have learned so much together with everyone that visits the site.

Motion design is getting more important everyday when it comes to design interfaces that engage with the user both functionally and emotionally. Because of this, I started practicing with Javascript and jQuery to create basic animations for my prototypes. One of the most common animations comes into play when you want to build a list or animate items in a chain.

This weekend I was waiting for my flight sitting at the airport with no internet and decided to create a new wallpaper for Abduzeedo. I started in Photoshop, but then I decided to play a little bit with Pixelmator. After 1 hour and lots of experimenting the final result looked really nice and that's what I want to share with you in this tutorial.

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.