It is a fairly well known fact around the design community, that folks love the freebies! And in that spirit, Arbenting has brought a special free Photoshop brush pack for the Elite by Design readers. This high resolution Kaleidoscope Brush Pack is free for anyone to download and use for commercial and non-commercial purposes alike. We only ask that you do not repackage or redistribute the brushes.

Brian had expressed interest in starting a freebie section for his site and we could not resist the opportunity to get it rolling for him. The Arbenting team are suckers for the brushes and we hope that you all enjoy using them as much as we do making them. If not, try harder!

Related posts:

1. Photoshop Freebies
2. 75 Insane High Res Photoshop Brushes
3. 24 Perfect Photoshop Vectors

This October brought lots of really cool design articles into the blogosphere with lots of neat ideas. I have been compiling this list over the last four weeks, and today bring you the best of the online design world for October 2008. From tutorials to inspirational posts, this compilation has everything you would ever want.

This is a compilation over 160 resources that I saw in October of 2008. Does everyone like this amount of resources, or would you prefer that I narrow it down to the top 50 or top 25 for November?

Dellipack 2: A Free Icon Set

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity.
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400+ Floral Brushes for Photoshop

With the popularity of last week’s collection of Photoshop brushes for creating textures, I thought it would be appropriate to put together another collection of brushes. This time we’ll focus on florals and foliage.
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21 Neatest Templates on ThemeForest

As the calendar ticks over into October, PSDTUTS’s sister site ThemeForest has made it to 1 month of age! We’re very excited about ThemeForest’s potential over here at Envato and I’m working hard to build traffic and content on the site.
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Amazing Absolut Vodka Inspiration

Design lovers everywhere gotta love Absolut. It is an amazing brand that besides the drink itself, makes people enjoy really well done bottles and advertising designs.
A great collection of product design.
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35 Photoshop Tutorials Inspired by Apple

Apple and its innovative products and marketing are the focus of some excellent design tutorials for Photoshop. Since I kept seeing tutorials inspired by the iPhone and iPod, I decided to compile the best tutorials of this kind that I could uncover.
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15 must-have features for modern design blogs (part 3)

Last week we saw how modern design blogs usually manage to gather a wide audience using Presentation techniques and special Features (see part 1 and part 2). Today, part 3 of this series will examine which types of Content modern design blog usually publish…
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25 Ways to be More Productive as a Designer

This list was created to help inspire you to make the most of your work days, become more involved in your career and be a healthier and more productive designer and person. Feel free to add your own suggestions for being a more productive designer to the list below.
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26 More Sites Using Wood

I did a roundup a while back on sites that used coffee in their theme, 26 of them in fact, and it had a nice response, so today I decided to give you 26 more sites that use wood as a texture in their layout.
An inspiring and creative collection!
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How to Create a Colorful Retro Style TV

In this tutorial, we’ll teach the intermediate vector artist how to create a retro style TV with gradients and layers. We’ll also create a nice funky background with circles and lines. Let’s have some fund creating this colorful illustration.
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Behind the Design: 5 Stories of Great Inspiration

We grow our creative talents through experience: whether it’s learning from a veteran designer about how things came to be or finding fresh delight in Smashing Magazine posts, no great artist exists without inspiration.
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Simply Ornate: A Free WordPress Theme

Today we are glad to release Simply Ornate — a free professional WordPress-theme created by Evan Eckard. This theme was designed with the main focus being on patterns and typography and comes in 5 flavours. It is designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
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12 Church Websites You Can Learn Good Designs From

So in my last post I talked about why church web design has being sucky as of par. Most church websites look like they are designed in 1998 and they just put stuff up there which ends up bloating the layout with to much info or they don’t give any of the relevant info.
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35 Essential jQuery Tutorials, Code Chunks and Plugins for Designers

So it’s for this reason I’ve rounded up some of the finest jQuery resources to achieve all kinds of things on a web page, from accordions to Flash-like menus to lightboxes, animation and more!
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10 Great Web Design Podcasts of 2008!

Podcasting is a fairly new medium, yet it has gained a phenomenal popularity due to its easy content generation, cheap distribution, on-demand listening, and low demand of bandwidth.
From radio shows, to interviews, to college lectures – podcasts are convenient…

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Illustrator’s Type Tool: A Comprehensive Introduction

Type is an essential part of Illustrator; whether you’re desktop publishing, designing logos, or using type for image building, you’ll be reaching for the Type Tool. This guide comprehensively covers the essentials of what is a huge amount of Illustrator functionality, which is type.
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Ultimate 3D Effects Tutorials Using Adobe Photoshop

Ever wonder how to add 3D effects in your design? Now you can start doing that by building up the basic skills and starting your own creativity using Adobe Photoshop. This post will help you save hours searching and digging around techniques to succeed!
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Incredible Custom Shoes Designs

We love shoes, that’s total fact. Now, when it comes to custom shoes, we are totally suckers for it. There are some artists that make sweet custom shoe designs that are really worth a look.
A great collection!
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Common Traits of Bad Web Design

In the past the article I wrote about bad blog design was successful, so I felt covering web design in general could be helpful as well. It is important to note that in this article I am referring to “web design” as the whole process of creating a site, not just the visual aspect.
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Web Design : Restaurant Sites

It’s been a time since we had our last Web Design post, so I’ve decided to search the next topic… and since I was pretty hungry, my stomach did all the thinking to me. So here are some cool restaurant sites designs.
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Most Used Elements In Collage Artwork

Collages, mash-ups, photomanipulations, compilations; They all are basically the same thing: Choosing a subject you want your design te be about, mix them up with some good elements and colours and produce stunning artwork. But how do you define “good elements”?
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40 Cool Beauty Amplifying Photoshop Effects

Beauty retouching is one of the most sought-after skills in Photoshop arts today. The techniques here are used not only on magazine covers, but in advertising campaigns, digital artwork and professional photography.
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15 High Quality Premium-Like Free WordPress Themes

Everyday we see many beautiful WordPress themes, many are good and only a little are just one of a kind. Today we present only 15 Free Premium-like WordPress Themes that are truly impressive and you might be willing to use for your next project, which have been released over the last few months.
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5 Beautiful penstyle fonts

I’m always looking for new interesting fonts. This is a list of some of my favourite penstyle fonts you can download and use on your design projects.
These are some great fonts for grungy, desk-style web designs.
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30+ (More) Most Wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks and Hacks

We’ve previously showcased more than 40 WordPress tricks and hacks you can perform on your blog but we quickly realized there are still a lot of impressive WordPress tricks, hacks and plugins out there that we thought are really great.
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Mega Roundup of 60 Cool Custom Designer Toys

Designer toys are a common love between many graphic designer and illustrators, as well as the collectable limited edition runs from producers such as Qee and Kidrobot there are many great examples of customised urban vinyl toys.
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12 of the Best Sources of Premium Vectors

There are a number of resources online for finding free stock photography, vectors, custom shapes for Photoshop, and all kinds of other useful items for designers. However, sometimes the quality you need will not be there with free items, and you may also spend more time searching for something free than it’s worth.

