Once again, we crawled the web to offer you a great collection of nothing but exclusive, high-quality free high-resolution textures and background images for your projects. As usual, don't forget to read the terms & usage conditions before including these textures into your professional work.

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The guys at Frexy really love icon design. In the past few months, Min Tran and Vu Tran have worked on two icon sets called “Bright!” and “Milky”, and now they happily release both as free resources for you.

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“Frilly bits” seems to aptly describe what are typically called ornaments, fleurons, vignettes, embellishments, or in some cases, frippery. Type ornaments, also termed printer’s ornaments, have been used in conjunction with type for literally hundreds of years. Of course, nowadays it’s all too easy to abuse these design elements, adding them merely for decoration rather than communication. But in the hands of an accomplished designer who knows how to use them appropriately and in moderation, type ornaments can serve to beautify and enhance a design.

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Let's start with the obvious: using one icon will always be better than writing many words. That's a well-known fact. The visual representation of a concept is assimilated more easily by the humain brain. Thus, icons remain the most effective way to symbolize actions, contexts or messages.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Recently, we wrote an article on icons repositories, and we just realized that we forgot to mention a major one: Iconfinder. It's time to fill the gap.

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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.

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