Cool Things Part EIGHT: A couple design-y things
On today’s episode of Cool Stuff I Like On the Internet I want to talk about some design-y type resources and inspiration.
First is Colourlovers. A good friend of mine introduced me to this site a year or so ago and I’ve found it incredibly useful. When I do any sort of project where a color scheme is useful I like to just search through the palettes and open ones that jump out at me in new tabs, then look through them individually and narrow them down to a few I’d like to try. As soon as I started paying more attention to how colors worked together in my work the quality got a lot better.
Also DeviantArt, particularly the resources section. DeviantArt is a site for artists to gather and post and review each other’s work. In Resources you can find some great tutorials and things like textures, fonts, Photoshop brushes and textures from people on DA, much of which is under creative commons licenses (though look out for people who have lists of restrictions on their profiles — well, I don’t mean LOOK OUT like BEWARE, but pay attention so you don’t disrespect their wishes). I’ve gotten a ton of textures at DeviantArt and even miscellaneous things like sets of emoticons for a forum I run. True, there are better sources out there for things like stock images (such as sxc.hu) but if you have the patience to sift through DA you can find some really unique things there. A lot of people who post things there, in my experience, are students, so you can find some really good quality work from talented people who you might end up buying stock from in a few years. Not to mention, besides resources, there is a lot of excellent work of all sorts on display there to be admired and perhaps spark inspiration.