I’m rather sad to be reporting this one, but Vector Magic, the awesome free online vectorizing service is no longer free. It looks like the creators behind the service have left Stanford to make a desktop version of the popular software, which will be selling for a price that has yet-to-be-decided. Personally, I prefer Vector Magic over Live Trace in Illustrator, but that may change if the price isn’t right. Vector Magic is a single-function software. It’s nice, but It only does one thing. I can’t see myself paying more than $50 for a software that only does one thing, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Read the rest of this entry »

[OS X 10.5] While having a Volume, Brightness, Pause/Play buttons integrated into my keyboard may be convenient, it really drives me crazy that my function keys don’t, well…function like I want them to in Photoshop. (or illustrator, etc.) I want to show you a way that I managed to get around this while keeping the functionality of the media buttons at the same time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now, before I start, not everyone is going to think these are all useful, so if you don’t ever use tree silhouettes, fine. But some of us do. Personally, I love dingbats because (most of the time) I convert them to vectors in Illustrator and use them as very large elements in some cases. All you have to do is use the font in Illustrator and then go to Type > Create Outlines, and Bam. You got yourself a vector to work with. Here are some dingbat fonts that I thought you might enjoy.

1. Geobats

Read the rest of this entry »

Nick La, over at WebDesignerWall recently contacted me with a cool story. A college student by the name of David Bracetty is selling ad spaces on a t-shirt in order to raise funds to go to FOWA (Future of Web Apps) in Miami, Florida. He will be wearing the t-shirt both days in an effort to pay for his trip. I recently purchased a couple spaces for BittBox, but time is running thin. His funds need to be raised by Feb 20th in order to get the shirt printed in time, so I decided to post about to try and help him out. If you have a website, and you can spare a cool $20, please visit David’s Website. I hope we can get you to FOWA David!!! (I remember how broke I was in college, and this is a great cause)

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got another set of Illustrator brushes for everyone. I previously released these shapes as vectors, but decided to go ahead an make a brush library out of them. I hope you can put them to good use. Screenshot after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »