“Buddycons” – Vector Social Media Icons

The icon set is called “Buddycons” and includes 126 vector social media icons. Included in the set are PNG versions of all 126 icons in both circular and rounded variations as well as a vector source file for easy resizing. The icons are free to use for personal and commercial usage, however, redistribution is not allowed.
“Buddycons” – Vector Social Media Icons

Free PSD Templates: vCard Personal Portfolio Minisite

This PSD design comes in 4 pages: Homepage (About), Works (Portfolio), Portfolio Pop-Up, and Contact.
All the pages are in Photoshop (.PSD) format with all layers neatly organized in layer groups for easy identification and editing of the logo, text and graphics.
Free PSD Templates: vCard Personal Portfolio Minisite

Modernist: Free WordPress Theme with Focus on Typography

This theme supports widgets, is SEO optimized and has clean and documented code. It loads very quickly, and has various WordPress 3.0 features. Works in IE 6+ and all versions of Safari/Firefox/Opera. The theme is absolutely free to use in private and commerical projects.
Modernist: Free WordPress Theme with Focus on Typography

Typominima: Free typography based minimal WordPress theme

Typominima is a free typography based, gorgeous, minimal WordPress theme fit for the writer inside you.
Typominima: Free typography based minimal WordPress theme

Coda Shortcuts Cheat Sheet (PDF)

Coda Shortcuts Cheat Sheet (PDF)

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

500 Free Icons Social Networking Icon Set from WPZOOM

This awesome icon set includes 100 icons of popular social networking websites. Every icon from WPZOOMs Social Networking Icon Set is available in 5 different sizes: 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24 and 16×16px (PNG & PSD format), which means you get 500 beautiful icons!

You are allowed to use these icons anywhere you want, however WPZOOM would appreciate linkback.
500 Free Icons Social Networking Icon Set from WPZOOM

WooCons – 170 Free Web Icons

This huge icon set, designed by Janik Baumgartner exclusively for WooThemes, consists of 170 icons, sized at 32×32px and are in PNG format.

This icon set has been released on the GNU General Public License.
WooCons – 170 Free Web Icons

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

You will find five fresh sets that that are perfect for web and mobile app developers, and all are completely free.

200+ Exclusive Free Icons: “Reflection”

You’ll find these icons great to use at small sizes, such as for website navigation, menus and more. Both vector and raster versions are included.

The set contains 208 icons and is available free of charge for personal and commercial projects, with attribution required.
200+ Exclusive Free Icons: “Reflection”

Free Mobile Berries

This set contains 80 icons, sized at 64×64px and are in .png format.
Free Mobile Berries

Content Management System Icon Set

This CMS Icon Set is made up of 12 high quality icons sized at 48×48px, and available in .png-format. The set was designed to be used in content management systems, but can also be useful for other user interface designs. You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions.
Content Management System Icon Set

Designer Icons – Professionally Hand-Crafted Free Icon Set

12 Professionally Hand-Crafted icons for designers and creatives. Each Icon is 32×32px with a transparent background.
Designer Icons – Professionally Hand-Crafted Free Icon Set

Tron Legacy Social Icons

This social media set has been inspired by the classic movie Tron. In total there are 20 icons, and the download package has the PNG, BMP, GIF, ICO and AI versions.
Tron Legacy Social Icons

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

License: The framework has been released as a complete web designer kit for free, even for commercial use.

You can download the UI Design Interface here: User Interface Design Framework
You can view the details of the framework below:

GUI Library

The GUI elements are based on common interface patterns (accordion, expandable panel, progress bar, tags, slide show…), that integrate usability good practices and are perfect for wireframes and interface design.

Vector Icons Library – 260 Minimal Icons for Free

This pixel precise icon collection have been created specifically for interface and web designers. They are based on a precise 16 pixels grid, which means that they stay clear and have a crisp look even at small sizes.

Graphic Styles Library

The Graphic Styles Library consists of 200 graphic styles for buttons, navigation menus or panels and 330 swatches harmonized with graphic styles for backgrounds, typography and other GUI interface elements.

