Free Vector Art: 20 New, Useful Illustration Sets
The amount of free vector art that you can download has been tremendously growing as more and more artists and studios decide to give away free vector art as a way to gain exposure and showcase their talent and skills. This is good news for many graphic and web designers who need some fresh design elements for their design projects. As a general practice, professional graphic designers usually use vector graphics to build artworks such as corporate logos, banners, print materials, etc. Read Best Design News
Having a collection of gradients that you can use anytime you need one in Photoshop is a great time-saver. The gradient tool is one of the most useful tools in Photoshop especially for making backgrounds, icons, buttons for the web, among many other things.Today, we would like to present some fresh Photoshop gradients that you can use for free in your designs, both web and print. 
For the month of February 2010, we gathered together 20 of what we believe are the best Photoshop brushes released during this month. As in the previous months, we tried our best to choose only those Photoshop brushes that are creative and unique with decent or good quality resolution. We tried to add variety by selecting different types of brushes–abstract, splatters, grunge, decorative, floral, people, among other things. Since February is also the month of hearts, expect also to see more valentine-themed brushes in this roundup. 
Last time, we had a roundup of the most spectacular ecommerce websites that made use of the grunge style design (28 Awesome Examples of ECommerce Websites Using Grunge Design). As a follow-uop, we decided to pool together a number of free resources that you can use just in case you also want to create something similar to those ecommerce sites we featured in our previous post. The first half of this list includes 15 free grunge fonts while the second half includes quality and high-resolution grunge Photoshop brushes that you can use for free. As in any graphic freebies, make sure that your read and understand first the terms of use set by the individual authors before usingthem, especially if you plan to use it for a commercial project. I hope you will find these resources useful as well. Enjoy! 
We do not see much of grunge design among ecommerce websites. Simply because this type of design is not as popular as its glossy and ultra minimalist clean-looking counterpart, the Web 2.0 designs. And of course, to sell their merchandise, businesses usually target a wide range of prospects or customers using the design approach that appeals to them. However, it would be very hard to stand out in a very fierce competition with a lot of ecommerce sites that also make use of the same design approach. Grunge design is popular among the young population, specifically the artistically-inclined people and those outdoor lovers. This group of population is the particular niche that most ecommerce websites using grunge designs cater to. For your inspiration, we decided to pool together in a single post 28 best examples of well-designed ecommerce websites that make use of grunge design style. 
Last time, we shared with you the best retro web designs from around the web to give you inspiration just in case you are doing similar projects. As a follow through to our previous post, we decided to come up with a list of retro design resources that you can use in designing vintage or retro-themed websites, desktop wallpapers, posters, e-cards, print ads, web banners and many more. This list is divided into three parts. The first part is composed of beautiful retro fonts while the second part is composed of hundreds of high-resolution and quality Photoshop brushes that you can use to create vintage look in your design. The third and the last part are sets of patterns featuring retro or vintage styles. 
When we think of old or vintage, we automatically relate it to something that is cracked, dry and ready to drop. But something old can be beautiful. Just look at the retro-themed websites that we are featuring in this post and you will surely agree with us on this one. The use of retro look in web design continues to be a favorite among some designers and is expected to further expand in 2010 as designers find more and more ways to honor vintage art. 
An Annual report is a comprehensive report on a company’s activities throughout the preceding year and are intended to give shareholders and other interested people information about the activities and financial performance of a company or organization. Since the core of an annual report are mostly numbers, designing an annual report thus require extreme attention to detail and a large amount of creativity in presenting numbers in an interesting way. 
Carpet texture images are being used by digital artists, interior designers, graphic designers for making 2D and 3D renditions. For example you can use carpet texture in creating a realistic model or design of an office or home interior. I recently needed some carpet texture photos for a personal project but I found out that it is not easy to find good carpet texture images online in high-resolution format that you can use for free. So here, I am sharing with you 12 carpet texture images at resolution of 3500 by 3500 pixels. I hope you guys will find some good use for these carpet texture images. 
Fire is one of the elements used by designers for creating realistic effects. These fire images are very useful in 3D animation works such as those fiery glow used in special effects that you see in blockbuster movies as well as background or textures for print and web designs. If you are a designer and would like to add some fiery glow in whatever you are working on, then start scrolling your mouse down and check out if you can find textures or maybe some inspiration from this collection. The good news is that, all of these textures carry a Creative Commons license, which means that you are free to use these fire textures provided that you credit or link back to the source or author. There are however some authors that has special requirements when you use their stock images, so please do check out the terms of use of each free texture when deciding to use them, especially for commercial projects. I hope you will find this collection inspiring as well. 
