Archive for the ‘Design Resources’ Category
| 6 Dec 2009 |
17 Amazing Twitter bird icon sets which you probably haven’t seen before |
Taking a glimpse at the web you can easily realize that Twitter is no longer a trend, but a lifestyle. Millions around the world are talking about what they are doing in the exact minute of posting, they are sharing ideas and having conversations , just like via an instant messaging client. The best part is that anyone can join a conversation!
You can see the twitter bird icon on millions of websites, and what you can notice is that many websites use the same icons(maybe you too!) and this is the time when you can start wondering “why shouldn’t i be different?”. This is where the talented artists come in, who release amazing icons and icon packs(mostly on deviant art).
I’ve done some research and collected 17 icons & sets which will get your blog, website or forum readers look out to the tweet icon.
Amazing Twitter bird icon sets
Remember to read the licensing of every icon/icon set on the download pages!
1. Twitter Icons .PSD
2. Free twitter bird icons
3. Twitter Bird
4. Adiumy Twitter
5. Blue Bird Twitter Icon Pack
6. Twitter Icons Pack
7. Twitter Icon BIRRRDFON
8. Twitter Replacement
9. Twitter dock icons
10. Twitter Icon Pack 1
11. Twitter Icon Pack 2
12. Twitter Icon Pack 3
13. TwitterJoy icons
14. The GodTwitter Follow Button
15. Twitter Icon
16. Twitter Space Icons
17. IconTexto Twitter Buttons
Free twitter bird icons by ~Stockgraphicdesigns
| 25 Feb 2009 |
5 Great icon sets for web design |
I browsed the web and did lots of lookups till i managed to gather these 6 icon packs(some of them you most probably haven’t seen). They are all awsome icon packs and perfect for personal projects. Remember that all icon set preview are linked to the author’s websites.
1) Monofactor Vector Icon Pack 1
As the title says these icons come in .Ai format(Adobe illustrator), the author recommends you open the pack with Illustrator above v8.0(CS). These icons are free to use on personal projects. If you wish to use them on commercial projects(from where you earn money) you need to purchase the commercial license which costs $50.
2) Pixelresort Pixelicious Icon Pack
Its pretty useless for me to write a description of the pack, because the author has already written one which contains all the essence:
“150 pixelcrafted icons mainly intended for developers. These have been a few months in the making, so enjoy them and put them to good use. The Icons are free for personal use or non profit organisations.”
3) Function Icon Set
The guys behind Wefunction.com really put lots of hard work in creating the icon pack. The pack contains 128 high quality 48x48px icons. This is their first icon pack and i must say it turned out wicked! The pack also contains social media icons. All icons have a sleek glossy look which you will definitely love. You have the right to use the icons anywhere.
4) On-Stage Vector PSD Icon Set
The pack contains 49 vector icons accompanied by their PSD forms. You may use the icons anywhere for free, but you may not redistribute or sell them w/o smashing magazine and the author’s permission! The icons were made by deziner folio(you know him form his famous wp themes) and the icon’s quality isn’t below his wp theme’s quality!
5) Aquaticus.Social
Social.me is an icon set consisting of 30 individual icons of the popular social networks/Web 2.0 sites out there Mmmm yummy! Thgese awsome icons will get you more thumbs up and traffic. The pack contains the sharing icons in 4 different sizes(size DOES matter). They were released under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported which means you can share the icons but you may not alter their original form.
| 24 Jan 2009 |
Fuel For Art – Helping Artists Succeed |
Fuel For Art is an 83 page ebook which is destined to help artists sell art online . The ebook is divided into 8 chapters, each of them containing the required steps needed to accomplish your goal.
The fundamental question on which the book is based is “After all, if art is what you love, why shouldn’t you try to make a living in the act of creation?” . This is the question which dominates every startup artist’s mind, unfortunately not many artists have the luck to succeed and have the art career they’ve always wanted.
With no doubt the hardest part in becoming an established artists is the beginning of your journey, where you need to set your goals and desired milestones. This is the part where most artists become confused and make critical mistakes. Not any more! The Fuel For Art ebook is a guide which answers all of your questions and helps you get on your feet and gain popularity as an artist. Think of it like this: if you were to hire a counselor, you would spend thousands of dollars on counseling and advices which are present in the ebook.
Fuel For Art is information rich and its easily noticeable the great amount of research the author has done in the process of writing this ebook. It’s a huge time saver, basically you have all the information at the top of your fingers. From getting on your feet & branding yourself to the process of selling your art(yourself) and making a living out of it it’s all there.
The Fuel For Art ebook is currently on sale, and costs only $37, which is relatively a small amount of money to invest in order to learn how to sell art online
EXTRAS
Along with the FFA ebook you will get two bonus ebooks:
- 5 Soical networking sites every artist should be on which will teach you how to make the most out of the best social networking sites destined for artists.