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Celebration Of Smoke Photography and Smoke Art

In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. At the bottom of this post are some links to tutorials on creating your own smoke photographs, as well as other resources on the subject.

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WordPress Rainbow: 35 Colorful Free WordPress Themes

While there are thousands of free WordPress themes available for download, here are 35 excellent options if you’re looking for something colorful.
A great collection of colorful and inspirational designs.
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15 Original Menu Designs

Navigation is important as it guides the user through the website, and you want the guidance to be clear. Yet a bit of creativity and love would do no harm but rather leave pleasant emotions from your journey across the website. Below are the 15 examples of original yet reliable menu designs created to easily guide you through the website.

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Phenomenal Packaging Design & Inspiration

Packaging might be the most important element of a product. Whether the product is a consumable good, some fancy hardware, a service, or even a website — that item might not even be touched if the package doesn’t communicate to the consumer.
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45+ Sources and Sets of Photoshop Custom Shapes

For graphic designers, working with custom shapes in Photoshop can be a big time-saver. While free brushes get a lot of attention, custom shapes probably get less. Here is a rundown of some of the best resources to download free custom shapes for your own work in Photoshop.
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7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design

This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.
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The Leaves Fall: A Social Icon Set For Bloggers

Today we are glad to release The Leaf Fall: a social icon set. This set contains 12 social icons, designed in an autumn-style. The set includes icons for Twitter, Technorati, RSS, Reddit, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.
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25 Amazing Photoshop 3D Text Effect Tutorials

Here we have collected 25 of the cool 3D typographic Text effect tutorials, well some of them are all done by the combination of some 3D software’s like Studio Max, Xara and some times illustrator with texture and coloring done in photoshop and others completely designed using photoshop.
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Tips on Pre-flight before sending to the printers

Arron Lock has kindly agreed to write some articles for design shard, you can check out his web site and follow him on Twitter He’s compiled some tips that should be taken in to consideration before presenting your files to the printer for printing.
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28 Great WordPress Plugins That I Personally Recommend

One of the cool benefits of using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) is the ability to use plugins which allows you to add on extra features with just a few clicks. I am going to showcase the particular WordPress plugins I use on this blog and the reasons for doing so.
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Designers Favorite Fonts In Use

We all have our favorites – from Pantone colors to stylistic approaches to fonts. Designers are at their best when they like the elements they are designing with. Find out what fonts these 8 designers love and why – AND see them in use!
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Top 5 Terms You Don’t Know for T-Shirt Printing

We think it’s important that we go over them as an introduction or possibly a refresher. The more terms and knowledge you put in your designer toolbox, the better you will be when it comes to designing your own promotional t-shirts or working with a client.
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10 WordPress Blogs You Should Be Reading

There are some great blogs that are 100% dedicated to the WordPress cause. It is through these sites that I keep up to date on the latest news, hacks, tweaks, and bugs in the rapidly evolving world of WordPress.
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5 Trends of Popular WordPress Blogs- Part1

These features are all fine and very important, but today we’re going to look at WordPress trends that are a bit more challenging. They’re not the run-of-the-mill techniques you’d teach a WordPress beginner. These 5 trends are slightly more difficult, but if done well they can add an extra special something to your website layout.
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20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know

There are a few special techniques or effects that can spice up just about any web page. These are the top 20 Ajax effects that every web developer should know. They’re essential parts of any web developer’s toolbox.
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18 WordPress Plugins to add Professionalism to your Blog

Is it time to take your WordPress Blog to the next level? Has the time come to take your blog up to the level of professionalism that all the top blogs use? Here are some easy to use but powerful WordPress plugins that will help you on your way, they range from Newsletters, RSS, etc…

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CSS Typography Reference Sheet – Get Creative with your Headlines!

This Reference Sheet was created to emphasize the many options available within CSS, particularly for Typography. So, what are you waiting for, get creative with your headlines! The page is split into three: CSS Typography Property Table, Web Safe Fonts Table and CSS Typography Value Conversion Table.

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Retro and Vintage In Modern Web Design

Retro and vintage are becoming a new trend. Once rarely used in this robust, dynamic medium, early, retro and vintage elements are now becoming more and more popular in a variety of design contexts. Online shops, corporate designs, portfolios and blogs incorporate both styles on a small and large scale.

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Freebies – Circular Fractal Photoshop Brush Pack

So usually, most of our Arbent Original Freebies go out to you on a Monday, but yesterday was Robert’s birthday, so we took the day off from posting, and delayed our weekly freebie. This week, we have a special treat in the way of a circular fractal photoshop brush pack for our readers.
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Should You Use A Photo As Your Twitter Picture?

Everyone seems to be on Twitter these days. Or on Plurk. Or Gravatar. Or MyBlogLog. Or Digg. Or Votetime. Or one of the million other social sites out there. And all of those sites use an image on your profile. But what sort of image works best? A photo of yourself? Or your logo? Or just a cool design?

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Logo Design for Olympic Games- Amateur or Professional?

About 90% of the people on this Earth watch the Olympic games, something like a mass psychosis. I’m not much of a sports fan but I’m interested in all related to design so… Does anyone remember the logos of Olympic games, either in 1956 or in 2008?

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3 Reasons Your Rates Are Still Low (And How To Start Raising Them)

If your rates are lower than you want them to be, don’t blame the economy. Don’t blame the state of your particular industry. And for the love of the business, don’t blame the competition. Here are 3 common rate-killing mistakes that could be keeping you scrounging rather than thriving.

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Crazy Ads Inspiration

We have been featuring art and design inspirations, why not some ads with a really good artistic side and tons of creativity. When putting art and business together, this is what you get:
Amazing collection!
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6 Ways To Add More User-Interactivity To Your Blog

Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.
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WordPress SEO – The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Theme Search Engine Optimization

The WordPress Codex says that “WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines“. Well, that may be true … to a certain degree, but there is more than enough work that you’ll need to do after you’ve installed WordPress in order to get it playing nicely with Google.
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iPhone Wallpapers: 40+ iPhone Wallpapers for Designers

Rather than do another post on wallpapers for designers, I thought I would do a post on iPhone wallpapers for designer. Some of these iPhone wallpapers come from some pretty big name designers. The rest are gathered from across the web so you don’t have to bother wasting your time.
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Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – Best Of: Part 2

In this post you’ll find some basic tutorials on getting started with certain aspects of Illustrator and some of its specific tools. You’ll also find more advanced tutorials that deal with all of the potential that Illustrator brings to graphic design.
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25 Graphic Design Career Preparation Tips