You can download the UI Design Interface here: User Interface Design Framework

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

gCons – All-Purpose Icons for Designers and Developers

gCons are a set of free all-purpose 32×32px icons for designers and web developers consisting of 100 icons. The icons come in 12 different colors and are available in PSD, PNG, JPG and GIF formats.
gCons – All-Purpose Icons for Designers and Developers

PixeloPhilia2

This set contains 44 beautifully crafted icons designed specifically for software and web developers.
PixeloPhilia2

ComFi Telecom Icons

ComFi Telecom Icons

Sketchy Social Media Icons

Every icon in this set are in .PNG format (making them easy to edit) and include four sizes for each icon: 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 57×57.
Sketchy Social Media Icons

Rubber Stamp Style Social Media Icons

The Rubber Stamp Style Social Media Icons set contains 12 creative icons in .png format and sized at 256×256px.
Rubber Stamp Style Social Media Icons

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

spirit20 Mini Pixel Icons

The spirit20 icon set consists of almost 500 transparent PNGs at 20×20 pixels, and is completely free to use for both personal and commercial projects. No attribution is required.
spirit20

Boolean: The Pixel Icon City

Boolean: The Pixel Icon City set consists of 100 icons, all in PNG format and sized at 16×16px. These icons are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
Boolean: The Pixel Icon City

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

The icon set is created from scratch in illustrator. The available sizes are 32×32, 48×48, 64×64 and 128×128. All the icons are in PNG format, so they will blend in any kind of background.

Download

If you want to link the icons please refer to the post.

Here is the process for creating an icons like this. We will use twitter icon for simple and fast procedure.

Open up illustrator. Draw A rectangle using Rectangle Tool with #9DDAE9 Fill and #E6E6E6 Stroke

Using Type tool write out “t”. We are using Pico Black All font. It is the twitter font. Move the around wherever you want.

Change the “t’ color to #2DCBEC, which is darker than the background. Now select the background and go to Effect> Stylize > Scribble. Here is the Settings.

Now Select the Letter and do the same thing.  Yo can play around with the settings and change it as you prefer . Here is Settings for the letter.

Now here is the Result.

For the rest of the icons, you have to draw each shapes apply gradients and effects . That’s all. Hope You enjoyed this post.

By Kawsar Ali ( Desizn Tech and desizntech@twitter)

Though these plugins might offer quicker ways of executing common filter and photo manipulations effects. In this round up, I’ll be highlighting some free plugins that are useful for your design projects or for your pleasure. After long time searching on the web, sieving all through the mediocrity, I dare say these free plugins will be worth your time.

Ulead Particle Plugin

We start off with the Ulead Particle plugin that’s accessible from the Filter menu. This plugin contains a range of effects such as Rain, Bubbles, Snow, Fire, Smoke, and Clouds.

In the image below, I used the customizable Bubble Effect to engulf the image in bubbles. It also comes complete with the image’s reflection on the bubbles themselves. The Density controls the number of Bubbles, the Variance sets different sizes for each Bubbles and the Reflection sets the visibility of the image reflected on the Bubbles. Also, each Bubbles can be positioned or edited individually from the preview window with the mouse.

The Rain Effect offers a quicker way to add rain to your images to varying degrees. Be it a light shower or a heavy storm.

A light drizzle:

Increasing the Density and Background Blur gives you the look of a heavy shower.

Ulead Fantasy Warp Plugin

This plugin offers a number of templates for patterns effects. By filling a shape with the Custom Pattern or any picture you choose.

By going to Filter>Ulead Effects>Fantasy Warp, you can select the Pattern type for the corresponding effect type.

The result below. Though there’s a similar process you use can use in photoshop to achieve just about the same effect by going to Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates.

More Pattern effects:

The Patterns plugin does have a pretty interesting extra feature and that is, it can create animated GIF files just by dragging each pattern you create to the Storyboard pane. When done, hit Animation and save the file to the folder destination of your choice. My created GIF ended up as a 1.6 mb file from a 500 by 500 document.

*Note: in the Animation options, the more frames you add, the animation gets slower.