- 25 Ways to get traffic to your online portfolio fast – As the title says this ebook will help you market your portfolio and gain maximum audience. All of the 25 tips are easily doable but require a fair amount of time and dedication in order to achieve your goals.
After reading my review above only one question stands: Are you ready to sell art online?
| 1 Dec 2008 |
6 Generators that every Web Designer should use |
Many Web designers use tools besides photoshop which make their lives easier. These are tools made by design community members for the rest of the community. Here are a few of them:
1) Tiled Backgrounds Designer
When it comes to tiled background patterns BgPatterns.com is there to help. This handy generator allows you to create, modify and test out tiled backgrounds which you can download after you are happy with the results.
At the pattern editing you can define the pattern and background color, the canvas size and texture, the preset image(with scaling and opacity modifying possibility), and you are also able to rotate the pattern.
If you don’t want to create your own pattern you can simply browse and download member created patterns.
2) Blind Text Generator
If you are tired of using Lipsum.com to generate dummy text to fill your designs BlindTextGenerator.com is just the right tool for you! The tool allows you to generate dummy text from several sources like Lipsum, Kafka, Cicero, Pangram and allows you to preview how the text would look like in a box with the width, font and line spacing specified by you.
You may also define the number of paragraphs/characters that you want to generate. This tool clearly says: its time to let lipsum.com go!
3) Watermark your designs
PicMarkr.com allows you to easily watermark your images in 3 steps. You upload the preview of your design, select watermark type(Text, image or stripe) and download the watermarked image which you will share with your customer. Simple as that.
The best part is that you can select the watermark text,image AND stripe, by this way you got more flexibility than ever in your hands. After you’re done you also have the possibility to upload the image(s) to your flickr account.
4) Vectorize your images
Even though everyone knows that wizards applications don’t create perfect outcomes Vectormagic.com is pretty close to flawlessly vectorizing images. It’s cool if you created a logo and want to print it on your shirt you will need it to be vectorized. If you re very short on cash i recommend this tool, but if you have $5 to spare than you can get a perfect vector image from a freelance vectorizer.
5) Stripe Designer
Imo Stripedesigner.com is a must for every web designer. This nifty generator allowss you to generate cool stripe patterns for your designs. It also provides a cool feature which allows you to preview it on different colored backgrounds, this way you can determine that the stripe will 100% fit your design. Awsome!
6) Stripe Generator
The most used stripe generator on the whole wide world! Stripegenerator.com is the #1 source to create and to get stripes for your designs! You can define the stripe size, alignment, color, background color and shadows. If your not satisifed with the outcome you can always head over to the showcase section and download stripes created by other users.
| 22 Apr 2008 |
Yet an other great web 2.0 font collection |
Seeing how a big success my other font collection post was i decided to surf around dafont again and make an other collection of fonts that are great for logos/banners and of course branding.
This time i didn’t use pink as the base color for the text. I used grey because i think the purple(as betng said:“you got to love the slut purple color”) can give a bit more extra to the fonts and this can confuse you.
All the fonts are available on dafont , and you can visit the main font pages by clicking on the previews.
no. 1 – Cicle
no. 2 – Collegiate
no. 3 – Dusthome
no. 4 – Dustismo
no. 5 – Zachary
no. 6 – Eurofurence
no. 7 – Kill
no. 8 – Lacuna
no. 9 – London Between
no. 10 – Mammagamma
no. 11 – Monofur
no. 12 – National First
no. 13 – Santana
no. 14 – Tuffy
Remember that dafont.com is one of the best free font resources, and you can find great free fonts there. For example why buy a premium paid font when you can find a free alternative? Also note that the presented fonts in this post are those fonts which weren’t presented in my previous font collection and they represent the fonts that i like and that have a web 2.0 feel.
Don’t stick just to the fonts presented here! Go ahead and browse dafont.com
| 23 Mar 2008 |
FREE High-Quality Icon resources for your designs |
The usage of icons can give a more professional aspect to your designs, especially if you use high-quality icons. At this point you might say that you won’t find free HIGH-quality icons.
WRONG. You will find quite many high quality icons, because there are quite many designers who do open source work. Open source work brings designers reputation/traffic to their websites/backlinks and possible custom jobs, so yeah it’s worth to do open source work.
In this post i will present a few icon packages that you will definitely find useful at a time
Website Icon Packages:
1) FAMFAMFAM’s silk icon package
FAMFAMFAM’s icons are the most widely used on the web. His icons are used on huge sites like stumbleupon, and 100% sure you saw his icons on many websites. This is the BIGGEST icon package which contains 1000 icons! All the icons come in .PNG format and in 16×16 px sizes.