The Graphic Design Career is a fast growing career that is becoming more and more competitive with every passing day. People are realizing how much money is available and how flexible the graphic and web design career really is. You can work full-time in house in a small studio or large agency.
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The Future of Web Design Galleries

Web design galleries started out as a novel idea several years ago when the first few were launched to showcase excellent work of designers from all around the world, specifically those that were exemplary in their use of CSS.
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Photoshop Toolbox

Most web and graphic designers use Photoshop on a daily basis, and due to Photoshop’s popularity there are countless resources online for users. In effort to make your life as a designer a bit easier, here is a guide to some of the best resources.
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Using Layer Comps For Web Design In Photoshop

In web design, it can be tricky to decide how to present your layout to a client. There are some designers who believe you should skip Photoshop and go straight to coding. I disagree. At the very least you should sketch out your ideas with a pencil and pad before ever opening up a text editor.
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1000+ Free High Resolution Photoshop Brush Sets

Hundreds of thousands of incredible Adobe Photoshop brush sets are all over the web. Due to this phenomenally vast amount of Photoshop brushes available, you can now add patches of dirt, rust, floral effect, swirls, mold, oil stains in your artworks and photos to give them an aged look.
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10 Principles of the Logo Design Masters

The veterans of the logo design industry have achieved their success for a reason. Sure, it’s partially due to the years of practice, blood, sweat, tears and inky fingers. But mainly, it’s because they stuck to the ten solid-gold principles of world class logo design.
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Design Vocabulary – Typography Terms – Week 1

Hey everyone, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the terms designers kick around. This is the first of what I plan to be weekly posts to teach you all some “design speak” in small bite size pieces. Enjoy!
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Inspiration : Alcoholic Ads

Last week I posted crazy ads, this time I selected the best of alcoholic drinks ads, a mix of nice works and creativity to get people drunk off their products.
A creative article!
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Featuring Twitter birds: 20+ twitter bird designs

I hope you all liked my free twitter icons. It has already became a trend to use custom designed twitter bird icons to show the status of a tweeter. I could find many kind of twitter bird graphics over different websites. I thought of putting together some of that graphics. And here it is…
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Top 10 ThemeForest Templates

In this post I am going to show you my personal favourite 10 templates on ThemeForest, I am addicted to the site and it brings me a nice passive income, I wont feature any of my items in this list but if you would like to check them out then my portfolio is here.
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50 Stunning Examples of a Great Redesign

A redesign can be worth its weight in gold if you get it right. There is a thin line between freshening up your design, and taking a step backwards with a redesign. Sometimes a redesign can be subtle and simple, and other times it can be a huge re-vamp of a company and it’s goals.
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Create a Vibrant Modern Blog Design in Photoshop

Taking a closer look into the world of web design this tutorial will cover the process of designing a vibrant and colourful modern blog layout in Adobe Photoshop. Beginning with a blank canvas we’ll go through the process of creating the entire structure and effects from scratch.
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25+ Logos of various Design Studios

Below is a list of 27 logos of various graphic and interactive design studios from around the world:
This is a great collection of design studio logos.
Get inspired!
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Old School B-Movie Posters

Movie posters are probably one of the best ways to check some cool designs. Hollywood posters tend to look alike… floating heads, photoshop effects and all that. But B-movies are in another level of coolness for sure.
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25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 3

Colorful websites are always a good source of design inspiration (See 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites, and 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 2). These 25 showcase designs make excellent use of color. Hopefully you’ll find at least a few for your own inspiration.
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25 Powerful Non-profit Logos, Deconstructed

Amnesty, World Vision, Make Poverty History: important and powerful organizations with equally powerful logos. In this post, we deconstruct 25 logos for organizations that make a positive difference in the world, particularly through fighting poverty.
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20 jQuery Plugins for Unforgettable User Experience

In this article we’d like to present a list of over 20 Useful and New jQuery plugins you should always have ready to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible web-solutions. Image Cross Fade Transition, Smooth Marquee, Auto-populate multiple select boxes, Feed Menus, sliders, menus, animation that should give you a useful and powerful toolbox which you can use in your future projects.

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WordPress Post Author Description

Lots of words these days about WordPress, people are getting more and more interested in high quality themes with lots of features, so ussual thing to have became post author info very useful if you have more writers. There was a guest post a bit earlier how to make a post author info outside main loop.

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Ten Questions For Fuel Your Creativity’s Adelle Charles

Once again, we at Arbenting have been granted with an insightful and inspiring interview opportunity. Adelle Charles of Fuel Your Creativity, was gracious enough to agree to sit down and answer a few questions that we had to throw her way. With some really great responses, that make for an awesome interview, it was hard to hold on to this post until it was scheduled to go out.

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35 Beautiful Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials

In this post, we go back to the 1900’s all theway to the 1980’s to showcase a variety of vintage- and retro-inspired designs that involve poster art, collages and graphical elements. Whether you’re into print design or web design, you’ll find something you can use or build upon.
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Amazing Vintage Ads

Vintage ads are awesome. We really can learn a lot from them. Colors, typography, the way the designers and artists found ways to overcome the lack of technology to produce some really amazing pieces.
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More Awesome Product Packaging

So enjoy, be inspired and be sure to check out the source sites listed at the bottom of the post. While you do that I’ll decide if I should do a showcase on Vodka bottles – some are just so brilliantly creative. I would love your opinion on that by the way!
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Unique website for your Digg updates

A couple of days ago, I presented the Unique website for your Twitter updates Reloaded. The script was based on another one TutorialBlog released earlier.
Now I’m using the same idea but converting it for another site. Today, you’ll be able to show a Unique website for your Digg updates.

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The Four Basic Design Principles: What Every Designer Should Know

The funny acronym that was created to help people remember these principles is C.R.A.P, the odd thing about this acronym is, if you use these principles your design will be quite the opposite. Probably won’t forget that now, will you?

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Highlight WordPress Category when on a Single Post: Tutorial

I searched high and low and eventually found a simple plug-in, by adding a small piece of code to the plug-in I could achieve this, follow the steps below and you should beable to get your categories highlighted too when on a single post.

