Resources - The Graphic Mac

Free vector art: Leaves

Resources
2 Apr, 2010

Adding leaves (particularly green ones) appears to be a trend that has held on for quite a while. If you’re looking to add a little “green” to your logo design, here are a few resources to download to make your job a little easier.

Grab your free vector leaf artwork

Green Leaves: 36 beautiful green leaves
Foliage Vectors: Viny (is that a word?) leafy strings
Ecology Vector 4: A plethora of leaves and “Green” initiative icons
Flower Tree: A tree full of (barely) leaves
Leafy Pod: A simple leaf collage
Vector Floral Elements: A huge collection of leaves and other floral objects
Abstract Tree: A simple artsy tree of leaves
Leaf Silhouettes: 80 silhouettes – make ’em green yourself
Nature: A little grass to keep the leaves company

While the linked artwork is all free, be sure to check for any license-restrictions on the individual download pages.

Free textures: Old paper

Resources
29 Mar, 2010

Having a large collection of textures on hand can be a huge time-saver, and add a nice touch to a design. I have tons of them on an external hard drive, all of which were obtained either by shooting with my camera, or downloading for free off the Web.

High resolution old paper textures

GraphicMania has a nice collection of Old Paper textures to help get our collection started.

Free Photoshop brushes: Decay

Resources
26 Mar, 2010

This collection of six brushes adds a little decay to your image

I came across this fantastic set of brushes at BlendFu and immediately downloaded it. Decay features six large and highly detailed brushes to add a little rust, cracking and decay to your background image.

Free fonts: 50 spooky horror fonts

Resources
24 Mar, 2010

It’s a little early to start searching for horribly frightening Halloween fonts, but if you grab them now, you won’t have to search for them later this year when you’re in a hurry to put together the office Halloween party flyer that you will no-doubt be stuck doing yet again!

At the very least, bookmark this collection of spooky horror fonts

Check out Hongkiat’s collection of 50+ Free High Quality Gothic & Horror Fonts.

Free textures: UrbanDirty

Resources
19 Mar, 2010

UrbanDirty offers a truck-load of dirty, grungy textures

There are plenty of places on the Web to find great high-resolution textures – particularly grungy ones. But few sites offer as many in one place as UrbanDirty. Over 700 spectacular, grungy, dirty, absolutely sick high-res textures – all free to use for your design projects.

Free font: Batman Forever

Resources
10 Mar, 2010

Batman Forever font

UrbanFonts has a huge collection of free fonts in dozens of categories. One of those categories is Famous Fonts, where you can find Batman Forever (pictured above). Granted, this isn’t the type of font one uses every day, it will most likely find a use once or twice – thus making it worthy of download. Be sure to check out the rest of the Famous Fonts.

Free textures: Grunge bricks

Resources
5 Mar, 2010

Caleb Kimbrough has released his latest set of free high-resolution textures. Five beautiful grungy looking brick walls are available for download here.

Bricks by Caleb Kimbrough at Flickr

Each image is of very high quality, and measures in at 3888 x 2592 pixels. Don’t forget to honor the Creative Commons license and attribute the images to the author if you use them.

Special symbols keyboard shortcut chart

General / Resources
26 Feb, 2010

Download the Special Symbols Keyboard Shortcuts Chart in PDF format

Ever find yourself trying to remember the keyboard shortcut for a funky symbol like ‡ (dagger) or ∞ (infinity), or perhaps the elusive ¡ or ¿ for Spanish text? There are a ton of special characters included in many fonts that you can use if you could only remember the keyboard shortcut to access them.

Download the special symbols keyboard shortcut chart and print it out to keep near your computer for quick reference. The 600k PDF chart is 5 x 7 inches in size.

Free Font: Ballpark

Resources
25 Feb, 2010

Ballpark font for your sports-themed designs

Among the 600-plus fonts that FontSquirrel offers, free for commercial use, Ballpark is one of those fonts that you don’t use often, but you’re glad you have it when you need it.

FontSquirrel is one of my favorite font resource sites, and I highly recommend bookmarking it for future font searches.

iPad GUI elements in a layered PSD file

Photoshop / Resources
24 Feb, 2010

Apple iPad GUI Elements in a layered Photoshop file

Teehan+lax has made available a layered Photoshop file containing all the iPad GUI elements you could possibly need. The file is built using vectors, so it’s all still fully editable. If you need to mock up something quickly for a client, this layered Photoshop file will certainly do the trick.

You can download the 24MB layered Photoshop file here.

And if you have the need for an iPhone version, grab the 9MB layered Photoshop file here.

Category: Resources