Resources
Free Stock Images and Textures
Find a list of free stock images and other freebies here.
Photoshop Guides and Grids
If you want layout options like InDesign in Photoshop, install this extension:
http://www.cameronmcefee.com/guideguide/
Website Icons
Find the best icons for your web site designs. Search for keywords and find all the icons.
Create Favicons
Favicons are the little icons you see right next to the url in your browser window and when you add a website to your favorites.
You can create a favicon by designing an image 16×16 and upload it to one of the online favicon generators ( http://www.favicongenerator.com/ ), download it to your root
and insert this code into the header:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" >
Or you can download a photoshop add-on to be able to save ico files.
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/
Web Fonts
So far fonts for websites were dependent on the users computer and which fonts were in the code. If the font is installed on the end-users computer, the font showed like intended. If not, the font would change to the default font. So rather then guessing what the design might look like on the visitors computer web designers would use common fonts to make sure they would know what it would like without surprises.
Now google has introduced web font that can be linked in the code and doesn’t need to be installed on the end-users computer to show.
We give it a thumbs-up!!! Find out how to work with google web fonts.
Testing Websites in IE
As a web designer I have always stuggled with the way Internet Explorer renders the websites. Every verison renders the page different, especially IE6 and IE7.
Not knowing, what your customer uses, it can be tricky since it might look great on your computer but not on theirs.
The website browsershots.org is great but it takes an aweful long time to load and you only have a few reqests before it asks you to upgrade to a pro-account.
In addition to that it’s not that user friendly. All I’m really worried about is IE since these are the once with the most bugs.
This great free program lets you enter the URL and you can see all the IE versions and how they render your website very fast.
MyDebugBar
Free Fonts
Are you bored with useing the same old fonts? Are you looking to enhance your graphic design projects with some great fonts?
Dafont.com is an open resource font library. You can download font for free for personal use and sometimes even commerical use. Make sure to read the instructions for use-terms.
Royalty Free Images and Photography
Every great web site has great images. Find free images here at Stock Exchange