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Web Design On Essence

A good director involves the use of fine art, fashion, sound, imagery, dialog and cinematography. All these elements come together to give people a gratifying experience. A good film can make you laugh, cry, scared or even angry.
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30 Beautiful Photoshop Illustration Tutorials

Illustration is usually done in vector graphics applications like Adobe Illustrator or CORELDraw. But with the robustness of Adobe Photoshop, designers who don’t have access to vector graphics software can achieve vector-like objects and compositions with it.
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25 Examples of Amazingly Creative Typography Art

What is type/text art? It is art created solely by using letters and numbers.
It is really is an amazing art.
This is a very neat article!
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10 Ways to Monetize a Design Blog

In this post we’ll take a look at 10 opportunities that design bloggers have for monetization. Of course, you won’t be able to put them all into practice, so choose a few that appeal to you.
Great ideas!
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50 Beautiful Movie Posters

Nowadays, movie posters play a big role in cinema memorabilia collection. They have lost the “informative” tone to wear a more artistic and decorative dress. We want to change it with this post.
Wonderful compilation!
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Really Cool Digital Makeup In Photoshop

Why use real make up if you can do a digital make up and make the skin look pretty and smooth. It’s simple, fast and very effective.
This is a fast and effective PS tutorial.
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Lose the color! 9 reasons to ditch color

So why black-and-white as the subject for a series of posts? It’s because black-and-white is an intriguing limitation and blessing at the same time. If black-and-white is used for a suitable project it puts you into a challenging but beneficial situation.
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12 Beautiful Twitter Themes

I’ve been browsing through a few Twitter profiles recently. If you haven’t heard about Twitter, click here Theming is an important aspect for any social networking site since that lets you represent your interests as well as your business. Good looking themes obviously draws the attention of your visitors.
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35 Phenomenal Fractal Art Pictures

In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we look at awe-inspiring examples of the dynamic digital art sensation that is fractal art with 50 Phenomenal Fractal Art Renders. Setting across the vast sea of cyberspace to find these works was such an amazing task as so many fantastic pieces surfaced.

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The Best 30 Art Magazines for Submitting Your Artworks

It is an overview of the most famous Art magazines that are interesting both for reading and for self promotion at the same time. Don’t stay in the shadows, reveal yourself and your works! Let the world see your amazing creations and enjoy your art!
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15 Useful Color Mixers For Effective Designing

I wanted to create this list, because there are times when I struggle choosing my design colors – for me it’s not always easy task to just play with the colors and choose the right ones – of course, there are few favorite colors for everybody, but finding new great color combinations are not so easy task.

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Creatives Ads : Volume 3

A collection of creative ads.
Check them all out to get inspired!
And don’t forget to see more related ad posts.
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A Visual History of 11 Successful Blogs

Many of the blogs that have a huge following today go back to much more humble beginnings. This post is a look at how they got started and what they looked like in their early days, compared to today.
All of the websites presented below are among the 15 most popular blogs according to Technorati.
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16 Free Ajax Contact Forms – For A Better User Experience

Contact forms are the most common bridges between readers & site owners whether it is a blog or an e-commerce site. Creating a better user experience in this bridge definitely helps improving the effect created in the eyes of the site visitors.

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10 Most Sought-after Skills in Web Development

As the moderator of the Freelance Switch job board, there are certain types of jobs that are constantly in demand. Here are the 10 skills that are or will be in highest demand for developers. If you are proficient in these skills, you’ll be in a great position to find work and weather any economic downturn.

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The Top Ten Icon Design Tutorials on VECTORTUTS

Icon design is a fun field to get involved in. It requires illustrative skills, which most of the tutorials on VECTORTUTS are dedicated to teaching. Now if your looking to refine your skills with icon design specific tutorials, we have a list of the top ten icon design tutorials on the site.
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Free Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set for Bloggers

This set of free hand drawn doodle icons includes 14 graphics tailored specifically for bloggers. Including social media graphics for Delicious, Design Float, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati and Twitter as well as commonly used icons such as RSS, Home, Comments, Contact and WordPress.

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Enhancing Your Art with Negative Space

Negative Space is the space between an object, around an object, but is not part of the actual object itself. It is the opposite of an identifiable object which can at the same time be used to help define the boundaries of positive space.
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35+ Nature Tutorials for Photoshop

There are plenty of great Photoshop tutorials for working with different aspects and elements of nature. This is a collection of tutorials for working with the sky, clouds, grass, water, rain, and much more.
A wonderful compilation of Photoshop tuts.
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Lose the color! Commercial illustration showcase

Most of the pieces are not pure black-and-white, a lot of them have a splash a tiny bit of color. While they feature some color they’re still perfect for the purpose of our study though and I’m sure they’ll get you’re creative juices flowing whether you’re a hardcore black-and-white buff, color lover or somewhere in between.

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Web Design : Grunge Sites

Grunge design is really nice to do… there are a few elements that make that grunge look: dripping sprays and paints, non-regular brushes, torn papers, old paper textures, rough edges, among many. Here is brief selection of sites… I hope you enjoy these. Cheers!

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I have just listed off the first 100 resources I found in October. For the sake of time, space, and loading times, I am simply going to list the remaining articles. Enjoy!

• Awesome Wall Paintings
• Typography Mega Inspiration
• 55 Premium WordPress Themes To Blow Your Mind
• Creative User Interfaces In Web Design
• Userful Resources For Developing
• 27 Best Places You Should Visit To Get Incredible Web Design Inspiration
• 15 Mac Apps Web Designers Should Have In Their Dock
• 30 Exceptional Gimp Tutorials And Resources
• Handycons – A Free Hand-Drawn Social Media Icon Set
• The Ultimate Collection Of Useful Photoshop Actions.
• Modern Products in Retro/Vintage Style: 30+ Retro Style Modern Products
• 10 Tips To Avoid Designers Block
• 45 Excellent Sets of Adobe Illustrator Brushes
• Learning About Type
• 26 Business Cards Of Graphic Web Designers On Twitter
• A First Hand Guide On How To Start Freelancing
• Freebies: Circular Fractal Photoshop Brush Pack 2
• Creative Design Firm Names
• Inspired By Repetition
• 208 Retro Photoshop Patterns.
• 50 Ways To Improve Your Productivity As A Freelancer
• How To Make Your Portfolio Better And Get More Clients
• Inspiration: Automotive Ads
• Splatter And Watercolour Brushes For Photoshop
• It’s Twitter Time – Free Vector Icon Set
• Print Finishes To Spice Up Your Designs
• Inspiring Grunge Style Big Typography Posters
• A Design Of The Times
• 50 High Resolution Textures, Tutorials, And Resources
• Moleskin Art – Beautiful Examples And Talented Artists.
• The Finest Coffee Cups – Most Incredible Coffee Icons On The Web
• 40 Challenging And Incredible Vector Illustration Tutorials
• 35 Green And Earthy Photoshop Effects
• 20 Creative Cloudy Designs
• 50 Beautiful Blog Designs
• 15 Websites With Slick Drop-down Navigation
• The Colours Of Toons
• Retro And Vintage Typography Showcase
• Encoding A Photoshop Mockup Into XHTML and CSS
• Best Print Designs.
• The Design Process Of Creating A Corporate Identity For A Beer Label
• 8 Ways To Better And Prettier Article Formatting
• 19 Creative Halloween Ads
• Illustrative Typography
• Inspiration – Fractal Art
• 40 Beautiful Grunge Photoshop Tutorials
• 10 Great Places To Find Web Design Jobs
• 15 Top Site Elements
• Social Media Directory For Designers.
• 11 Powerful Poster Designs That Were Created For The USA Presidential Election 2008
• Smoke Type In Photoshop In 10 Steps
• Outstanding Illustration In Photos
• 5 Books Every Designer Needs
• 25 Must Read Interviews From 2008
• Inspirational Brochures and Booklets
• 24 Beautiful Flash Website Designs
• Inspiration – Blog Footers
• Inspiration – Awesome T-Shirt Designs
• Graphic Design Portfolios 10

This is a compilation over 160 resources that I saw in October of 2008. Does everyone like this amount of resources, or would you prefer that I narrow it down to the top 50 or top 25 for November?

