Cool tutorials are what help designers to evolve with the growing trend of creativity. Today we feature some of the best tutorials featured in numerous articles across the web…

LEARNING CODEIGNITER FROM SCRATCH
Nettuts Plus featured Jeffrey Way’s article about the focus on the CodeIgniter PHP framework which seems promising for all web developers.

With raw PHP, building a simple image upload utility,performing some validation, saving the file to uploads folder, and automatically create a respective thumbnail, can be somewhat time-consuming. However, with CodeIgniter, it’s simply a matter of referencing the correct library, and passing in some configuration options!

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 1

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 2

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 3

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 4

CREATING DIFFERENT TOP NAVIGATION
Designing websites that have good navigation designs are always a challenge. And designers often face the question of horizontal or vertical navigation. Connor Zwick explains in Nettuts Plus that sometimes a drop-down system is usually the answer and it’s always a good idea to think out of "normality" to create navigation that stands out.

CREATING A SIMPLE WEB-BASED CHAT APPLICATION
We have all heard about tutorials for web applications, but what about chat applications? Nettuts Plus featured a tutorial by Gabriel Neva teaching us in great detail as to how it is done.

In this tutorial we will be creating a simple web-based chat application with PHP and jQuery. This sort of utility would be perfect for a live support system for your website.

CREATING LITTLE PLANETS USING PHOTOSHOP
Abduzeedo.com featured an article that teaches users how to create a "little planet" effect from flat horizontal pictures by using Photoshop.

40+ HIGH QUALITY ADOBE FIREWORKS TUTORIALS, RESOURCES AND PNG FILES, NOT TO MENTION 30 SELECTED FLASH AND ESSENTIAL ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 TUTORIALS
Sites like Noupe.com offer some cool tutorials and other essentials that will certainly make your day, such as: Fireworks latest tutorials, and Actionscript stuff.

Tutorials on how to use software is one thing, but how about the programming stage? Noupe.com featured 30 hand-picked essential tutorials for Flash and ActionScript 3.0.

30 OF THE BEST PHOTOSHOP WEB LAYOUT DESIGN TUTORIALS
As designers and programmers, we need all the help we can get in designing and programming the best website possible. Dzine Blog made a featured article concerning some of the best Photoshop design tutorials for Web Design.

How to create PDF Files with PHP
Theme Forest.net featured an article showing us how to create PDF files using PHP and a free PHP library called FPDF.

PDF is the de-facto electronic document standard because of its security and integrity. Making a PDF isn’t limited to high-end desktop software though; they can be created quite easily on the fly from your web application. Add in a sprinkle of free code, and you got one great recipe for PDF-ala-mode!

Creating a Polaroid Photo Viewer with CSS3 and jQuery
What if you could do more than just create Polaroid pictures on your site, such as having fun modifying them online? Marcofolio.net came up with a detailed tutorial on how to make this possible.

By combining the CSS3 Box Shadow and Rotate properties, this effect is relatively easy to create. When dragging a Polaroid around, you’ll see the shadow. When it’s placed down, it’s rotated to the left or the right (random).

This example is making use of CSS3 and jQuery, just to show the effect when combining two powerful techniques. The CSS3 is injected by jQuery, keeping the CSS file clean.

Creating a Cute and Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator
Trying to create something cute and fuzzy vector monster but don’t really know how, then Blog Spoon Graphics‘ article about creating such a thing using Illustrator.

Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.

Building a better Tooltip with jQuery’s Awesomeness
With this tutorial, tooltips that appear whenever you hover your cursor over it won’t seem so boring anymore, as Net Tuts Plus demonstrates in this cool jQuery tutorial by Jon Cazier.

One of the great tools we have in our web development goodie-bag are tooltips. A tooltip is a box that appears when you hover your cursor over an element like a hyperlink. It provides supplementary information about that element. For example, a link with little or no text (an icon) may become confusing. Provide an extra sentence or two within a tooltip to explain to your users what will happen if they click on it.

Smart Columns with CSS and jQuery
Soh Tanaka.com featured a simple article concerning how to rectify certain problems on site columns with the help of CSS and jQuery.

One solution that would be able to benefit the situation of excess white space and being restricted to having a fixed number of columns per row is to take the good of both scenarios and mash it into one.

TURN-BY-TURN DIRECTIONS WITH THE GOOGLE MAPS API
Nettuts Plus featured an article by Noah Hendrix portraying a cool detailed tutorial in creating a small widget allowing users to retrieve turn-by-turn directions to a specific location in Google Maps.

I challenge you as developers to continue to find interesting ways to integrate maps in to your applications. Anytime a model is location aware, you should question if your project has a use for visual representation on a map.

RETRIEVING YOUR GMAIL EMAILS USING PHP AND IMAP
In David Walsh’s blog, he features a useful tutorial on how to retrieve emails from Gmail in the shortest possible time without the hassle of connection interruption. In this case, he uses the MooTools FX Accordion plugin to display each email through a cool demo.

MAGENTO TUTORIALS
Inchoo.net highlighted an article of a tutorial about the implementation of multiple ways for Magento’s various features in detail provided by Branko Ajzele.

Basically, what you need to do is to create the directory inside your template directory and place the bestseller.phtml file in it. In my example, I’m using the custom-created directory /inchoo

Using Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR)
Ivan Weiler posted a small tutorial in Inchoo.net to show users how to operate the Facelift Image Replacement script using Magento features.

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors.