*** From the Archives ***
This article is from December 17, 2012, and is no longer current.
Free For All: Finding That Special Free-One for You
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Color Inspiration, Community, and Love
Looking for hues and kisses of inspiration? Craving color comraderie? Looking to break old patterns by creating and sharing new ones?
Forget Matchprint.com. Ignore TintHarmony.com. Never mind PaletteofFish.com. ColourLovers.com is the location to meet that special someswatch. With more than 3 million lovers, only ColourLovers.com can help you find that one and only who puts a tint in your eye. Every day lovers like you explore and share the more than 6 million colors, 2.5 million palettes, and 3 million patterns. Come find your soulshade!
Convert Color to Just About any System
Even with the preeminent place to meet and fall in love with new colors there can be obstacles to new relationships with swatches. Even the most perfect relationship can be hindered by language and cultural differences. When you meet that special someswatch that gets your ink flowing, don’t let anything stand in the way of your (color) love!
Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator can easily convert colors between RGB, HSB, CMYK, Web HTML HEX, and various ink color libraries like Pantone and Toyo, which is great if you only need colors for print, photography, or the Web. But what about those times when a client asks you to match its brand colors into plastic dyes for manufacturing or into wall paints so that the newly redesigned lobby can reinforce the client’s brand? That’s where the EasyRGB.com RGB to Commercial Tints application can be so handy. Just enter your starting color either as RGB or HTML HEX, choose a target color collection from a list of over two dozen, and click start. RGB to Commercial Tints will then deliver converted matches and near matches. It even offers a way to quickly find shades harmonious with the returned colors. And isn’t color harmony what each of us is really after in this lifetime?
20 Web and User Interface Templates
Fall in love with Web and user interface design all over again. Or, at least, don’t reinvent the wheel for every Web and mobile design project. Whether you need inspiration or a turnkey design, use any of these primo free templates as-is or merely as a jumping off point for your own creation. Naturally you’ll need a recent version of Photoshop to make the relationship work with these free PSDs.
Gridly (Free Account Required for Download)
Orange (Free Account Required for Download)
Wordy (Free Account Required for Download)
Meet Your Type
“Why settle for casual flirtation when looking for a long-lasting relationship? Finding the perfect match is easy if you know the rules. Meet Your Type will help you overcome common obstacles, and keep your heart thumping for your one true love: typography.” That’s the introduction to Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Love & Typography, a free PDF-based ebook from the Font Shop. Not only is Meet Your Type beautifully designed, but it’s an excellent primer on the subject of typography, why we choose typefaces (aka “fonts”) for different types of messages, and why typeface choice is essential to effective communication. Even if you already know everything to be found in Meet Your Type it’s an excellent and engaging read to give to your clients to help them make sense of your refusal to set the entire catalog in Comic Sans or design the logo in Papyrus.
What can I find free for you? Want more free fonts? More Photoshop brushes? How about more online applications that do this or that for free? Tell me in the comments what you’d like to see in future installments of Free for All, and I’ll do my best bloodhound impression to track it down for you.
Please note: Free for All will often link to resources hosted on external Web sites outside of the control of CreativePro.com. At any time those Web sites may close down, change their site or permalink structures, remove content, or take other actions that may render one or more of the above links invalid. As such neither Pariah S. Burke nor CreativePro.com can guarantee the availability of the third-party resources linked to in Free for All.
Slideshow image from Colourlovers.com, by mharel & fra.
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