Related posts:

1. A Refresh For Elite By Design
2. 90+ Remarkable Examples Of Bold Colors In Web Design
3. Freebie – Kaleidoscope Circles Photoshop Brush Pack

This September brought lots of really cool design articles into the blogosphere with lots of neat ideas. I have been compiling this list over the last four weeks, and today bring you the best of the online design world for September 2008. From tutorials to inspirational posts, this compilation has everything you would ever want.
Enjoy!

45 Beautiful And Creative WordPress Themes

WordPress provides designers utmost control over a theme – resulting in unprecented flexibility in the layout and design direction he or she can take. WordPress – in the title – is inside parentheses because the designs you’ll see below are wonderful designs despite of the publishing platform they use (which just so happens to be WordPress).

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220+ Stunning Creative Skateboard Graphics

T-shirts, album art and skateboard graphics are often used by designers and illustrators as a blank canvas to express their personal creativity, with no limits holding back the creative ideas there are many stunning examples to be seen. This collection of 223 skateboard deck graphics from various designers and illustrators will be sure to get your creative juices flowing!

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25 More Incredibly Artistic Website Designs (Part 3)

If you enjoy getting inspiration from artistic designers, here is a collection for you. It’s a follow up to the first two popular collections: 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites and 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites Part II.
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10 Challenging But Awesome CSS Techniques

Most designers and web developers only scratch the surface of the potent language that is CSS. In terms of programming languages, CSS has a fairly simple learning curve. That doesn’t mean that CSS isn’t a powerful language. Sometimes it’s the small things that make a huge difference in a website design.

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100 Nice And Beautiful Blog Designs

We spent weeks going through hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere, looking for blogs with nice and interesting design. We marked down those with great interface, graphically beautiful, unique personalities and styles. Here we bring you – 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Design.
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21 Inspirational Typography Artworks from DeviantArt

The inspirational collection here ranges from portraits made from just Typographic characters to abstract art design using 3D software and type elements. I have on occasion tried to replicate this type of artwork and I have found it to be very painstaking and time consuming. So I praise the artists who have managed to make these beautiful artworks and designs look so stunning and graceful.

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The Web Designer’s Typographic Glossary

Though there are some great examples of web designers writing on typography recently, one thing that I’ve always wanted is a quick little reference to help me remember both the terms and how the typographic toolkit should be used. This is the beginning of such a reference.
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20 Insane Comic-book Style Photoshop Effects

Comic books and graphic novels combine two things every designer aspires to meld: real meaning and pure, unadulterated eye candy. Here we introduce 20 of the best ever tuts on using Photoshop to create stunning comic-book style art.
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70 Cute and Cheeky Vector Animal Characters

This collection of 70 cute and cheeky vector animal characters provides a roundup of some fantastic fauna-based illustrations from across the web. We’ve got everything from bears to beavers to… well, weird—and strangely fat—Japanese-style bunnies. Time to put on your cute-resistant specs and dive in!

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Resources for Freelance Web Designers

Being a freelance web designer is definitely hard work! But if you are willing to put in the time and effort it takes to be a good one (i.e. make a living), it can be both financially rewarding and fun! Here are a few articles, links, and tools to help you along on your freelancing journey…
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Grunge Type Photoshop Tutorial

Ok, today we are going to look at how to make grunge / worn style type to use in your art.
The process is actually quite simple, and you can get endless variations.
This is a great tutorial brought to you by You The Designer.
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Simplicio: A Free Icon Set

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place. In fact, the results are quite often pretty impressive.

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10 designers worth following on Twitter

Twitter is a popular hangout for geeks and techies, and you are almost guaranteed to find everyone from the layperson to mini-celebrities on Twitter. Here is a list of awesome web designers on Twitter worth following. Note that conversation value has been given importance (how active they are on Twitter, and how much of tweets is design-related).

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40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box

In the showcase below we present 40 creative out-of-the-box layouts that break the boring 2- and 3-columned, boxed layouts. We have collected pure CSS -designs, CSS+JavaScript -layouts as well as Flash -designs. Most designs presented below risk their site structure and content presentation with unusual approaches.

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25+ Essential Articles For Every WordPress Beginner

With thousands of new blogs springing up every day, it can be quite daunting for a new user to be thrust into a new interface and blogging platform. That is why today I am taking WordPress back to the basics with 25+ essential articles for every WordPress beginner.
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How To Master Photoshop In Just One Week

So you want to master Photoshop huh? You’ve come to the right place. This is the first part of a three part series that will help you to master Photoshop in and out in just one week. Today’s part is all about getting to know the basics of the program and how to operate the complex software – nothing amazing, but you need to crawl before you can walk!

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Irresistible Websites Part Four: Energy

What gives a website design energy? The way I see it, a website displays energy if the design is not only well crafted but also generates its own atmosphere. The design elements may be simple (even minimalist) or bursting with detail, but with one aspect in common: they create an ambience based on a sense of location, time or mood.

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Type Chart

Typechart lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.
This is a great resource for finding good web typography, and how you can use it yourself on your own website.
I would highly recommend this resource to designers new to web typography.

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DelliPack: A Free Icon Set

Today we are glad to release The DelliPack! icon set. This set of “delicious icons” contains 5 high-quality icons: a folder icon, a paint icon, a safe icon, a building icon and a printer icon which can be useful for both corporate and personal projects. The set includes a PSD-source file as well. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

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Interview with Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe

Most of you are probably familiar with CSS Globe. If you’re not, it is a very popular site run by Alen Grakalic that provides design news (through user submissions) on a daily basis. Alen also publishes some original tutorials and articles on the site.
CSS Globe is a great resource for both print and web designers.

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The Process of Designing a Killer Logo

Designing a killer logo has everything to do with concept and little to do with technical prowess or how well you can use a design program. Also, when it comes down to it vector is the most versatile and useful format for logo design.
A must-read for any logo designer.

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How to Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch

Creating a WordPress Theme, The Homepage Following on from the recent article on “PSD to HTML”, this tutorial will look at taking a HTML/CSS template and turning it into a functioning WordPress theme. There is so much you can do when creating your own theme we couldn’t nearly cover it all.

