Category: Resources
40 Free icon sets for Web designers
Free Font: Quicksand!
Quicksand, a free sans-serif typeface from Andrew Paglinawan, is a full typeface set consisting of light, book, bold and dashed versions. Quicksand is available in this thread in the Typophile forums, and is totally free.
Free Scratch Textures
Bittbox has released their latest Free Texture Tuesday collection, titled Scratches Five very nice high-resolution textures are available for download. I’m a big fan of textures for use in my designs. They make excellent background images and overlays.
Zag: Free from MyFonts
MyFonts is offering a free download of Zag Regular and Zag Bold, part of Fontfabric’s Zag font family in OpenType format. You will need to set-up an account with MyFonts to download the fonts, but it’s a beautiful font and worth the effort!
Free sticky tape brushes & textures
Photoshop Brushes are an easy way to spice up your designs. Grab them, place them and you’re done. Fudgegraphics has a collection of sticky tape brushes and textures to enhance your latest Photoshop design. The Brush collection is a single, 25.3MB file, containing 15 brushes averaging over 2,000 pixels in size. The Texture collection is a 39MB ZIP file containing 15 PNG files of the same images as the brush set. You can download Sticky Tape absolutely free from Fudgegraphics.
Creating letterhead templates in Microsoft Word
If you’ve been in the design business for any amount of time, you’ve no doubt run across a client who asks you to create a letterhead template they can use on their Windows machine in MS Word. Ugh! Fortunately, there is a relatively simple way to get a little control over the placement of graphics using Word’s absolute position option when placing your images. My friends over at CreativeTechs have a step-by-step tutorial to show you how to accomplish this very easy task.
Free font: Amerika
Among the many quality fonts available for free from Fontex.org is Amerika. I really like the curves of this font. Amerika contains a serif, sans-serif and alternates version in the download. Fontex is beautifully designed and easy to navigate, so be sure to check out all the other fonts available on the site.
Get your graffiti on with the generator
If the idea for your next project includes graffiti lettering, then venture on over to Graffiti Creator to start vandalizing your desktop! The site, run by Mike Wigén, claims to be the first “graffiti generator” on the Web. I won’t argue the point, but I will say that it’s one of the best ones I’ve used. It allows just enough customization to make it interesting, yet simple enough to save the image and easily trace in Adobe Illustrator if need be (hint-hint).
Free font: BlackJack
One thing a designer can never have enough of is fonts. As I look in my Suitcase Fusion 2 database, I see that I have over 4,100 fonts – one of which I just added this morning. BlackJack is a beautifully designed script font by Typadelic, and available for free from FontSquirrel. While you’re there, be sure to check out the growing list of excellent fonts available.