TexturePalace is a website which shares 200+ premium-but-free textures that we can use to decorate our designs.

All textures are converted from camera RAW data where the picture size is 3400px*2400px (or more).

The textures are well categorized like ground, nature, grunge, metal, etc. & they are free to be used in both personal or commercial projects.

Bgrepeat is a website that shares 100+ free repeating backgrounds to beautify your designs.

Most of the backgrounds are minimalistic & various colors of each are presented.

You can easily sort bakgrounds according to their popularity, view larger versions & download them (.JPG format).

Upperx is a set of 100+ free grunge textures with a nice little story.

They are photographed from the old, oxidized, metallic & graffiti-painted doors at Barcelona's Poblenou, an old industrial neighborhood now in full transformation.

All images are in .JPG format, 850*637px size & 72 PPI resolution.

Iconizer is one of the latest online generators that you may find useful.

It is a free & web-based application, from the makers of popular Preloaders.net, that enables you to customize various popular icon sets online.

Iconizer allows you to select an icon from a list of well-categorized icon sets and:

• select the foreground/background color
• size of it
• file type to be created
• add an animation
• resize it & more..

Although the application is very useful, what would be even better is "selecting the whole icon set" & ability to customizing it in bulk.

Textures are handy design elements that can beautify the complete output very easily.

Textur.es is a simple website which presents quality & free textures.

It is a community-powered resource where anyone can submit new textures.

Currently, there are 50+ unique images & new ones are added regularly.

PatternWall is a fresh website which features a huge collection of free seamless patterns to beautify your designs & website backgrounds.

Just like the name, it is similar to a wall where new patterns load automatically once you scroll down, no paging is required.

Patterns are free to use both in personal & commercial projects.

Noqta is presenting 30+ quality patterns that are free to download.

Most of them are pixel-patterns. They come with a Creative Commons license which means they can be used both in personal & commercial projects.

To download them, simply save the background-image of every pattern displayed in order to get the repeating-ready versions of the images.

Using textures mostly helps creating surprising designs (both in good & bad ways). But it is certain that, quality textures, when used wisely, will end up nicely.

ZenTextures is an online gallery presenting beautiful free textures.

Textures are very well-categorized like: paper, grunge, wood, stone & more.

Currently, there are 400+ textures shared which are free to use for both personal & commercial projects.

Color Pallete Generator is a free web-based application that is creates the color palette of an uploaded image.

It supports .PNG, .GIF, .JPG, .JPEG images & creates 4 levels of palettes: light, medium, dark, complete.

The generator also prepares the related files for CSS & Photoshop swatches of the color palette created.

P.S. Up to 1 mb can be uploaded.

Optimizing images is a "must" when serving them over the net for faster browsing experiences, lower bandwidth & diskspace usage.

Smush-it is a free online service for compressing your images by offering different techniques than Photoshop, Fireworks, etc. & creates non-quality-loss output.

It offers several ways for easier usage:

• Web based uploader that supports unlimited file uploads & optimized images can be downloaded as a .zip file. Images can be uploaded from URLs too.
• Firefox plugin & a bookmarklet for 1-click optimizing for the images exists on that webpage.
• Wordpress plugin for automated usage for the uploaded images.

Anyone, who wants to get more bytes out of their images, should take a look at Smush-it.