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.
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punypng is a free web-based application which can seriously compress JPG, GIF & PNG images without any loss of quality.
The application first analyzes the content of your image and figures out the best image format to use. If necessary, converts the format automatically.
It also has built-in support for dirty transparency* which can save an average of extra 10% for transparent GIF & PNG files.
What would be more amazing is the service to offer a desktop tool with context menu support.
*: an innovative technique that offers additional compression to any PNG or GIF as long as it has either 8-bit or 1-bit transparency
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.
Anyone, who wants to get more bytes out of their images, should take a look at Smush-it.
Flowplayer is a free Flash media player that can configured & styled to fit your needs.
It supports multiple media types: FLV, H.264 coded MP4, JPG, PNG & MP3.
This Flash media player can also be controlled with JavaScript & from other Flash movies.
Besides the free GPL license, there are several other paid licenses. So, make sure you check the licensing before using it.
P.S. This is not a very fresh resource but realized that it was missing in WRD & here it is.
Everyday Icons has a playground area, which has a chic interface, presenting free patterns, icons & some PDF note designs.
Specially, patterns are high quality, can be previewed & downloaded in different colors.
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Currently, you can find 100 patterns and 6 small icon sets.
DinPattern by Evan Eckard is a website presenting quality & unique patterns created by him.
Currently there are 60+ free patterns to use.
New patterns are being added by time and before downloading them, you can easily preview how they look.
