Digg is still an amazingly popular way to get the news. Now we are beginning to see a new brand of site, a more niche-focussed version of digg, arriving (Design Float, Vot.eti.me, Design Bump, WP Scoop, etc). If you’re thinking about starting one for your niche, have on fear, there’s a whole bunch of free scripts in various languages avaialble:

-PHP and MySQL
-Smarty Template Engine
-Module Engine
-Most used and largest community
-Affero General Public License
Download | Demo

-PostgreSQL, Python and Memcached
-Extremely stable
-Not well documented
-Difficult to set up
Download (git repo) | Demo

(more…)

This week we’ve seen a lot of new and exciting content on the web. The featured item this week is the following set of brushes:

The instant I saw the preview I fell in love with these brushes, they really are amazing. They work wonders on dark backgrounds, just as shown above.

Here’s some other great brushes, textures and vectors from the week:

(more…)

Grunge design has been going on for years, but one less-commonly seen aspect of this is in grungy icons. When developing a grunge-based site design, there are very few sets of decent grungy icons to be found. Here’s our list of the best:

(more…)

It’s a couple of days late, but here’s a list of 15 awesome websites we discovered in October:

Sites with meaning (blogs, interesting, etc):

Deskography is without a doubt, my favorite site for October. The whole idea of sharing deskspace images is brilliant, it’s far better than all those “share your desktop/workplace” threads in almost every popular forum.

Checkout App is a neat looking Mac App which helps people setup a store. The same team created the Versions App and Disco App.

Brand New is a brand-analysis blog with some great articles and detail analysis of top brands.

Delicious CSS is, yes, another CSS gallery. The great thing is that they seem to have some decent quality standards, unlike many of the CSS galleries who seem to try to keep up fast posting, without worry about posting poor quality sites.

And now some wonderful designs from October:

(more…)

Vintage is an ever growing trend in web design and graphic design these days. It’s a style that looks back to the past, and, in combination with modern effects, can create stunning results. From pin-ups to tomato adverts, we’ve got it all, here’s my selection of vintage-themed brushes:

(more…)

Halloween is fast approaching, and I only thought it appropriate that we’d have a collection of horror/halloween related brushes. Zombies, bats, grave yards and skulls all included! As for usage, they probably won’t be very useful in web design, but they can be used to create some amazing vintage-styled movie-like posters if you want:

I’ve discovered a bunch of awesome websites this month that I’d like to share, some are new, some are old, some are only there for their design, others for their content, they’re all awesome:

Beautiful Designs:

(more…)

Another post in the collection series, this time a collection of beautiful space themed photoshop brush sets. These can be used for many things, from the obvious space scenes to many different clever effects using blurs, blend modes and playing around with the color/curve settings. Enjoy:

(more…)

This collection contains a 25 amazing light related brushes. This includes fractals, light beams, clever light effects and shapes as well as other light related things. If used well, these brushes can create some amazing effects perfect for anything from posters to websites.

A quick tip if using them: play around with layer settings, saturation/hue settings and opacity. Mix them together, but don’t over-do it. Good luck & enjoy:

(more…)

Well Wallpapers aren’t really a necessary resource or anything, designers always like to have a pretty desktop(well at least i do). Heres a roundup of a bunch of great wallpaper sites and lists! If i’m missing anything, let me know in the comments.

50 Remarkable Nature Wallpapers - Smashing Magazine

(Really) Stunning Wallpaper and More (Really) Stunning Wallpaper - Smashing Magazine

Space and Nebula Wallpapers - Smashing Magazine

Mandolux

Breathtaking Photo Sets Guaranteed to Inspire - Design Reviver

49 Amazing Wallpapers - Paint Bits

Flickr Wallpaper Pool

Aviation Photo Flickr Set

Top 10 Gaming Wallpapers - Digital Battle

To continue on the sketchy theme from the last collection of sketchy icons, I have now gathered a list of the best sketchy brushes to help you in your sketchy designs:

(more…)

Introducing a new type of post: collections.  We aim to collect groups of icons or brushes or other media under certain headings. For example, today we have 10 Sketchy Icon sets.

In web design and graphic design today, the “sketchy” trend is ever increasing. However, there seems to be a real lack of decent sketchy icon sets. I’ve managed to locate just 10 decent sets:

(more…)