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.
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.
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.
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.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Adobe InDesign, the layout tool for print and digital publishing, Adobe is releasing a commemorative book titled “Page by Page: 10 Years of Designing with Adobe InDesign” that highlights the product’s evolution and features designers who have helped make InDesign a success.
InDesign celebrates 10 years with free e-book download
Designed to provide an inside look at the company’s stewardship in moving publishing from print to digital solutions, the 10th anniversary book examines the role of InDesign and the InDesign Family in transforming the layout and editorial workflow at agencies, corporate publishers and traditional publishers worldwide. The book also details the evolution of InDesign from its public debut in 1999 to today and includes sample work created by designers for publications such as Marie Claire, publishers like Condé Nast, and cutting edge design agencies such as Modern Dog and Mucca Design.
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.
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.
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.
Jane Austen: A unique and readable calligraphic font
If you regularly use iMovie or some other application to capture audio or video, or were wondering how to do it on the cheap, then you’ll love this handy little tip.
Video Capture with Quicktime Player
All you’ll need is a copy of Quicktime Pro 7 or later, or the latest version of Quicktime Player in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and a Mac with an iSight camera, or a connected video camera or microphone.
(more…)