Category Archives: Design

5 Sites to Find Free PSD Resources for Your Web Designs

Looking for some high-quality PSD resources? Maybe your design skills are lacking and you need some professional-quality elements for the theme you’re making for your blog. Or maybe you need some social media icons. Or maybe you’re just don’t feel like reinventing the wheel again for that login form.

No matter your reason, anyone doing some web design can benefit from some freebie PSDs.

Creattica

Envato’s Creattica site, which is primarily a design gallery slash place to hire freelancers, has a category for downloadable freebies. There’s some good stuff, from icons to textures to audio player skins.

PixelBeam

PixelBeam is largely one guy making some cool graphics (though he seems open to contributions). Everything is free for commercial use, with a few “simple rules” to follow, namely that you link to PixelBeam if you’re sharing the resources and that you properly credit PixelBeam if you use them in a project you intend to sell somewhere like ThemeForest.

Premium Pixels

“Premium Pixels is a bunch of free design resources & tutorials created by Orman Clark. Don’t worry, shameless freeloading is encouraged, feel free to use and abuse at will.” Licensing is similar to PixelBeam. You can do pretty much anything you want with the PSDs, so long as you don’t redistribute them as-is. Attribution is requested for projects you intend to sell.

365psd

BittBox

BittBox is a good source for textures, patterns and the occasional Photoshop brush. There are tutorials and the like now and then, too.

Easy CSS Sprites with Sprite Cow

CSS sprites are a commonly used technique to decrease page load times. One of the biggest hassles when setting them up, though, is figuring out the coordinates for the images in your sprite. (The other is rebuilding the sprite when you want to add…

Where to Find Free Fonts for CSS @font-face

If you’ve discovered the magic that is the CSS @font-face property, then you have likely run into one of its biggest problems: while there are plenty of free fonts online, not many are licensed with terms that allow you to use them with @font-face.…

Don’t Assume a User’s Browser Window Size

Chris Coyier has an amazing article that finally puts the screen resolution myth to rest. Despite screen resolutions getting progressively bigger, the available width for your web designs is not. If you have a ginormous 30-inch monitor, you probably don’t keep your web browser…

Design Spotlight: Pro Blog Design 2011

The industrious Michael Martin has once again redesigned Pro Blog Design, this time going for a more open (and less blue) look. The new design better incorporates promotion for Pliable Press and his custom design services, while still leaving room for third-party advertisers on…

The League of Moveable Type

Looking for some high-quality open source fonts, perhaps to use with @font-face? Look no further than The League of Moveable Type, an organization that curates a collection of professional typefaces licensed in a way that doesn’t inhibit your ability to use them on the…

How To Create a Stylish Button Entirely with CSS3

Web designers have been making dynamically-sized buttons using the “sliding doors” trick for awhile now, but isn’t that technique so 2003? Wouldn’t it be cooler to construct buttons using only CSS? Line25 has a fresh tutorial on How To Create a Stylish Button Entirely…

CSS3 Multiple Backgrounds

CSS3 has a nifty feature that I wasn’t aware of until recently: multiple backgrounds per element. This was something I used to wish for frequently before I got used to faking it by nesting DIVs and assigning them single backgrounds. Chris Coyier’s CSS-Tricks blog…

Little Big Details: A Blog of UI Details

Michael, the guy behind Pro Blog Design and PliablePress, posted a link recently posted a link to a neat design blog recently. Known as “Little Big Details,” it features minor design elements that are exceptionally functional and possibly worth emulating. I like the concept,…

HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is a default template that you can use as a starting point to build HTML5-ready web designs around. It has a few neat features, like: Full cross-browser compatibility…even with IE6. It uses some scripts to add support to those uncool browsers. You…