The silk icon package is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
2) Pinvoke icons package
This is the first version of the package and it contains 200 10x10px icons and 200 16x16px icons. All the icons come in .png format. I think that compared to FAMFAMFAM’s icon package these icons have better contrast and “more life” in them.
The icons are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
3) Iconjoy website icons packages
There are 2 website icon packages provided by Iconjoy. The total number of icons included in the 2 packages is 26×2 = 52. All icons are in 16×16 px format and come in colored and greyscale version.
Icon file Types: .ico, .icns, .tif, .gif, .bmp, .png
4) Sweetie Basepack
A great package of 182 icons which come in .png format and in 3 sizes: 8×8 px,16×16 px and 24×24 px. You are allowed to make derivatives with the included Photoshop documents
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
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You will also find a big list of icon resources on MaxPower’s blog
Feed Icon Packages:
1) Zeusbox Studio Feed Icons Pack
Their feed icon package is one of the best ones available on the web. This is the second version of their icon pack. It contains 10 more feed icons than in the first version. The pack is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license.
The icons come in 2 sizes: 16×16 px and 32×32 px. All icons are in PNG format
2) IconJoy Web 2.0 RSS icons pack
These icons are really clean and they look great on a bight web 2.0 design. The pack contains 4 different icon types in 2 sizes: 16×16 px and 32×32 px and 4 colors. There isn’t a license attribute specified.
The package contains the icons in .ico, .icns, .tif, .png format along with the .psd source.
3) Bittbox Glass style RSS icons pack
Bittbox approaches the design of RSS icons form a different perspective. I’m talking about the glass effect here. The icons come in 2 different styles: with and without reflection. License: You may not redistribute the icons on your website.
The package contains 217 icons in .ai, .eps, .svg, .png, .jpg formats and in 8 different color combinations.
4) Bittbox Glass style RSS icons pack
Think outside the box! Why make RSS icons with rounded corners or stuffed into boxes when you can create big RSS icons in circles? This is exactly what Dirceu Veiga did. An icon like this looks great on a design where you used big elements(to keep the scale). License: available at Fasticon License page.
You can download the icons for Windows/MAC/Linux in 2 sizes and 4 different colors.
The package contains the 4 icons in .ico format, this meaning you can use them in any size you want 
Social Bookmarking icon Packages:
1) Vikiworks Social bookmark iconset I
Package that contains 12 icons in 3 sizes – Large – Medium – Small. These icons are ideal to use on your blog and/or website if you want to “influence” a bit more the visitor to submit to a particular social bookmarking site.
2) Vikiworks Social bookmark iconset II
This second package contains 10 more social bookmarking icons and is the sequel of the first release. These also come in the 3 sizes just like at the first version. It seems that these icons look a bit more professional than those from the first package. Improvements are always welcome
3) Snap2Objects 3d Social bookmarking Icon Package
Add a cool and unusual 3d social bookmarking icon to your blog/website. A 3d icon like this will surely grab attention, maybe a little too much attention Icon pack licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
The package contains 5 icons in different perspectives. The icons come in .png format. Remember that these are vector icons, this meaning that the PDF file is also included in the package
4) Snap2Objects 3d Social bookmarking Icon Package
This is yet an other 3d icon set but the icons are shown from a different perspective. You can notice that their shape looks like a pan which just got pulled out of the oven.The package contains the 6 icons in 2 sizes. They are in .png and .ico format. No license info specified.
Remember that the presented icon sets are just bits of the gigantic resource that is available on the web, so if you are looking for some slightly different icons than don’t hesitate to use Google or most importantly Deviantart!
| 2 Jan 2008 |
Web 2.0 WordPress Badges Reloaded! |
Add a web 2.0 wordpress badge to your wordpress blog and show that you are proud that you are using a such great blogging platform!
As base icons i used the badges made by Oceangray, i tuned them up and gave them a nice web 2.0 look
All 12 badges are sized 64×64 and they are PNG icons with transparent backgrounds.
They are ideal to show off your support for wordpress, or for your wordpress themes(if you are a wordpress designer).
To download the badges just click This link , or click the image above.
| 18 Dec 2007 |
16 FREE web 2.0 fonts for your designs |
Today i will present you 17 FREE fonts selected from dafont.com that you can use for your designs. To go to download page just click the preview. on the preview as a main color i used the flickr pink, that way this whole post won’t look monoton
1) Arista
2) Bohemica
3) Caramella
4) Centabel
5) Cjust
6) Danube
7) Folks
8) Geosans
9) Moderna
10) Photonica
11) Rezland
12) Siple
13) Steiner
14) Swatch
15) Ubuntu Title
16) Volt
Good Luck!
