The talented team at DesignModo has created a new UI design kit, The Bricks, and they are giving away 3 licenses to WRD readers (2 personal and 1 developer license).

The Bricks is a PSD UI kit which comes in 4 parts: Forms, Elements, E-commerce and Words.

It consists of many beautiful, pixel-perfect items which play well with each other and each having multiple variations.

A 12 column grid is used and every UI element in the kit fits to the grid perfectly.

Each layer in the PSD file is named, grouped and organized carefully so that working with them don’t get complicated.

Also, The Bricks comes with a slick icon set that looks good with the rest of the kit. It is in Photosop Shapes format so that it can scale as we wish.

How to join the giveaway?

3 licenses of The Bricks is being given away:

• 1 * Developer license
• 2 * Personal License

When working on a web project, ready-to-use and high-quality design elements can help a lot in improving the output.

These can be icons, badges, buttons, UI elements, etc. And, they save so much time if you already know where to hunt for them.

Here are the places to find high-quality, modern and free PSDs to beautify your designs:

Dribbble PSD Search

Dribbble is a great resource for design inspiration and many designers share free PSDs there.

Just make a search like "UI PSD" or "PSD button" and you will get many options.

Behance PSD Search

365psd

An awesome website that features a free PSD every day.

Premium Pixels

Premium Pixels puts a lot of effort for sharing beautiful PSD freebies where all of them are designed by the website.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a designer/developer with developer part being a little stronger, I love making use of ready-to-use design resources as they help creating very good looking stuff quicker.

Vandelay Premier, a place for premium design resources with lots of beautiful items, has also various attractive UI kits and they are giving away a huge pack to 3 WRD readers (details on joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of the post). Vandelay Premier members get access to all of these UI sets plus hundreds of other design resources.

Here are the UI kits in the pack:

Exotico UI Set

A PSD UI set with 100s of items from navigation to charts, buttons, sliders, loaders, notifications, ribbons and more.

Exotico's design is stylish and each element is editable through well-layered PSDs.

Zephirro E-Commerce UI Set

For anyone working on an e-commerce project, Zepphiro is a real helper as it has all the major e-commerce related design elements.

There are pricing tables, checkout, shopping cart, product listing/filtering designs, buttons, banners and even more.

Creating mock-ups of an e-commerce project with Zephirro would save serious time.

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When designing a website, if you don't prefer to create everything from scratch, having ready-to-use design elements simplify the process so much.

Besides the ease they offer, such high-quality elements also beautifies the websites being created.

If you are looking for such UI sets, DesignModo is probably the best place to find them as they have a bunch of professionaly-built PSD UI packs.

These packs are all full-layered PSD and includes lots of design elements from buttons to menus, sliders, navigation solutions, pricing tables, charts, icons and much more. And, all having free versions.

Let's take a closer look at the options:

Impressionist UI

Impressionist UI is the world’s biggest user interface elements pack with 300 elements, 5 styles and all being created PSD shapes.

It has almost every element we can think of and also comes with a 200 icons (both PSD & AI).

And, you can get a taste of this huge set with Impressionist UI Free.

Futurico UI Pro

With 200+ elements, all being rasterized PSD layers

There are 2 sets of elements in different colors and two examples of use in web design.

Make sure you also check its free version: Futurico.

Pandora UI for iOS

Pandora UI for iOS comes with lots of elements (completely focused on mobile interfaces), 5 skins and sample apps for helping mobile developers create good looking apps.

It targets iOS developers, the pack has support for retina display and all elements can be infinitely scaled as they are all Photoshop shapes.

And, as usual, here id the Pandora Free.

Dark Amber UI

This is a relatively smaller (yet still big) UI kit which is focused on both web and mobile interfaces.

It has ~60 elements, all have retina display support

And, every Dark Amber UI purchase is bundled with the popular Unicons icon set.

Everyone has a different style in decorating the background of their desktops. Some of us prefer plain colors, some place photos and most of us probably use wallpapers.

WallpaperFX is a place to hunt for new and high-quality wallpapers with 1000s of items (new ones being added each day), well-categorized browsing and the price: totally free.

Personally, I use nature or abstract images but there are many other categories like games, movies or sports and they can all be listed according to the popularity and freshness of the items.

In the website, we can find the latest hd wallpapers and even lots of Macbook Pro retina display wallpapers.

I have chosen 5 wallpapers -that I'll probably be using in the next weeks- to simply give you an idea about the items featured.

Read the rest of this entry »

DesignModo, a website providing informative design, development + art-oriented articles and releasing design resources, is giving away 3 Personal Licenses of Impressionist UI (details on joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of this post).

What is Impressionist UI?

It is a huge pack of user interface elements with over 300 elements for web design and includes almost any design element we can imagine.

The pack comes as a .PSD file where each element inside is created as a Photoshop shape (they can be resized to any size).