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10 Masterful Mobile Phone Tutorials

As new advancements in mobile phone technology continue to appear, so do the mobile phone tutorials. As these new cell phones are released many tutorial writers become inspired to recreate these beautiful new phones in Photoshop and Illustrator, so designers can master the techniques and use them to create their own illustrations, icons, web designs, print ads and so forth.

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9 Web Design No Nos for the Newbie

I admit I’ve committed just about every crime against web design on this list. That’s probably why it flowed so smoothly from my mind. They are all easily avoidable sins that, if transgressed, will cost a web designer big. So if you want to avoid humiliating yourself in front of clients and burning unnecessary midnight oil, take heed. It will save you a lot of anguish to learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

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76 Unique WordPress Themes

WordPress is one of the most used CMS around the world. In this list, you will find Blog, Gallery and Portfolio Themes. All this designs are unique, creative and attractive. This list is a good way to find inspiration for your next blog .
A collection of beautiful and inspirational blog designs.

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20+ Inspiring Pixel Artists, Tutorials, and Resources

Let’s take a look at some of the top pixel art studios and artists that will leave your mouth dripping with wet little squares. Then we’ll review a wide range of beginner to comprehensive pixel art tutorials. And don’t miss all the articles, resources, and collection of other cool stuff to be found in this solid collection of pure pixel love.

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35 Beautiful Examples Of Rain Photography

Below we present over 35 beautiful examples of rain photography. This post is supposed to provide you with some inspiration for rainy motifs and is not supposed to be the ultimate collection of best photographs. All photos are linked and lead to the sources from which they were taken. Please feel free to explore further works of these photographers on their Flickr collections or their personal sites.

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30+ Adobe Illustrator Tutorials : Mastering Your Tools and Options

In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials that shows you exactly what needs to be done in order to create professional artworks using which tool and option. These tools and effects may or may not be new to you, but I am sure you will find them interesting.

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Interview With Chris Spooner

I recently had the opportunity to interview Chris Spooner. I’m sure many of you are followers of his blog, Blog.SpoonGraphics.com. Chris has just recently made the jump to full-time freelancer, and I hope you will enjoy getting to know more about him.
Chris Spooner’s blog covers various design topics from tutorials to inspirational posts.

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10 Amazing Graphic Design Magazines Part 1

Graphic Design Magazines are a key way for active graphic designers to further immerse themselves into the design community. They can inspire you, inform you and keep you up to date on the latest trends, hottest studios and new design talent.
Are you subscribed to any of these?

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Top 7 Most Overused Techniques & Elements Used In Graphic Design

Are you following graphic design trends subconsciously? These are two questions to ponder over the next six weeks in this six part series showcasing the most overused techniques used in design today.
Are you using these elements?

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The Top 10 Premium Specialty Themes for WordPress

Premium themes ideally will separate themselves from free themes by achieving a better, more professional look as well as through added functionality and options from within the dashboard. Here are 10 of the best premium specialty themes available today.
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40 Icon Tutorials for Photoshop

There are a growing number of excellent Photoshop tutorials creating for your own icons. Here are 40 of the best.
A creative and inspirational collection of beautiful icon designs and how you can recreate them in Photoshop.
Enjoy!

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Huge Collection of Adobe Illustrator Resources

If you’re interested in improving your skills with Adobe Illustrator or finding resources that can make you more effective and efficient with your time in Illustrator, this is the collection for you.
A must-read resource for vector artists!
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40 Stunning Vector Landscape Illustrations

A common feature seen in all the examples is how the use of vector graphics results in a unique crisp and stylized image, ranging from colourful ‘cartoon-like’ designs to more abstract and geometric illustrative works.
Stunning vector artwork collection.

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50 Creative Photoshop Text Effects

Learn how to soak your text in bubbles, splatter it with blood, turn it to glass, then to ice, melt it into water, grow it into grass, cut it from metal and riddle it with bullets. Explore these 50 creative Photoshop text effects.
Have you used these yet?
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15 Design Blogs To Promote your Articles

Getting the word out on Digg/Stumble Upon can be tricky when no one knows your blog, but luckily for design related articles, there are many high traffic blogs that have community link features where you can submit your design articles and receive decent amount of traffic.
How many are you using?

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20 Firefox Add-ons to Enhance your Web Development

Which are the best add-ons that can really help you as a web developer or designer in terms of time and effort? So here’s 20 extremely useful Firefox Add-ons that can help developers create websites.
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How to Create a Trendy Retro Type Treatment

In this Illustrator tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a trendy retro type treatment with a free font, gradients, blends, and some scatter brushes. It’s a relative easy tutorial containing techniques that can be quickly applied to many other type treatments and various graphic elements.
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Illustration Artists Showcase and Inspiration – Part 1

This collection is mixture of more traditional illustration to photography and illustration, when I look at illustrations like this I always think about how there made, such as paint splatters did the designer take a can of spray scan it in and manipulate it, stuff like that can add a whole new dimension to the illustration.

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10 Amazing Graphic Design Magazines Part 2

Today we will list 5 more important magazines covering similar topics to the previous part and in addition more technical topics such as tutorials and tips for using important design programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

Subscribe to them today!

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75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques

Developers and designers are using more and more JavaScript in modern designs. Sometimes this can be a hindrance to the user and take away from the simplicity of the design, and other times it can add greatly to the user’s experience.
Have you tried any of these techniques?

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Web Design : Religious Sites

Since my friend and I are developing our church’s web site, I start to research tendencies for this kind of site. And my surprise is that there are really awesome sites out there about it! From vintage style to illustration, flash elements, gradients, photographic background… there are many trends, but all of them are really well done.

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39 Masterpieces Of Creative Advertisements

I am calling this collection as “39 Masterpieces of Creative Advertisements”. Maybe most of you guys already had a look at some of these but we tried to make this compilation very inspiring, interesting and entertaining for everyone and specially for our exclusive readers. Just take a look at them.

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Finding Inspiration In Type + Color

Today I am focusing on type + color, and have written a line or two underneath each choice I have made to display below. It’s crazy how many combination’s can be created with color + type and movement too. You may find yourself going back to these sites to look at them more closely.
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Creative Tabbed Website Navigations & Tutorials

Navigation is arguably one of the most prominent and important aspect of any web design. It allows for a clear navigation and a way for visitors to explore deep into a website’s archives. The purpose of a navigation is to construct a concise and easy way for visitors to find their way around.
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15 Amazingly Free Magazine and Headline Fonts

A very neat collection of free magazine and headline fonts perfect for creating bold typography and elegant web designs.
Be sure to check this source if you are in need of typographic inspiration.
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Tribute To Graffiti: 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks

In this episode of Monday Inspiration series we are presenting a tribute to street art and graffiti — over 50 examples of beautiful and impressive graffiti artworks. Hopefully everybody will find some inspiration at least in some of the works showcased below. Feel free to explore the works of artists by following the links to their sites.

