Hand-drawn design objects are always a popular choice to reflect a personal touch, warmth & sometimes; childeshness.
Although it is possible to create new designs via scanning drawings or designing with graphic tablets, using ready-to-use ones is always a good & quick choice as well.
In order to add a twist into any design easily, here is a collection of 37 beautiful hand-drawn Photoshop brush sets:
Divine is a fresh & free Photoshop plug-in for converting Photoshop files into Wordpress themes.
It works by selecting spots in design files & marking them as Wordpress variables like:
It produces valid XHTML-CSS code & themes are automatically widget-ready.
Divine has an integrated FTP-client & it is a very ideal plug-in for anyone who is not that into coding and/or Wordpress theming.
For many users, according to the Photoshop knowledge level, it is sometimes hard to create what is in mind. And, for everyone, having a well-designed object can call the inspiration & help us to create better.
In both cases, for Photoshop users, quality & free PSD files are a treasure. Whether you use them in a tiny part of the whole or build your composition around them, they will help a lot.
Here is a collection of 35 beautiful & free PSDs for charming designs:
For any designer with significant amount of Photoshop brushes installed, it is always a pain to navigate through the brushes & find the one you need.
ABRView is a free software that makes this process much easier. It allows you to define the folder(s) where brushes are installed & preview them.
Also, once you download a brush, although you have an opinion on how it looks, you can not be sure until installing it, running Photoshop & checking the look from the brush palette. As ABRView can display brushes from any folder, you simply save time on seeing how they look.
It has an .exe version for Windows & .jar version for Mac & Linux.
Mastering frequently used applications increases the productivity significantly.
Controlling these applications via keyboard is a part of this "mastering process" which helps you use an application with 2 hands = much faster.
Also, knowing the tricks of tools inside these products definitely opens new doors for creating.
Specifically for designers, here is a list of cheat sheets for the most popular applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Gimp, Fireworks & more..
Keyboard shortcuts are very well organized, both by menu & alphabetically.
Also, shortcut presets that add lots of extra shortcuts are provided too.
Keyboard shortcuts for previous Photoshop versions:
There are many different way & settings for converting images to black and white with Photoshop.
This is a Photoshop file presenting different filters/presets. Just update 1 file & see the various outputs.
Protecting images online is a difficult, almost impossible, mission to accomplish. At the end, the image is there and a "print screenshot" command can grab it & no way to stop this.
But, there are various ways to harden the process & make it not worth trying like disabling right clicks, using images as backgrounds, adding watermarks to them & more.
Here are the good practices of these options:
This method will make the real image unreachable unless checked from the source.
You can use the original image as a background & put a transparent-blank file over it that matches the size of the real image.
For ex:
<div id="image1" style="background-image: url(originalImage.jpg);">
<img src="blank.gif" height="250px" width="300px">
</div>
So, when the image is right-clicked, it will be the blank.gif that can be reached.
There are also 2 JavaScript framework ready solutions for this:
Photoshop plug-ins are the add-ons that power a Photoshop user.
They make a complicated task much easier & help creating amazing effects, designing faster & better.
There are lots of free Photoshop plug-ins which can fire your skills. This post aims to present most of them (150+) in a comprehensive way.
Photoshop plug-ins are .8bf files. After downloading a plug-in, simply place it in the presets>plug-ins folder of the Photoshop’s installation folder (creating a folder with a name defining the plug-in & placing the plug-in files inside the folder will make it more organized).
Here they are:
A free Photoshop plugin for easily removing black or white values and making the region transparent.
It provides 6 different filters to match any photo type.
It has 20 effects to modify image colour values in several ways.
The plug-in can be used for digital-photo color correction or any other transformations.
It has 20 effects to create dramatic edge and colour modifications.
This Photoshop plugin is handy for photo transformations for a highly stylized look & creating interesting texture effects
Easily create screen/mesh patterns with 30 options.
In one step, you can add small detailed and repetitive texture overlay effects to areas of your image.
Christmas (& New Year) is getting closer & many websites will be creating themes for their designs/logos, designing special newsletters, banners & also, lots of materials will be printed.
So, designers are possibly in need of quality Christmas themed design objects.
Here they are:
Halloween is very close and many designers / website owners are probably in need of quality & free Halloween themed brush sets & vector images.
Here is a collection of very nice free design resources which includes pumpkins, witches, creepy trees, bats, skulls & more. To summarize, a complete design set for a Halloween-related event or a web content.
BlendFu is a website featuring free Photoshop & GIMP brushes in a well-tagged presentation.
Users can upload their brush sets & even the designs they created using those sets.
Currently there are 900+ brush sets featured.
And, a great thing about BlendFu is, when you click on a brush set, you can view every single brush in the set in detail.