Luce

Luce is a plugin created by Antonino Perricone and it can be downloaded from his website amicoperry.altervista.org/luce.

This nice plugin is about the use the rays of light for a ‘devastating’ illumination effect. A unique feature is that the rays of light can be set to radiate from a focal point and can also radiate from behind objects.

From Filter>L’amico Perry>Luce, select the Light type as Point and Algorithm type as Zero, then place your cursor on the object you wish the light rays to emanate from.

This is the cool resulting effect:

Changing the Algorithm type to “Light from,” gives the result of the light rays over the objects in the picture. The Luce effect also works for text and single objects with plain backgrounds.

Redfeid Set of Plugins

Though this is not an entirely free plugin as it is a demo. I just couldn’t leave it out of this plugins’ roundup because the artistic value it brings.The Redfield website does sports very few totally free plugins.

The effect below is the Umatrix. You can see that a demo watermark was embedded in the image. Download at www.redfieldplugins.com/downloads

From the Layer Visibility sub-menu, there’s a large gallery of effects that can be selected. This one’s Grid.

My amateur attempt in landscape photography.

The Fractalius effect result (this one’s called Shaggy).

Still under Fractalius option is the Crayon Wide:

RetroDots.

This plugin comes with a range of options for editing dots:its size,border colour, fill colour, direction of dots and so on. A similar Photoshop Filter that comes close in nearly emulating the effects is the Pixilate Filter. But it doesnt offer much customization.

You can select the target object in the picture to match the colours of the dots.

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You get this result when you set the Outside Properties to “Input image.”

Photobox

This isn’t a plugin as such, but a Photoshop Action that transforms the layers of your images into a 3D box.. I added it to this roudup because it was worth mentioning I believe.

You can download it from www.turningturnip.co.uk/photoshop/photoshop-actions. To get started, just unzip the file to “C://Program Files/(username)/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop/Presets/Photoshop Actions.” With the image(s) you would like to transform opened in photoshop, go to Window>Actions to reveal the Actions Palette.

Click the small arrow on top right side of the palette and select Load Actions. Also note that your document must have a default background. This Action is great if you want to create something like a box package for a product.

By David Ella Ella

For today’s news we have a great collection of useful Photography cheat-sheets, visit the resources for the full articles and download pages.

Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier

Here is a list of all the cheat sheets available from this resource: Portrait Lighting Cheat Sheet Card; The Photographic Cheat Sheet by Gordon McKinney; 49 Photo Tips Cheat Sheet; Light Falloff Cheat Sheet Card; Photography Cheat sheet; PhotoBert Cheatsheets; Reflector Card Cheat Sheet.

You can download the all of the photography cheat sheets from here: Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier.

12 Extremely Helpful Photo Editing App Cheat Sheets

Here is a list of all the cheat sheets available from this resource: Adobe Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts; Photoshop Lasso, Brush and Pen Tool Cheatsheets; Photoshop Elements 7 For Dummies Cheet Sheet; Photoshop Toolbox Reference; Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Cheat Sheets.

You can download the all of the photo editing cheat sheets from here: 12 Extremely Helpful Photo Editing App Cheat Sheets.

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Who wouldn’t want these on their bookshelf. Read further on in this post to find out how to enter and, hopefully, win these fantastic books.

Here is an overview of the books you can win:

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

jQuery: Novice To Ninja

jQuery: Novice to Ninja, from sitepoint.com, will show you how to unleash the amazing power of jQuery. In this easy-to-follow guide, you’ll master all the major tricks and techniques that jQuery offers—within hours.

jQuery has quickly become the JavaScript library of choice, and it’s easy to see why. This JavaScript framework dramatically improves how you add interactivity and animation to your website.

Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog

Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility.

Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more.

Digging into Wordpress

There is much to learn about the World’s most popular publishing platform. From your first steps of learning about WordPress all the way through maintaining a site throughout the years, this book is packed with truly practical information.

Rocket Surgery

Rocket Surgery, written by Steve Krug, it’s a how-to book that explains exactly how to do your own web site usability testing.

The Winner has been selected!

Thanks for your interest guys and congrats to the winner – @chadMuelle!