35 Web Images & Photography tips, tutorials, techniques & resources
Free Hi Resolution Wood Textures
"I took the camera for a trip around the neighborhood and captured some wood textures that I hope everyone will enjoy. They’re all 2500px wide, and I tried to get a pretty good variety."
Top 20 Free Vector Resources for Designers
63 Impressive Website Background-Images: Trends, Resources and Tutorials
"In this post you will see how web designers had carefully created background images to influence how the websites is visually distinct but considerate of their goals in engaging and facilitating the design elements and content."
26 Free Icon Sets We Love
"We love icons a lot. Here are some of our 26 of our favorite, free icon sets from all over the web. Check them out and help spread the icon love."
Free Vector Maps and Country Outlines
"This collection of free vector graphics features an extremely useful compilation of country and map outlines from across the web. A great addition to any designer’s toolbox!"
Mac OS X Leopard: Designer’s Guide to Icons
"To get really beautiful icons, Apple recommends that you let a professional designer create your icons. Despite all the eye candy and realism that is possible to apply to icons, less is more. Strive for a simple solution using one easily recognisable object. The basic shape or silhouette of your icon can help users to quickly identify it. If you aim for an international market, your symbols need to also be internationally recognizable providing Worldwide Compatibility."
Where can I find textures and background images?
"Below you’ll find a hand-picked selection of some useful resources related to textures and background images. We tried to pick the best ones which offer quality and professional content without annoying advertisements."
Social Bookmarking Icons Collection
"Attractive social bookmarking icons are a factor in website visitors clicking on them and help everyone to share, bookmark & promote your content. WebResourcesDepot have collected these beautiful social bookmarking icon sets."
Making ‘IE6-friendly’ PNG8 Images
"While we’re never going to be able to reproduce the transparent shadow in IE6, we do need a way to generate a lot more of the blending colors along the edge. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to bring a tiny slither of the background inside our shape."
morgueFile
"The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. This is the world wide web's morguefile."
Nuclear Warning Vectors
"A couple days ago I posted a tutorial on making a Nuclear Warning Symbol in Illustrator using a simple brush. As a follow up this week I’m posting two variations of the result of that tutorial. The first is the normal Nuclear symbol, and the second is a grungified version. Have fun."
10 free dirty and grunge textures
"Here is a list of 10 amazing grunge textures from our gallery that you might have missed."
Awesome up your design with A.B.
"A new trend in web design is the rise of ambient — or auroral — backgrounds (A.B. for short). One of the spearheads of the new trend is Drew Wilson and with this tutorial Drew pulls back the curtain and lets you in on all his little secrets."
Urban Dirty
"Urban Dirty is a regularly updated online photo library featuring 324 gritty, grimy and sometimes slimy images for use in design and artwork creation. For example, here's a desktop wallpaper using this photo. View the images in small, medium or large, download or edit online and have fun with them."
Grunge Style In Modern Web Design
"Below we’ve collected everything you would ever need for a perfect design in a grunge style — design examples, free fonts, icons, textures, brushes and even few tutorials."
Wallpaper
"A selection of unique wallpaper designs that can be reproduced to any scale. These wallpaper patterns repeat on all sides so you can use them to fill custom shapes and backgrounds in your own designs."
35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
"Below we present 35 incredible free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons."
Icon Finder
Handy icon search engine.
Stock.XCHNG
"Welcome to Stock.XCHNG, the leading FREE stock photo site! Whether you just want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your personal photos with others, this is the site for you!"
Questions to Ask Yourself When a Design is Coming Up Short of Your Expectations
"In this post we’ll take a look at some questions to ask yourself when a design is not living up to your expectations. These questions focus primarily on the design, not necessarily the effectiveness of the site overall, the usability, or the content."
Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention
"Most web professionals are all too aware of the problems caused by hotlinkers. Leechers. Bandwidth thieves. People who use images hosted on your web server on their own pages. With PHP and mod_rewrite, you can disallow embedding and allow linking while automatically creating gallery pages for those direct linkers."
A Better Image Rotator
"The first image rotator made it easy to generate a random image on a web page, even if you had never worked with PHP before. The new, more powerful (but still dead easy) version uses a simple configuration file to create custom links, alt tags, titles, and even CSS styles for each image. Plus it handles differently sized images without a hiccup. Enjoy!"
If I Told You You Had a Beautiful Figure...
"Lay out images consistently across your site using a liitle clever JavaScript."
Random Image Rotation
"Readers return to sites that appear fresh and new on each visit. On a news site, magazine, or blog, stories or headlines will be updated frequently. But how can static sites keep that fresh feeling? Dan Benjamin’s free image randomizer may do the trick, and you needn’t be a programmer to install it."
Cross-Browser Variable Opacity with PNG: A Real Solution
"Think you’re stuck with wimpy GIFs and their rigid binary transparency? Well, think again, Sunshine. Michael Lovitt shows how to overcome flaky browser support for PNG so you can take advantage of this graphic format’s lossless compression, alpha transparency, and variable opacity."
Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds
"Create a PNG that’s blended from transparent to white, use it as a background image, and rely on the background-color style to provide the other half of the blend."
A More Accessible Map
"Is there a way to display text-based data on a map, keeping it accessible, useful and visually attractive?"
High-Resolution Image Printing
"Your client looks up and says, “Why does our logo look funny when we print the pages?” Do you sigh dramatically, or learn about Ross Howard’s technique for printing high-resolution images via CSS? We vote for option B."
Spruced-Up Site Maps
"The clean-n-simple site map gets a nice haircut and and a shoe-shine as Kim Siever shows us how to hook custom bullet styles to troublesome nested lists."
Dynamic Text Replacement
"Let your server do the walking! Whether you’re replacing one headline or a thousand, Stewart Rosenberger’s Dynamic Text Replacement automatically swaps XHTML text with an image of that text, consistently displayed in any font you own. The markup is clean, semantic, and accessible. No CSS hacks are required, and you needn’t open Photoshop or any other image editor. Read about it today; use it on personal and commercial web projects tomorrow."
CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death
"Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution."
20 Vector Lines Swirls and Patterns
"20 Different swirls for use in backgrounds and for adding texture. Great for use in any vector illustration especially skys, space and anything techy."
24 Free High-Res Textures
"I've been playing with my camera and I have a bunch of High-Res textures for all of you!"
The Best Icon Search Engines and Features for Designers
"Icon Search Engines are brilliant time saving tools that have gained popularity because of the quality of icons they display."
31 Sources of Quality, Free Icons