Inspiration (ĭn'spe-rā'shun): a) Stimulation of the mind or emotions to a high level of feeling or activity. b) The condition of being so stimulated by an external source. There's a tight line between inspiration and imitation. Inspiration means captivate an idea and develop it further. Imitation means identify an idea and use it.

Read more...

Brusheezy, Vecteezy and Fresheezy. Like their proud parents say, "Stupid Names"... But cool free resources. We featured one of those (Brusheezy) in our yesterday's article on free Photoshop brushes. Why not take a tour and learn to know the two other brothers? Vecteezy is an index of free vector graphics, while Fresheezy (as the name doesn't say) does the same for Wordpress themes.

» Brusheezy, Vecteezy and Fresheezy

One of the most powerful features in Photoshop is the brush tool. Thanks to its numerous settings, it can create an infinity of shapes, effects or textures. The sites we're featuring today offer free brushes for your favourite graphic toolbox. As usual, don't forget the read the licencing terms before you download and use what you'll find on these sites.

» Designfruit provides many amazing brushes for Photoshop and png files for other editing softwares.

» Brusheezy is a place where artists can download the best free Photoshop brushes and patterns on the internet. This site is updated every day with new material.

» Adam Woodhouse released many sets of quality brushes including Web 2.0 Style Brushes with different shapes, and many dynamically generating gradients, Grunge Brushes and Retro Brushes.

» BittBox provides a lot of free and original source files of photoshop brushes.

» Hawksmont Universe offers over 30 sets of Photoshop brushes.

» PSBrushes offers more than 500 free high-quality Photoshop brushes, conveniently sorted in themes.

» R0man.de's set of free Photoshop brushes, hosted on DeviantArt.

» EasyElements free Photoshop brushes.

» GetBrushes.com is a free Photoshop brushes directory, featuring carefully handpicked collection from the net, all free to download and use.

» Photoshop Support provides plenty of high-resolution brushes.

Bringing quality to the community, as they always do, Smashing Magazine released a free RSS/Feed icon set (designed by Dirceu Veiga from Brazil). The set contains 8 icons which you can use for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free. The icons are available for both Mac and Win-users in resolutions 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px.

Those guys love high-quality freebies. Over the last years, they've featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place, which is why they support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

» Get the exclusive free RSS/Feeds icon set

Maintaining graphic-intensive websites can be a pain, every webmaster knows that. Having to go through the painstaking process of manually creating thumbnails is a boring and time-consuming duty we'd all like to get rid of (even if we have spent countless hours developing state-of-the-art photoshop actions sets for that purpose). Well, guess what? The time of pain is over!

While looking for interesting on-the-fly image resizing techniques, we came accross a ridiculously easy-to-use PHP script for resizing images the smart way. Created by the Joe Lencioni, the guy behind Shifting Pixel, this little piece of gold consists of a single PHP script, that you'll put anywhere on your web server along with a companion folder named "imagecache". And then you let the magic begin.

All you have to do from now — and believe us, it's really as easy as that — is to src to the script in every <img> tag you want to get a thumbnail for, with the proper querystring. Your tag will then look like something similar to:

<img src="image.php/output_image_name.ext?
     width=nnn&height=nnn&
     image=path_to__image.ext" />

Oh boy, it works like a charm!

But wait, there's more: thanks to this script, you can also get square thumbnails. These add a definitive classy touch to your pages, and just require a simple extra "&cropratio=1:1" argument in the call. Isn't the world a beautiful place? And since the usage of the script is fully transparent for the developer, it can be called from any host language — as long as your webserver runs PHP and GD and your language outputs valid (X)HTML!

» Download Smart Image Resizer

Today, we're discussing photos -- free stock photos, to be precise. Another "holy grail" for webdesigners out there, when you consider the price you pay "respectable" stock merchants like Corbis, Photodisc or iStockPhoto.

Once again, there are many valuable resources on the web that provide access to tons of free images, illustrations and photos. We'll be listing just a few of those, but you can certainly find more by googling a bit. So if you find the fine gem, don't hesitate to share it with us so we can update our list for the benefit of the community.

» Stock Xchange
» StockVault
» EveryStockPhoto
» Public Domain stock photos
» FreeRange
» Free Stock Photography
» MorgueFile
» Image*After
» Creative Commons Picture Search
» Flickr
» Kavewall Stock
» FreeFoto
» OpenPhoto
» Free Photos Bank
» Pixel Perfect Digital
» YotoPhoto
» Deviantart

Recently, we wrote an article on icons repositories, and we just realized that we forgot to mention a major one: Iconfinder.

Iconfinder is a search engine that searches only for icons, that are free for download and licensed under GPL or BSD licenses (most of them). Search results are developer oriented (searching for “pirate” icons will get you no results, but searching for “database” icons will get you many).

Iconfinder is very easy to use and results come with icon previews, links to download and information about licenses. All icons are provided as PNG files with transparency support. This service is still in beta, but works pretty well. A search cloud is also provided to tell you whats popular, and a blog informs you about what's going on in the labs.

» Iconfinder, a search engine for icons

Every developer in the world knows that a picture is worth a thousand word, that's why they use icons to represent common actions, notification of important concepts, and also to illustrate their applications -- online or not. So we all agree that icons are essential. However we also agree that having beautiful icons is a definitive advantage since it can be used to attract the user's attention where we need it.

We carefully hand-picked some high-quality icon libraries for you, so you can use them in your daily work. As usual, make sure you read the license agreements, since not all the packages are free for professional use.

» Tango Icon Library

» InterfaceLift icons for Windows and MacOSX

» Social Bookmarks icons

» Famfamfam Icons

» Zeus Box Studio's feed icons

» Pixelgirl's icons

» Sphere Graphics icons

» GoSquared vector icons

» Pixelpress icon set (for mac, in .dmg format)

» Everaldo's YellowIcon library

We'll stop here for now, but we'll continue to update this post with new repositories as we find them. However we have a little tip for you: there are thousands of icon repositories on the web, many of which hold quality icons for MacOSX. Despite the fact that OSX uses its own custom format for storing icon definitions, there is a quick and easy way to convert that format to PNG. Of course, you'll need OSX... but that shouldn't be a major issue!