There are edit boxes, tabs, buttons, notification windows, menus, windows, backgrounds, graphics, sliders, informational blocks and much more in it.

Web elements are not the only stuff in Impressionist UI but there is also a slick set of 200 icons accompanying them. The items in the set are well-chosen and will fit perfectly to any web project.

What is it good for?

Such a giant user interface set is a very handy resource for quickly creating good looking, consistent interfaces.

As each element is a layer, we can easily prepare high-quality prototypes, customize colors (if needed) and get going fast.

DesignModo offers other UI packs too:

The UI packs DesignModo offer are not limited to Impressionist UI and there are others as well.

For example, Pandora UI is another UI pack created specially for iOS interface designers.

How to join the giveaway?

DesignModo is giving away 3 Personal Licenses ($39/each) of Impressionist UI to WRD readers.

If you want to join the giveaway, you can choose one of the methods below or do both to increase your chances:

• comment to this post
• tweet this post (click to tweet easily)

Winners will be selected randomly on 30 April 2012 (1 week later). Good luck to all.

P.S. You can also follow DesignModo both on Twitter and Facebook to get notified about the updates on these UI packs and any new ones.

The winners

Here they are:

• Ben (comment #568279)
• Flavio (comment #566940)
• @vitorneves

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.

VectorPack.net, a website featuring premium design resources, is giving away 5 sets of "66 Vector Abstract Backgrounds" to WRD readers.

The backgrounds are all very detailed and come in multiple variations + colors.

They are actually part of a greater design resource named "Mega Design Bundle" which contains over 900 design elements and available for a highly discounted price of $37 instead of $550 (only for the next 2 weeks).

Read the rest of this entry »

Box of Bundles is a fresh website featuring a set of creative design resources that are available for free.

The bundle contains items like various vector UI elements, icons, templates (website, mobile, e-mail), CSS3 buttons and more.

They are designed by different designers around the world (you can submit new items for the next month's bundle as well) and free to be used in personal and commercial projects.

You might not now but recently the world's biggest logo marketplace Brandstack.com was acquired by DesignCrowd. It's since been relaunched as BrandCrowd, a marketplace for designers looking to sell any unused logos and for anyone hunting for a logo design.

The marketplace is offering a quality experience for both parties;

• only high-quality designs are accepted so buyers browse through a well-designed set of logos
• designers focus on creativity without being directed by a client brief

The process to sell logo designs is pretty straightforward, upload the designs with a short brief and they are ready to be purchased after the BrandCrowd team places them under the right categories so buyers can find them easily.

The user profile also function as a portfolio of items for sale where your designs are listed and the price you've set is displayed to the user. Sellers can receive offers from buyers who want to make an alternative offer to buy the design and/or request modifications to the existing design.

Listing items is completely free and BrandCrowd only gets a commission when there is a sale. After each sale, the company contacts buyers to verify the purchase, which means logos are protected.

If you want to buy logos, things are all good as well. Browse the logos, filter with keywords (for ex :check the design and creative services logos) and, if found a logo meeting your requirements, just pick the item and it is all yours (won't be resold to anyone). As the buyer gets the vector files, it is possible to easily apply updates on it.

Re-selling/Privacy

Interestingly, there is a feature available to buyers (such as web design agencies) to allow them to make a purchased logo hidden or private.

This is useful if you're looking to:

• re-sell that logo (potentially with a margin)
• just wanting to hide the logo for your own business so that people don't know where you got it from.

Conclusion

BrandCrowd (which used to be known as Brandstack) appears to now moving forward with a new name + energy.  Our take: it's a risk-free opportunity for unlocking the value of any used logo designs and a great place to buy a creative logo for yourself (or your clients).

Having useful design resources under our hands always ease the process of creating beautiful websites, banners, posters, etc.

Mega Bundle 2, which is a big collection of design goodies offered for a very good price ($29 rather than $545), is providing WRD readers a chance to grow their design libraries by giving away 5 licenses (please check the details on joining it below).

Who created this bundle?

VectorPack.net  is a design studio creating professional vector art and design elements including stock vector art, Photoshop brushes, backgrounds, textures, fonts, seamless patterns and WordPress themes. Simply, every design element that we are in need of.

What included with it?

The Mega Bundle 2  is a set of 650+ design elements that VectorPack.net is offering for a price of $29 instead of $545.

It is available until the 13th of October (8 days from now on). This great Mega Bundle 2 contains the following items:

• 319 vector elements
• 278 PS brushes
• 66 abstract backgrounds
• 58 seamless patterns
• 30 textures
• 1 WordPress theme

Considering VectorPack.net presents such useful Mega Bundles at a discounted price regularly, subscribing to their newsletters would make sure you know about them in advance.

How to join the giveaway?

You can choose one of the methods below to join the giveaway:

• comment to this post
• or retweet this post (click here for an easy re-tweet)
• that's all

Winners will be selected randomly on 12 October 2011 (1 week later) and good luck!