Friday Freebie: Barking up the Right Tree
It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for a Friday freebie. This week a collection of textures of wood bark and one shot of some imposing conifers. So naturally I’ll call this one “barking up the right tree.” Yes, I threw in the image of the trees just so I complete the corny joke. As they say in Mary Poppins, “there’s nothing like a good joke,” though this is really nothing like a good joke.
Download the files here (18mb)
I took these pictures at the beautiful Larabee State Park in Washington State. If you’re in the Pacific Northwest and you’re looking for a good place to camp, crab, or kayak I highly recommend it. You’re free to use these images as you see fit for both commercial and non-commercial projects free of charge. My gift for putting up with my bad pun.
woods textures by Devlin Donnelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Free blank thumbnails for book design.
When I design the cover for a book I like to read the book first, this is not always possible, but it is important to talk at length with the author and get the feeling and meaning of the book. The next step is researching the book to find related information about the topic or genre. Taking that information into account, I find it important to brainstorm. I like to get away from the computer and sketch out ideas on paper. One great exercise is to take a page full of blank thumbnails and quickly sketch out different ideas. It’s a fun way to find connections and meanings and develop a relationship between the book and the cover.
To make it easier for myself, I’ve created few pages of blank thumbnails that I use when I work on book jackets, and I’d like to share them with you. Included on the PDF are thumbnails for hard cover, paperbacks and for fun I threw in a tri-fold brochure. Download them, print them and brainstorm away! Please use them and pass them along if you found them useful.
Don’t for get to check out my portfolio and see some book jackets I’ve designed.
Twitter Background Templates for Illustator & Photoshop
Twitter is all the rage, but how can you make a great looking twitter page? Twitter gives the user limited, yet flexible design options. As social networking sites go, this gives you the ability to create a unique look unlike say, Facebook. But it keeps things much cleaner than the design nightmare that is MySpace.
Creating a cool background is the key to differentiating yourself on Twitter. After reading Jennifer Farley, of Laughing Lion Design‘s excellent tutorial on Sitepoint (click here to read it) about creating your own backgrounds for Twitter. I was inspired, and created some generic templates based on her tutorial. Download the my templates and use Jennifer’s tutorial and these templates and before you know it, you’ll have a background that will make everyone a twitter about. Oh, man, I can’t believe I actually used a lame twitter pun. Twitter puns are the lowest form of humor, it makes one sound like, dare I say it… a twit. I did it again!
Download these free templates for your own use, pass along the link if you like them. The templates for Photoshop and Illustrator with guides and are in the three most common browser sizes (800×600, 1024×768 & 1280×1024), though the 800×600 might be a bit useless, but you might as well have the complete set. These were created in the CS3, if anyone is interested I can save down the Illustrator version to an earlier version.
Also you can follow me on Twitter.
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