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CSS Typography: Contrast Techniques, Tutorials and Best Practices

The main advantage of elegant CSS typography lies in its ability to be both attractive and improves the user experience. When chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective to support the overall design.
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Design blogs making an impact

Since then I’ve been on the lookout for designers and bloggers who have come up with their own great ideas to generate awareness or fundraising for worthwhile causes, much like James West did earlier this year.
Is your blog making an impact?
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Photoshop Tutorial: Designing a Unique Bookmark Box

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial we’ll be learning how to create a unique, and professional-styled bookmark/promote box for your personal Blog, or maybe even your website.
How did you like this tutorial?
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25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs – Part 4

A few of the most popular posts on this blog are the 3 collections of inspirational, minimal web designs (see part 1, part 2, and part 3). So why stop there? These 25 sites are also clean and attractive.
Do you like minimalist?
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65 Places to Find a Graphic Designer

There are many outlets designers use to promote themselves nowadays, most of which are online such as design galleries. By knowing these places you will be able to find the perfect designer for your business!
Are you using these outlets?
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WordPress Developer’s Toolbox

With all of the WordPress development that is going on, there is a need for an organized collection of resources to educate, inspire and equip developers to improve the quality and efficiency of their work. This post provides all kinds of WordPress-related resources to do just that.
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Top 7 Most Overused Icons, Shapes & Symbols Used in Graphic Design

Is all design looking the same to you? Are you following graphic design trends subconsciously?
These are two questions to ponder over the next six weeks in this six part series showcasing the most overused techniques, effects, icons, shapes, concepts, fonts, stock images and clichés used in design today.
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50 Amazing Gig Posters Sure to Inspire

The gig poster scene isn’t exactly the best kept secret among music fiends like myself. It is a tradition that started in the 60’s and is still going strong.
The following are 50 hand picked gig posters whose creativity and imagination blew me away.
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20 Cool Custom Calendar Printing Examples

Custom Calendar Printing is an extremely popular business promotion method and many popular applications include the automobile, photography, fashion, corporate, retail and travel industries. They are also great for in-house use at your office, they can be given out for free or even sold to make a profit while still marketing your products or services.
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40+ Beautiful Icon Sets Hand-picked from deviantART- Part 2

So today we would like to present another 40 incredible icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop. Let’s take a close look at some of the most beautiful icon sets we’ve found on deviantART.
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10 Websites with huge list of resources for web designers and developers

These are the sites which have a huge list of links that are divided up into categories and then thrown together on one giant page of resources for web designers and developers, all these website covers mostly all topics in design and development, such as Icons, Templates, Fonts, Scripts, Color tool, CSS and more.
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25 Tasty 3D Graphic Design Treats Part 2

Previously we made a post on the topic of 3D typography called 25 Tasty 3D Graphic Design Treats and since that post the amount of designs created in this niche has grown tremendously! This has inspired us to make another post on 3D type showcasing some sick new designs.
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28 Killer CSS Menus – Inspiration

There’s nothing like a big fat truckload of style to get those creative juices flowing, and it’s with no end of pleasure that I deliver to you the first of many collections of usable web eye candy, this time looking at navigation.
Are you inspired?
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Top Designers and Their Inspiration

In the 2nd part of my design inspiration article series I asked 2 top designers to let me know what inspires THEM in order to see how they come up with their ideas and what artists, websites, and sources they use.
What’s your inspiration?
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Due to the Credit Crunch, This is your New Office

So the financial markets are in an epic turmoil, and everyone’s cutting back. Office equipment is an area where many firms could really make a saving. Here’s a complete solution:
(Office humor)
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Make an Inspiring Artistic Poster with Drawn Elements

In this tutorial, we’ll create drawn elements, use design brushes, bring them into Photoshop, and merge them into a unique poster composition that feels hand-made, stylistically unified, and personalized.
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45 Character Illustrations in Web Design

Having a character illustration is a must get your visitor’s attention. The visitor will easily associate the character with your site or your web services. All these vector characters make the website very attractive. This list is a good way to find inspiration if you decide to use a character in your Design.
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35 Tutorials for Mastering Photoshop Brushes

Regardless of your skill level in working with brushes you should find some tutorials here for you. Some cover the basic uses and functionality of brushes, some will teach you various ways to create your own custom brushes, and some will help you to develop your skills by using them as an integral part of a design.
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18 Truly Awesome Hand-Picked Designer T-Shirts

If you are like me, you love your t-shirts and this is why I have hand picked 18 awesome, cool designer t-shirts for your pleasure. All of these shirts come in men and women’s sizes and are on sale from $19 at Design By Humans by affiliate.
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14 Great Abstract Photoshop Brushes For Light Effects

One of the best ways to create spectacular abstract effects in Photoshop is by using brushes. They save you time and make the process less complicated. However, taking the time to find high quality brushes isn’t all that fun, so I’ve compiled a list of 11 high quality abstract brushes from various designers which I hope will be useful to you.
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10 Excellent Dark Designs for Your Inspiration

Often overlooked given the recent craze surrounding Web 2.0 have been dark designs. Choosing a dark design is a massive branding choice when setting up on the Internet, so here I’ve gone ahead and picked 10 usable, well organised and appealing dark designs from around the Web.
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10 Beautiful icons set for web developers and designers

This post contains a collection of 10 beautiful and very popular icons set useful to be used in your web applications or your websites.
A great resource for all web designers!
Which set of these beautiful icons is your favorite?
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30 Kick-Ass Vector Based T-Shirts from Top Designers

This collection of 30 stunning T-Shirt designs is an inspirational roundup of examples from some of the best names in the apparel world, each with their own unique take on vector illustration.
Do you own any of these excellent tees?
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A Comprehensive Guide: Illustrator’s Paintbrush Tool and Brush Panel

Illustrator’s Paintbrush Tool and Brush Panel are some of it’s most powerful tools. With these you can dress up your vector paths into compelling flourishes, patterns, tapered edges, and more.
How skilled are you in Illustrator?
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Top 10 Sources of Logo Design Inspiration

If you’re a logo designer or interested in learning more about logo design, there’s no doubt you’d like to see some excellent examples for the best logo designers around for your own inspiration. The ten sites listed below are all great places to visit when you’re in need of some inspiration, and many of them will also allow you to share your own work with others.
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45 Explosively Colorful Photoshop Effects

Imagine a world without color. Then, imagine a world without Photoshop. Depressed yet? Don’t be. Let us cheer you up with 50 Photoshop effects that will have you manipulating vibrant colors like a pro. Our palette crosses the full range from subtle and elegant to vivid and high-impact.
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WordPress Archive that *works*: StepxStep Guide and Plugins

One of the advantages of using WP Archives page is the amount of information that it can provide to help the visitors easily browse your blog and find what they’re looking for. It can also act a your blog’s sitemap which is perfect for search engines.
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Create a Custom Mac OSX Style Ring Binder Address Book Icon

