There are tons of great resources out there, but they can take a long time to find and a long time to sort the wheat from the chaffe. We've broken down our resources into separate categories. If you have a resource that you think should be listed here, please contact us to let us know.
Backgrounds and Textures
The Inspiration Gallery - Unique and original borders, backgrounds, wallpaper. These are not just the "usual" hideous backgrounds and borders you can find on the web. There are some very beautiful textures and images here.
Briar Press - Cuts and Caps - Fabulous ornamenents and inital capital letters. You can download these vintage images for your personal use in print, web, or even letterpress projects.
Image After - Stock Photographs of Textured Objects - This a huge collection of photographs. You can download and use any image or texture from the site in your own work. Covers everything from architecture exteriors to household objects.
Squidfingers Patterns - Over 100 different repeating patterns.
Texture Library - More good quality photographs of textures of everything from wood to fabrics to metals.
Background Patterns - Lots of interesting, subtle backgrounds for use on web sites.
Stock Photography (Free)
Stock Xchng - A huge site of free photographs, mainly for personal use.
Morgue File - Nicely designed sites with lots of good quality photographs, free for personal use.
Big Foto - Collection of photographs on a wide range of themes.
Free Foto - OVer 100,000 pictures for personal or non commercial use.
Free Photos Bank - Nice clean site with a broad range of photo categories.
Stock Photography (To Buy)
Fotolia - Over 2 million top quality, royalty free photographs starting at $1.
Shutter Stock - Subscription based photography site. Signing up for a month gives you access to over 1 million pics.
iStock Photo - Royalty free image and video clips from $1.
Getty Images - A huge big whopper of a site with millions of images. Sign up as a member (for free) and you can download comp images for free. If you want the high-res version of a comp, you need to buy it.
Alamy - Environmentally friendly stock photography!
Fonts (Free)
Dafont.com - The big daddy of font sites. Over 7000 free fonts to download. The site has a clean design and it's easy to get around and find the fonts.
Blue Vinyl Fonts - Nice original fonts in old school and graffiti styles.
Fonts by Dieter Steffman - A wide range of fonts by German designer Dieter Steffman.
Dingbat Depot - A very large collection of free dingbats on a nicely designed site.
Divide by Zero - Original and unusal fonts, dingbats and doodles by Tom Murphy. All the work here has a lovely hand-drawn quality to it.
Font Diner - Wonderful retro fonts and dingbats of a very high quality.
Mac Fonts - Fonts exclusively for the Mac.
Who Fonted? - Apart from loving the name of this site, there are tons of original free fonts available.
1001 Fonts - There are probably about, ehm, 1001 fonts on this site give or take a few. Again there is a wide range of categories from brandname fonts to Western style fonts.
Fonteria - A large archive of fonts by several designers. All free to use.
Identifont - This is a tool which helps you identify a font from a sample by answering some questions. It also has a section where you can download a selection of free fonts.
Fonts (To Buy)
This is a list that could become very long indeed, so we've selected some font foundries that we think are good value or inspiring or cool or all of the above!
Adobe Type - Over 2 thousand top quality fonts for purchase.
The Australian Type Foundry - Unique selection of quality fonts.
Buy Fonts - A fairly inexpensive site for windows fonts.
Photoshop Brushes
Photoshop Actions
Photoshop Plugins
Color Resources
Picking colours can be a difficult thing to do. For some it comes naturally, while others are colour-pickingly challenged. The following resources can give you a good start to getting the right colours together.
Kuler - From the Adobe Lab, this is a wonderful free application that lets you create colour themes and save them for your Creative Suite 2 applications.
Color Blender - We love this site too. It is such a great application and it's free.
The Meaning of Color in Web Design - Guide to colour and its meaning around the world.
Color Schemer - A colour scheme creator application to buy. |
