Archive for April, 2008
I stumbled onto a ‘Design Resources Search Engine‘ the other day somehow, and wanted to tell everyone about it. It’s basically a Custom Google Search Engine that only searches the best design blogs and sites out there, but it is quite handy if you like to find freebies, as I know a lot of you all do. Jump on over and give it a try. you might just find what you’re looking for. Also, if you look at the complete list of sites and you know of a good site to add to the list, you can suggest a site. Just click on the blog link at the bottom of the page and use the contact form in the footer.
Believe it or not, but I made these with a sketch pad, a can of spray paint, and a kitchen sponge. It was actually quite fun. I was inspired by a t-shirt I bought recently and decided to churn out a new brush set. The preview doesn’t do them justice because they are so darn wide, but you might notice from the screenshot that there are 5 ‘pairs’ of wings, making the brush total 10. As usual, the brushes are ginormous (2500px). I hope you can put them to good use ;) If you’d like to share your designs, you can always upload them to the BittBox User Showcase Group @ Flickr.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a huge fan of Flickr. I’m no photographer but with the immense number of images on the site, you can spend hours browsing for inspiration. Compfight is a service that allows you to quickly search Flickr and browse hundreds of results instantaneously. There’s also an option to search only the Creative Commons images, saving you a couple clicks compared to Flickr’s own “Advanced Search.” One other thing that makes Compfight useful is the fact that when you roll over each thumbnail, it tells you the pixel dimensions of the ‘original’ size image.
I’m proud to release my very first original free font here on BittBox, BB Petie Boy. (Named after a horse I had when I was younger) There are four weights, one of which is a barely legible grunge style. The ‘Destroyed’ weight is the only one without punctuation. Light, Medium, and Heavy all have the necessary characters for typing. Now, before you ask, yes these are free fonts. You can use them in anything you want, even if you sell your design, you just can’t redistribute these fonts, or host them on a server. Anyway, it’s my first font ever. I still have a lot to earn, but I hope you can give some feedback on how to make the next one better. If you have any problems installing, please let me know, but the fonts should work in both Windows and OS X. (not sure about Linux) Previews after the jump.
In the spirit of April Fools day, I wrote a tutorial on something I once considered “tricky.” If you’ve ever run into problems while trying to “Expand Appearance” on your brushes in Illustrator, you’re not alone. Expanding the appearance of your brush work has many helpful uses because you can get paths that outline your shapes, instead of just the brush stroke itself. This helps preserve the shape of your brush work when scaling and allows you to send files to print with outlined paths that prevents problems when the printers open your files, among other things. Let’s get started.
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- New Post: http://t.co/yq8XkgjK
- New Blog Post: How To Create A Set Of PS Brushes From A Single Texture Photo: Creating Photoshop brushes is rath... http://t.co/ljZ39pJf
- New Blog Post: Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Split Wood Textures: http://t.co/GcEkrC6z
- New Blog Post: Freebie Friday: 6 Abstract Lines Brushes: Happy Friday everyone! Today I’m releasing this set of... http://t.co/xhCZBTPq
