Sometimes you just don’t know where to start on a new project. Particularly newsletters or magazine layouts. Inspiration is everywhere, but often times having a pre-made template is a great way to start your layouts.
BestInDesignTemplates has several Adobe InDesign templates you can download and use for free, including: flyers, newsletters, catalogs, and a 20-page magazine layout. Obviously you would want to use these as a starting-point, rather than a finished design.
A nice playful sans-serif font. 100% free for commercial use. Download Gidole font here.
The very bottom of Safari’s browser window, the Status Bar, by default shows you the web address of the link your mouse is hovering over. Unfortunately this feature doesn’t always work well, and isn’t very informative. Heck, sometimes it doesn’t work at all.
Ultimate Satus Bar is a Safari extension that improves on the built-in status bar in a few ways.
First up is the fact that unlike Safari’s status bar, Ultimate Status Bar only shows up when you hover over a link, saving you around 20 pixels of screen real estate. That’s not a big deal on an iMac, but if you’re surfing on a MacBook Air it can make a big difference.
Ultimate Status Bar places a small Favicon in the corner of the site the link will take you to when possible, as well as an icon for the file type if you happen to be hovering over a downloadable link such as a PDF, TIF, ZIP, etc. And for those downloadable files, it will display the file size if it can be determined – so you can decide if you want to download the file now, or wait until later.
Perhaps the best feature is that short URLs get lengthened and displayed (see the image above). This is not only great for security reasons, but it’ll also help prevent you from getting Rick-Rolled!
Finally, you can customize the appearance of Ultimate Status Bar with the built-in themes.
Ultimate Satus Bar is free, and for the most part works extremely well. I couldn’t get it to display the Favicon for my own site, nor the download size of a ZIP file I hosted (though it was a very large file, so maybe I didn’t wait long enough). But it never failed to show me the link address, expand a short-URL, or hide the bar completely once I moved the mouse.
Looking for business-related icons for a Keynote/PowerPoint presentation, website design, or other design project? Check out the business icon collection at FreePik.
This is not an in-depth, step-by-step guide to becoming a freelance designer. Instead it gives you the broad strokes, with plenty of things to think about and act on.
I’m about half way through reading the 115 page PDF and I must say, there’s some really great advice in this eBook—even though the illustrations are stuck in the 80s 😉
It’s not obvious, but just click the image on the Azedo web page to download the fonts.
Some nice pieces of vector art for your next infographic project. You can download Black & Orange Infographic vector art for free here.
Every designer, at some time in their career, has the need for these hand-drawn sketchy fonts for a design. Sketch Gothic is really nice, and comes in a bold and light version. Sketch Gothic is free for personal use, and a commercial-use license is available.
ATLÉTICO is a beautiful bold serif display font, free for personal use. You can also purchase a commercial-use license via a link on the webpage.
