Posts Tagged ‘resources’
Designers Toolbox – Die lines, contracts and more!
Posted in Design, on March 26th, 2010 by Carlos.
Here’s a great resource site for you designers out there. Designers Toolbox includes both free and paid resources that you will no doubt find useful.
Perhaps one of the coolest things offered on this site (and it looks free so far from what I’ve been seeing) are die lines for various brochure sizes/foldings, as well as size templates for postcards, business cards, DVDs, etc. It’s nice to have these things all together on one site.
Paid resources include country maps (something that I always find myself needing from time to time), and contracts and forms. The contracts and forms are templates that you can customize for projects and clients you are working with.
The site is definitely worth checking out! [Designers Toolbox via 1stwebdesigner]
More Inexpensive Resources for Designers – Envato Marketplaces
Posted in Design, on March 19th, 2010 by Carlos.
Earlier this week I mentioned MediaLoot, a resource site for designers. Thanks to commentor Don, I checked out his recommendations – the Envato marketplaces. Envato runs many sites that you may have already heard of like psdtuts+. Their marketplace sites are a series of sites that offer design resources for many applications. GraphicRiver is a marketplace for layered Photoshop files, vectors, icon packs and more. Its sister sites like ActiveDen sell Flash and Flex resources, while others are dedicated to audio, video, 3D and more.
The prices for the their resources start at $1, $2, or $4 depending on the marketplace. For example, a site theme purchased from the ThemeForest marketplace starts at $4 seeing as how the files you’d be purchasing there are more sophisticated and involved. To get the lowest possible price, you need to prepay to add money to your account. Seeing as your account works across the various marketplace sites, you’re very likely to find things to spend your money on. For whatever reason I had been stuck on iStockphoto for quite some time even to buy vectors, but I’m starting to realize that there is a lot more choice out there at much more competitive prices. [Envato marketplaces wiki]
MediaLoot – Offering Premium Graphic Design Resources
Posted in Design, on March 17th, 2010 by Carlos.
I’ve run across a premium design resource site called MediaLoot that seems to provide an interesting value proposition. It is a subscription-based site (currently $14/month, though they say it will go up to $29/month) that offers graphic resources like textures, brushes, icon sets and even templates to its paying members. They do not limit how much you can download in a given month (which most other subscription services do), so theoretically you can sign up for a month, grab everything and cancel. But that wouldn’t be very nice – and besides, they are promising continual additions so you will have more and more reason to stay subscribed. I’m happy to see a company offer something like this because it really means that they will need to provide a quality product to keep its members interested. And I hope that it doesn’t get abused so that it forces them to change their model.
If you start to compare this against other subscription based services like istockphoto.com, MediaLoot is certainly a bargain. However at the moment their resource library isn’t very large and of course does not come close to the size of the istockphotos of the world. But that is part of their draw as they claim they will offer only premium resources, so you don’t have to sift through hundreds of sub-par images/graphics to find what you need.
Given I easy spend more than $14/ month on istockphoto.com, but could never justify their restrictive and expensive monthly subscription, I might give this one a shot. There are already several goodies that I see there that I could put to use in my projects. It will be interesting to see how this community grows and what it has to offer down the road.
Go check out their site to see what they have to offer. They also have some freebies that you can use as sort of trial-run. [MediaLoot]
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