Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Google has launched a web fonts site that lets you browse through hundreds of free, open source fonts that are optimized for the web. You simply pick the fonts you like, review them used with actual text (no lorem ipsum), then click the ‘use’ button. You can choose from plain, bold, italic and see the impact on page load time and then download the fonts, or simply add a snippet of code to the header of your website to refer directly to the font.

Looking for a set of gradients in a variety of colors and styles? Check out DezinerFolio’s set of 130 free gradients. These aren’t images, but fully scalable gradients in .grd format, ready to use for any of your Photoshop projects. Use these gradients for backgrounds, buttons, tabs and more.

Get a selection of simple but very useful ready made colorful rollover CSS3 buttons at tympanus.com. You get a selection of 20 buttons in various shades and different font styles and effects. Be sure to check the demo.

A fun way to browse through Twitter networks is to use neuroproductions visual Twitter browser. You simply add a Twitter username and that account’s network pops up, including avatars. Screen space is limited, so not all members in your network are displayed. You can then click on the avatars to keep browsing their networks. This Twitter app is smaller than 5k and just enough to browse through your Twitter friends. When you’re done playing with that, check out Kris Temmerman’s other visual experiments projects.

Our newest friends on Twitter

It can be time consuming to find just the right icon or design one yourself; if you’re looking for an easy way to get icons for your design work, for personal or commercial use, including icons in the public domain, visit IconFinder. This icon search engine provides an easy way to find high quality icons for your web design, presentations or reports. You can search alphabetically and through tags besides the standard search functions and you can also browse through popular icon sets. The site makes it easy to contact designers directly if needed. Before using any icons, be sure to read the license.

As opposed to being limited by the many preset grids available, you can simply define the layout width and the number of columns you want and the Gridulator will show all possible grids (incl. gutter widths) with nice round integers. You won’t get decimal results as with some desktop grid creators. Once you’ve set your options – there are shortcuts available – Gridulator will create full-size PNGs grids that are perfect for web design for use in CSS, Photoshop etc.

This is a simple app yet extremely useful.

What do you need a blood splatter brush for? A game, an album cover, a poster? Whatever dark use you’re planning on, the dried blood splatters on photoshoptutorials may be just right. If you need some fresher blood, try Shad0w-GFX’s brush or circle–of–fire’s brush on deviantart.com. Be sure to check acceptable uses of any blood splatter brushes; some may be for personal use only, while others allow all uses, including commercial.

If you have a large repetitive task at hand, or you find yourself doing the same type of editing over and over again, Photoshop Actions can be an amazing time saver. You can string together a series of tasks, like tool actions, menu commands and other editing features and record and save them as an action (Like Automator scripts on a Mac).

Photoshop comes with some actions already installed, or you can create your own actions to change the size of an image, apply filters and effects and then save your files in a specific format. Or click over to Visual Blast Magazine for a great collection of customized Photoshop Actions from around the web, like puzzle action, crystal ball, 3d cube and skin softening actions, postage stamp and vintage and curled edge actions.

You’ve been using free or premium WordPress templates for a while and have learned how to modify them, change their design and add functionality to them, and now you’re ready to build your own theme. With Themeshaper’s WordPress theme tutorial you’ll be able to create a theme for yourself with all the bells and whistles just how you like it. Your finished theme will be search engine optimized, include google-supported Microformat markup, have valid and logical semantic markup structure than can be used to create any layout, smart default CSS layouts, 2 widget areas coded to disappear when they’re empty and a lots of the typical WordPress stuff you expect from a theme.

“Chronicling the most curious, creative, and notable projects, stories, and events of the graphic design industry on a daily basis” is how Underconsideration’s Quipsologies is describing what they’re doing. Recent entries sure to inspire more great designs include products like a crumplable and waterproof maps, magazine title and logo designs, designs that sprung from the former Soviet Union, Susan Kare’s signed prints classic Apple icons, CMYK soft drinks, profiles of the Google Doodlers, different ways to think of six-pack abs, defunct airline designs, Drawing Exercises in Excel, and so on. Great way to wake up and inspire your designer brain!