A Spare Update — No. 4

December 18, 2012 at 10:23 pm

I start­ed writ­ing this for last mon­th’s Headline Heads Up and did­n’t fin­ish, but here it is now. Feeling bad, I decid­ed to throw in an early Christmas present for those that cel­e­brate. (I recent­ly sort­ed out my RSS and got it loaded into Google Reader so now time just gets away from me as I con­tin­u­al­ly have inspir­ing things to look at and resources to read and eval­u­ate. I guess it’s time to work on some cura­to­r­i­al dis­cre­tion and time man­age­ment.) But here’s to get­ting back on track with a wrap up of awe­some fonts and fun links to check out.

 

Desk

Foundry : UPPERTYPE
Designer(s) : Pedro Lobo
Cost: €10

Desk Typeface by UPPERTYPE - Alphabet Example, Narrow Shadowed

Desk by UPPERTYPE makes the list this month because it’s a bold state­ment. It does­n’t try to be a lot of things; Desk is built for dis­play pur­pos­es — end of dis­cus­sion. It has upper­case, numer­als, and punc­tu­a­tion. There isn’t a filled in vari­ant, just the shad­owed ver­sion shown.  The nar­row­ness leans slight­ly art deco but the curves and shad­ow update it a bit. Somehow I read both high fash­ion cat­a­log and emo band nos­tal­gia album cover.

Continue read­ing →

Six Tree Bark Photoshop Brushes

October 1, 2012 at 8:12 am

It’s time for anoth­er free­bie of Photoshop brush­es. This time it is six tree bark brush­es. These have lots of tex­ture with some mot­ley spots from the lit­tle bits of moss grow­ing on the trees. All six are large at 1944 x 2500 pix­els and have areas of low con­trast and high contrast.

Terms of Use
This prod­uct may be used free of charge for per­sonal or com­mer­cial pur­poses. Attri­bu­tion is not nec­es­sary but you can always give some link-love to www.sparetype.com — it is always appreciated.

Pre­view

Photoshop Brushes - Tree Bark Preview 1
Photoshop Brushes - Tree Bark Preview 2

 

Down­load the pack­aged brush file! (.ZIP — 23MB)

 

Sixteen Free Jewel Tone Photoshop Gradients

July 20, 2012 at 8:29 am

I real­ized yes­ter­day I have been draw­ing on the same col­lec­tion of gra­di­ents as a go to resource and decid­ed to build a new basic set of col­ors. The col­ors I chose are very vibrant and sat­u­rat­ed — thus I am call­ing them jewel tones. I also worked the bright­ness and sat­u­ra­tion across the set so all six­teen are nice and consistent.

Download the Photoshop gradient file here.

Jewel Tone Gradients Preview - 16 Free Photoshop Gradients - Vibrant, Saturated Rainbow of Colors

20 Wood Grain Photoshop Brushes

April 16, 2012 at 7:40 am

I love the stuff released over on Bittbox and I’m not ashamed to admit that a ton of my inspi­ra­tion and source mate­r­i­al comes from such an awe­some site. But now it’s my turn to give a lit­tle back to the design com­mu­ni­ty. Today I’m releas­ing twen­ty (that’s right, 20!) wood grain brush­es. Taken from sev­er­al images of a set of built-in cab­i­nets and doors, these brush­es span from sub­tle to high-contrast. Some of the doors had lit­tle nicks and scratch­es which add a lit­tle bit of char­ac­ter as well.

Terms of Use
This prod­uct may be used free of charge for per­son­al or com­mer­cial pur­pos­es. Attribution is not nec­es­sary but you can always give some link-love to www.sparetype.com — it is always appreciated.

Preview

Wood Grain Brushes Preview - Photoshop Brushes, Gimp Brushes, Wood Grain Texture

 

Download the packaged brush file! (.ZIP — 60MB)

 

Responsive Web Design Sketch Paper

January 17, 2012 at 11:32 pm

Responsive Web Design Sketch Paper Blank - Wire-framing, Design sketching, Layout drawingResponsive Web Design Sketch Paper Interface - Wire-framing, Design sketching, Layout drawingI sat down today to start sketch­ing some ideas for a respon­sive web site design. Imagine my sur­prise when I searched for a sim­ple, letter-sized tem­plate of win­dow sizes only to find one result. I want­ed some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, so I made my own.

These pages are for early stage wire-framing and sketch­ing since the win­dows are scaled 25% — 50% of what they will actu­al­ly become. I found it use­ful to have them all on one page so I could eas­i­ly see the dif­fer­ences in aspect ratio and size. I did­n’t spend much time sketch­ing on these pages before mov­ing to larg­er sheets with grids, but they helped me get ideas start­ed for fur­ther refine­ment in that next stage.

There are screen sizes of 1440 x 900, 1024 x 768, and 800 x 600 scaled down to 25%. Then there is a smart­phone and tablet size (based on the res­o­lu­tions of the iPhone4S and iPad2) scaled to 50%. There is one PDF with blank out­lines and a sec­ond PDF with gener­ic scroll bar and head­ers blocked in for consideration.

Let me know if you find them as help­ful as I did in the comments.