The Designer’s Toolkit
I subscribe to a ton of blogs centered on design and find them extremely useful. It’s a daily routine for me to check my feeds to see new stuff. I thought I’d share with you guys some of the sites I subscribe to. This list is a sampling of tutorial sites, design inspiration and freebies. This is not all of the design stuff I subscribe to, just a sampling. If you want to view everything in my design list, visit my shared Google Reader Feeds, listed at the bottom of this page.
Great Tutorial Sites
A blog/Photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner.
“Through our blog we aim to provide helpful and informative posts that meet the needs of our readers. The majority of our readers are web designers or online entrepreneurs of some sort.”
Smashing Magazine is an incredible wealth of tutorials, free stuff, inspiration, and interviews. It’s worth looking at throughout the day.
Photoshop tutorials are categorized into 3D Effect, Abstract Effect, Drawing Effect, Photo Effect, Text Effect, Texture & Patterns and User Interface Design.
Tons of tutorials and freebies here.
An internet tutorial index catering to graphic designers, webmasters and programmers, with 5633 tutorials listed in 43 categories.
Fabio Sasso originally created this site so that he could compile all of his ideas and things he had seen so that he would not forget them. Abduzeedo primarily focuses on Photoshop tutorials.
Design Inspiration
Behance is a place for designers to showcase their work. There are some stunning designs here.
Card Observer is a new site that showcases well designed business card designs.
Free Stuff
Background Textures via Flickr
Flickr group dedicated to…wait for it….textures.
Tons (I mean tons) of resources here. PSD files, vector images, patterns, brushes, stock photography and more. For my money (free), it’s better than istockphoto.
40 High Quality PSD Downloads via 10Steps
Lost and Taken is dedicated to giving away some of the most high quality textures that you’ve ever seen (all copyright-free).
Texture King
This site hasn’t been updated in a really, really long time. Even so, it still has some great textures to work with.
This is a great little site. Amazing Photoshop brushes…of all types of categories.
A place for artists to download and vote for their favorite custom Photoshop brushes and patterns.
Vecteezy is an index of free vector graphics.
Share with us!
If there are any sites not listed here that you’ve found useful, please let us know. We’d love to grow our list of designer resources.
For additional helpful sites, check out my Google Reader page.
About the Author
Bobby Chandler Has Written 67 Articles For Us!
Bobby is the founder of ChurchKreatives and the Director of Communications at Sugar Creek Baptist Church in Sugar Land, TX. His background includes serving as a pastor, church planter, and art director at an ad agency.
