Archive for the ‘Freebies’ Category

10 Free Silhouette Vector Packs

August 17, 2010

Ah, the faceless/detail-free silhouette: a simple and clean design element that can be used across a variety of mediums. It can be time-consuming to create a new silhouette vector graphic every time one is required for a design, and it can be plain inefficient to do so if the graphic that is required doesn’t need to be a custom one (of course, if a custom graphic is called for, we always recommend going that route). Luckily, there are a ton of free silhouette vectors out there. We’ve taken the time to round up 10 of the best, free silhouette vector packs out there. Each image links to the download site and we’ve checked them all out, so feel free to go on a free vector downloading spree!

203 People Silhouette Pack

This is a huge collection of people in various poses; a great collection that will come in handy for any designer.

Birds Collection

Birds flying, birds perched, birds standing on one leg… you get the gist.

Keep Fit: Exercise Vector Pack

These exercise-related vector silhouettes are great for any fitness-related designs you may be tapped for.

Hit the jump for the rest of the free vector silhouettes! Read the whole article >

YourBand: a Free HTML Template

June 17, 2010

Most indie musicians are either poor, barely scraping by, or living with their parents. It’s a tough racket, and there are a lot of things to pay for when you’re a musician: touring, gas, recording, printing an album, promo materials and so forth.

With that in mind, we donated some time to create and give away a free, killer one-page HTML template for musicians through Chorus Magazine. We call it the YourBand HTML Template. What is this, exactly? Well, you can download this file for free, get a domain name & hosting for your band or client, change a few lines of HTML and upload this file to your server. Presto! You have a gorgeous one-pager website for your band/client. This is what the template looks like, which can be edited to suit your needs:

YourBandTemplate

Click here to view a live demo of the template.

The template has been designed and coded so that you can easily change the background & fonts if you know a little CSS. Doing this will completely change the look & feel of the template. To get an idea of what we mean, here is another version of this template with just the background, fonts & a few other small CSS changes applied. This shows you how easy it is to make this template your own.

Wondering why only one page? Well, one-page websites are seeing a huge surge in popularity. This is due to a few reasons: a) they’re more cost effective, and b) they provide more concise information. I mean really, how many pages do you actually need for a web presence? The amount of information on the Internet is overwhelming; thus, one page sites are growing in popularity due to their simplicity and ease of use. That being said, any somewhat savvy web guy/gal can easily turn this template into a multi-page site.

Features of the YourBand HTML Template include:

  • A lightweight, easy-to-manage music player
  • A cool photo gallery
  • Standards-compliant, valid XHTML
  • Ready-to-edit links & content

This is what’s included in the download:

  • Two differently styled versions of the template: “Granite” (shown above) and “Cardboard” (linked above).
  • An Editing guide
  • Screenshots of each version

So get downloading, and if you have questions about implementation or anything else, leave ‘em in the comments!

Download

Free Client Presentation InDesign Template

June 14, 2010

As a design studio that does a lot of branding & identity work for small businesses, we often find ourselves creating PDFs to showcase design concepts to our clients. A good presentation of design concepts can greatly influence a client’s view of your skill and professionalism. However, it’s not very efficient to create a new InDesign document each time you have to present a design concept to a client. With that in mind, we’ve created this free client presentation indesign template.

The idea here is that you, a graphic designer, can download this template, change the text and brand it to your design company, and use it to present design concepts to your happy clients. This will save you loads of time if you don’t have a template like this in your arsenal, and your concepts will be presented to your clients in a professional, clean and easy-to-understand fashion.

Here’s the quick list of details:

  • Brandable to your company
  • Populated with fake content you can replace easily
  • Space for logo designs and complementing material (business cards etc)
  • Color swatches
  • Suggested text for describing your design concepts

Here is an example of one page layout; here is an example of another.

This is fully open-source; download it and distribute it, use it for personal and commercial projects, but please don’t pass it off as your own. So that’s it! Hopefully you’ll find this useful; if so, please share & vote this post up on any or all of the social media sites below. Please note: this was created in InDesign CS4. Thus, it can be opened in CS4 & newer programs. There is a .INX file that should be able to be opened by InDesign CS3. Any older than that and you’re out of luck. Sorry, out of my control!

download

Free Tooltip-Style Social Media Icon Set

February 22, 2010

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. There are a lot of icon packs & sets out there, but a lot just give you flattened PNGs, making it more work than it should be to customize the icon colors to your liking. With that in mind, I decided to make & release a new vector icon set so other designers and/or bloggers could download it, tweak (if necessary), and save as a PNG in the size they need. More flexibility for you means an increased likelihood you can actually use this icon set in your designs.

free vector social media icon set

This icon set (click the image to download, or click here) is in .EPS format, and includes the following icons in 128X128, 64X64, and 32X32 pixels in 8 different colors each:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Delicious
  • StumbleUpon
  • RSS
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Mail

If you’re counting, that’s 240 icons. Of course, the sizes & colors don’t really matter as you can make them bigger or smaller, and/or change the color, without loss of quality. Just thought it might make it easier for some people to include the common icon sizes.

You are free to use these icons in any of your projects, personal or commercial, and to change them as you see fit. Please do not redistribute as your own; I’d appreciate a link if you’re sharing. Thanks, and enjoy!

New Feature: Found Friday Vol 1

February 19, 2010

So last week we killed the weekly wallpaper feature. We killed it dead. Why? To be honest, a lot of the time we found ourselves racing on Thursday night or Friday morning to design a wallpaper to put up. It took up too much time, and to be honest it wasn’t all that popular. So we’ll still be doing calendar wallpapers, and the occasional wallpaper if the mood strikes, but our new weekly feature is going to be a lot better. Allow me to introduce to you: Found Friday.

Every Friday, we’ll post a new Found Friday article, linking to a variety of design-related articles, items & more that we’ve discovered during the week that we think are awesome. We’re active in the online design community, and there is a ton of new content released every week; our hope is to help spread some of that content to people who might also think it’s great. I hope you, our readers, will find this post both more fun & useful than the weekly wallpapers post.

So let’s get rolling. The inaugural Found Friday post features the following: an ultra minimal start page, a redesigning of Valentine’s Day, a huge & awesome icon pack, a really little content management system, the BBC site redesign process, and 35 new free fonts for designers.

FAV4.ORG

How to use Fav4.org: choose your 4 favorite websites from their list. Set the page as your browser’s home page. Enjoy the ease of minimalist design. (via swiss-miss)

Link to Fav4.org

REDESIGNING VALENTINE’S DAY

The gents over at Brand New (a great blog on identity design) were tasked to redesign Valentine’s Day. Read about their process, and see the awesome result, here.

Hit the jump for the rest of the article! Read the whole article >

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