Articles, resources, tutorials and inspiration from around the web. Kick off your weekend with some tasty snacks.

In this tutorial we’re going to put together a cool grungy poster design for the upcoming Vancouver Olympics. We’ll go over several basic Photoshop techniques and combine some basic image manipulation with some grunge text treatments to create some cool effects. This is an easy step-by-step tutorial that even Photoshop beginners should have no problem with.

Green Thumb is a free, vector-based social media icon set designed exclusively for release on Visual Swirl. The package contains icons for the following sites: Delicious, Design Bump, Design Float, Digg, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, Reddit, RSS, Stumbleupon, Technorati, and Twitter.

Articles, resources, tutorials and inspiration from around the web. Kick off your weekend with some tasty snacks.

Planetoid photography turns panoramic images into beguiling spherical scenes, pictures that at first glance appear to be tiny planets floating in space. A simple planetoid can be constructed from a landscape photograph, transformed with some fairly simple steps in Photoshop, adjusting image dimensions and using the Polar Coordinates filter.

Visual Swirl and Emma Looney are proud to present the second installment of your Desktop Wallpaper Calendars for 2010. February’s calendar is another beautiful example of the work of graphic designer, Emma Looney. We’ve also expanded the number of resolutions available so there is bound to be one perfect for your monitor. Keep reading for a little insight from Emma about this month’s design.

When I first launched Visual Swirl two months ago, I wasn’t sure if this whole blogging thing would stick. Luckily I’ve had some great success over the first 60 days (thanks mostly to you all) and I decided that a custom look was needed to really take the Swirl to the next level. That’s why, I’m excited to announce a new look (as you can see) for the blog. Let me quickly walk you through a few of the highlights.

Why should designers care about Apple’s new iPad? This post looks at 6 takeaways from the new Apple iPad that will change the way we look at design for the web and beyond.

Redesigning a website takes time and energy. Having the right tools at hand can help speed up your redesign and get you back to your real work. Here are 8 tools to maximize website redesign efficiency.

Articles, resources, tutorials and inspiration from around the web. Kick off your weekend with some tasty snacks.