Today I’ll show you how to create an Address Book replacement icon for Mac OSX. When you are a beginner, it’s better to start with designing replacement icons to get some practice. Let’s get started with personalizing the icons in our workspaces.
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25 Refreshingly Blue Website Designs

Whatever you design situation may be, its nice to be able to quickly look over websites with similar color schemes to get an idea what has been done. Our large showcase of blue websites should help you get into the “Blue Zone” if you ever find yourself working with this color. How blue is your web site design?
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20 Free Handwritten Fonts And Resources

Handwritten font can really say something special personalizing communications with Your visitors. Actually there are a huge amount of great fonts out there, we never heard of. I wanted to dig a little deeper and so I created my own selection with some very special handwritten fonts.
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500+ Photoshop Brushes for Creating Textures

Textured graphics are obviously very popular right now, and fortunately there are tons of free Photoshop brushes that will help you to quickly and easily get the textured look you want. This post is a showcase of some of the best sets of brushes available anywhere for creating textures.
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28 Excellent Free Mac Apps for Graphic and Web designers

A great collection from Specky Boy on twenty eight free mac applications that are perfect for graphic and web designers. This is a great resource to find an app that can quicken your workflow and make your life as a designer easier.
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15 must-have features for modern design blogs

Design blogs are popping up all around the web these times, the newest ones trying to reach a wide audience through long compilation-style posts on all possible subjects related to web design, while already established names hire guest writers to renew their content at a breathtaking pace.
Are you using these features?
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30 Creative Website Headers

One of the first things new visitors will notice upon arriving at your website is your header. Some sites are able to make an excellent first impression by featuring an artistic or creative header. This mini gallery post is a collection of some of the more inspiring headers out there.
A great place to get inspired for your next web design.
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Issues Involved with Website Communication

Regardless of what type of website you’re developing, the success of the site will hinge on being able to communicate effectively with visitors and readers. On the subject of communication, there are a number of potential issues that need to be considered:
Are you having any of these issues?
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Getting Creative With Javascript: 15 Websites With Cool Slider and Scrollers

The Most Important thing is not -what you say, the important thing is -how you say and when you say , While some days before we are using flash for buttons, gallery etc, later now JavaScript frameworks like mootools , scriptallicious and prototype replace the flash with a light weight code and we can get the same effect like flash.
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Guide to Blogging for Freelance Designers

The blog was originally planned to just be an occasional article that would ideally draw some search traffic from potential clients, however, in just a few months it became much more than that when I started to understand the potential of blogging and how to produce results.
Are you a freelancer and blogger?
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15 must-have features for modern design blogs (part 2)

In part 2, we will finish the roundup of features every design blog must have. Next post, part 3, will dive into the different types of content modern design blogs usually fancy publishing.
Are you using these features?
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40 Photoshop Tutorials On Rain Showers and Water Drops

Adding the illusion of water and rain to photographs using Photoshop can be a bit tricky. Many times the effect feels forced and cheesy, as if you’re looking at a grainy picture instead of an authentic rain shower. The tutorials below will give any designer inspiration for incorporating water scenes in fall designs and showcase some amazing water work by excellent designers.
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40 Brilliant Mid + Hi-Res Wallpapers for Photoshop Lovers

If you love Photoshop, you need a desktop wallpaper that demonstrates your allegiance to killer digital art. Something that inspires you every time you look at it, to be better, more skillful, work harder. You will find that here.
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20 Sites You’ll Love if You’re New to the Web Industry

Today I decided to share the best of my web design bookmarks with you. Whilst there are heaps of tutorials and blogs out there, these are amonsgt those I’ve found the most useful. I’ve also tried to provide a good cross-selection of sites covering everything from Photoshop to CSS to JavaScript.
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How To Write An Effective Design Brief and Get The Design You Want!

How do you get the design you want? The perfect design you envision in your head? … The design brief is the answer. Whether you are a designer or a client, an effective design brief is the single most critical factor in ensuring that a project is successful.
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Use Whitespace to Indicate Relationships Between Content Elements

One of the most important tools in a designer’s toolbox is whitespace. Whitespace is just that — it’s space between various content pieces, like paragraphs, headings, buttons and so on. This space can be tweaked to achieve different effects — such as to separate elements apart from each other by increasing the amount of space or group related things together by tightening it.
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60 Concert Posters From Ten Amazing Artists

So many shining examples of this exist in the art community, and in this episode of Monday Inspiration we present 60 inspiring concert poster designs from 10 amazing artists. The links at the bottom will take you to sites dedicated to showcasing other wonderful works from the concert poster genre.
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Create a Vibrant 3D Pixel Type Treatment

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a fun 3D pixel font type treatment. Using a free font, gradients, and Illustrator 3D filter, you will easily create a type treatment that you can apply to many other fonts.
This is a spectacular effect!
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25 Typography Flickr Groups Designers Should Join

Flickr is a great place for inspiration. There are numerous groups dedicated to the topic of typography, but vary in what they focus on such as found type, signage, calligraphy, graffiti, type design and more.
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30 cool wallpapers for designers

I’ve been wanting for a while now to write a designer wallpaper-list article. As a designer finding nice wallpapers that you actually like can be quite an adventure.
A great resource to spruce up your desktop!
Which wallpaper is your favorite?
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45 Amazing Illustrations for Inspiration

Now and then we stumble at various artists whose work we find inspirational. In a week or so we might not remember the name but the image will still be there. It’s great to keep the record of their locations, whether in your computer, or in your bookmarks, etc.
A fantastic inspiration piece!
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Top 7 Most Cliché Stock Images Used in Web Design

Sometimes clients ask us to implement ‘not-so-unique’ elements into our designs and sometimes it seems almost impossible to convince them otherwise, however, hopefully this post can suggest some reasons why not to use the old web design stock imagery clichés.
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How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch Part 1

I’m going to show you how to create a wordpress theme from scratch in these 3 parts of tutorial series. I will cover from Structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully css based html, and finally wordpress implementation.
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30+ Websites that Feature a Hand-Drawn Style

While the content of these sites is still presented in a very clean and relatively simple format, the visual field is dominated by a single illustrated image or by a series of hand drawn elements throughout the background. Here the designers are using their “art” to frame the content.
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30 Brilliant Vector Logo Designs, Deconstructed

A kick-butt logo design is of great importance to any business. Often seen as the first impression of a company, its logo must be tailored to communicate specific values and ideals in an instant.
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Again, it has been a fantastic month. I can’t wait to see more in October!

Related posts:

1. School Is In Session – 100 Design Articles To Keep You Motivated : Part 1
2. School Is In Session – 100 Design Articles To Keep You Motivated : Part 2
3. 45+ Design Blogs You Should Be Reading