My Free Design Resources » free

Fully Editable Simple Dark Navigation Menu

mentalhead — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:13:14 +0000

OK, today we have something bit different. This is not a standard Photoshop resource, but it will definitely come in handy to web designers and coders. Today we have web design resource that you can use on your webpages, so make sure that you check it out.

As you know, simple and plain menus are not that interesting, if they aren’t amazingly designed, so why should you be stuck with a plain old static menu? Drop down menus are great, they are attractive, they are dynamic and best of all, they are free, well in this case at least. You can design your own menu, and that’s not that hard, but there’s no need to design a beautiful dropdown menu when you can download it for free. That’s right, today we have a sweet Simple Dark Navigation Menu that you can use in your designs, and best of all is the fact that this menu is fully editable. This menu comes in PSD file and you can edit it in any way you like, as long as you follow the author’s rules.

As for this menu, it’s simple and it looks great, and since it fully editable it will be great web design resource for all web designers that know how to code a drop down menu.

Simple Dark Navigation Menu Download

11 Awesome Dice Photoshop Patterns

mentalhead — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 15:49:10 +0000

All designers, both graphical and web, have difficulties when it comes to filling their surfaces. Sure, you can fill a surface with certain color or a gradient, but that doesn’t do the trick since both gradients and plain colors are just boring to people. You can add some diversity and some sort of texture to your designs with some patterns, since patterns can fill certain selected area in just a few clicks. Therefore, it’s no wonder that Photoshop background patterns are one of the most used design resources in design.

Since we’re talking about free patterns here, today we have a fresh set of patterns that have designed by JenniStock. JenniStock did an amazing work, and thanks to her, we got 11 free Photoshop background patterns that you can use in your designs. These are some nice patterns in two different sets, and each set includes colorful dice patterns. These aren’t just plain patterns and all of them come with a certain texture so we can say that JenniStock really did her best with those, therefore, these patterns are one free design resource that you must have. I’m downloading them at the moment, and I can’t wait to use them in my designs so I’ve decided to share those with you. So there you are, 11 free patterns for you to use. I hope that you’ll like them.

Download 5 Dice Photoshop Patterns Pack 1

Download 6 Dice Photoshop Patterns Pack 2

2 sets with 10 Free Scratch Brushes for Photoshop and Gimp

mentalhead — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 07:26:27 +0000

Today we have one free design resource for you that will make making of the various effects simpler and easier than before. I don’t know about you, but as a web/graphic designer, I cannot create anything without a set of Photoshop brushes. Photoshop brushes are great, especially if they are free, because they save your time and allow you to create amazing results in just a single click.

As for brushes, today we have two sets with 10 Free Scratch Photoshop brushes in each of them for you. Thanks to these sets, you can create scratches on all sorts of textures and surfaces, and it’s just the thing for you if you’re using paper, wood or metal textures. In fact, some of these brushes are created from scratched metal. Anyhow, this set contains ten brushes and all of them are 1000 to 2000 pixels wide, and some of them are even 2500 x 2500 so you can enjoy in full resolution and use these on higher resolution projects. These sets contain one .abr file that is fully compatible with Photoshop and Gimp.

As for these brushes, they are created in Photoshop CS5, and they look great, so I hope that you’ll like them.

Download Free Scratch Brushes 1

Download Free Scratch Brushes 2

Source #1: texturemate

Source #2: texturemate

15 Free Image Optimization Tools for Designers

mentalhead — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 22:02:26 +0000

When it comes to web design, web designers should keep in mind the size and resolution of their pictures. Bigger resolution produces bigger size of the file on your server, and with big images on your server and with thousands of visits you’re going to exceed your bandwidth limit soon enough. Therefore, before posting images on your website, you should try to optimize them as much as you can and reduce their size.

In order to reduce the size of your images, you should change the file format as well as the resolution, and there are many tools that can help you with that. Adobe Photoshop is without a doubt, the best tool for that, and it is being used by many designers, but as you know, Photoshop isn’t cheap, so you might want to find a different solution in order to optimize your web graphics. There are many solutions that can help you with optimization such as free software and free online services. Thanks to these solutions you’ll be able to optimize your graphics for web, cheap and with ese. The following article shows you 15 great solutions that will come cheap and that will surely come in handy, if don’t use any other tool for optimization of your graphics.

Personally, Photoshop is the best solution, but if you cannot afford it, check out some of these tools.

Original Article