A while back I told you about some free smoke textures you could download and use in your Photoshop designs. But if those textures didn’t quite fit your needs, perhaps you would be better off creating your own texture backgrounds. 
QBrushes has an awesome set of 21 free smoke brushes for use in Photoshop. Using them on top of color backgrounds and messing with the layer settings can yield some pretty cool results!
Category: Resources
Free grungy wall texture pack
SixRevisions has a really nice set of grungy wall textures you can use in your personal or commercial design work free of charge. You can download each texture image individually from Flickr.
Free Font: Helwoodica 2.0
Felip Darius has released an update to his popular Helwoodica font. Helwoodica 2.0 is based on the appearance of Helvetica engraved on wood blocks. Another great grunge font, available for free.
Illustrator gradient mesh tutorial
LifeInVector has a great Adobe Illustrator Gradient Mesh tutorial available. The tutorial is a downloadable PDF/Illustrator file combo, and covers the use of the tool quite well. 
If you’re looking for more, check out this list of 40 great Illustrator tutorials at Smashing Magazine.
Free Font: Northwood High
Another great font available for download at DaFont.com. Northwood High contains upper and lowercase letters, numbers and a few necessary punctuation characters.
BlackBerry layered Photoshop file
I recently had the need to use a nice clean image of a smartphone. I began searching through the numerous images found via Google and eventually came across this freely available layered Photoshop file of a BlackBerry – just what I was looking for from a user over at DeviantArt. 
The 6.2 MB download expands to a 15 MB PSD image containing, well, a ton of layers – allowing you to customize the heck out of it.
Free Font: LunaBar
LunaBar is a pretty cool script font, available for free over at DeviantArt. You can never have too many good script fonts, I always say!
Free spiral brushes for Photoshop
CreativeNerds has put together 14 very cool spiral brushes for Photoshop geeks free for download. I’m a big fan of Photoshop brushes, and this set could be extremely useful to add depth to background images and techy artwork.
Free red vinyl textures
ThinkDesign has 15 red vinyl textures in high-resolution available free for download. They make great backgrounds for ads, brochures or multi-media presentations. The single download is approximately 54MB.
Adding gradient strokes to type in Adobe Illustrator
Vectips has a quick tutorial showing you how to create gradient strokes on your type in Adobe Illustrator. This super simple technique use the Appearance panel and effects to create editable gradient strokes in Illustrator. As a bonus, you can add transparency for a very cool effect as seen above.