Free For All: Geeks and Goofs
Scientific and Technical Fonts
The mission of the STIX (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) project is to produce royalty free, high-quality fonts that include an extended set of glyphs (characters) to enable easy typesetting and publishing in digital and print media scientific, medical, and engineering formulae, notations, and schematics. The fonts are available free of charge to publishers and consumers of such technical materials—the latter to enable readers to fully experience electronic documents such as PDF, ePUB, and HTML documents.
In time, the STIX fonts will be available in fully hinted PostScript Type 1 and TrueType sets, but right now you can download them as 23 fonts in the more universal, cross-platform OpenType format.
Multicolr Search Lab
Looking for inspiration based on color? Idée indexed the colors in 10 million Flickr images licensed under a Creative Commons license. They then took those photos and built them into the color search engine Multicolr Search Lab. It lets you choose up to 10 different colors, each of which Multicolr will use to find Flickr images containing those colors, and produce a grid of matching images to inspire you. Many of the images can even be used directly in your projects, depending on their individual licenses.
Diagram Software
Creative pros often make diagrams: website content and structure charts, organizational charts, network resource diagrams, floorplans, and even decision-making flowcharts such as the diagram explaining when a designer should use Comic Sans. Most diagramming software, however, is not creative pro-friendly. Microsoft Visio is the best of breed, but few creative professionals want to learn it (or pay the $259.95 for it). Fortunately there is a free alternative: Gliffy.
Gliffy’s drag-and-drop, Web-based interface makes it a breeze to whip up almost any kind of chart. Start with one of Gliffy’s categorized templates, and then modify or remove elements and labels; add more from a library of high-quality, pre-designed components; and move components around to your heart’s content. When you’ve got the chart just the way you want it, you can take a screenshot of it for no charge, or, by initiating a premium account (free for 30 days), you can save the diagram for later modification, download, or instant publication on your blog. If you decide to stay and pay, Gliffy’s pricing structure is extremely reasonable, with a commercial, 1-user account costing only $5 per month. Academic users, who must prove their academic status, can get the same account for free.
Backgrounds Dotter
I started in the design business before the desktop publishing revolution, when color separations were cut by hand; multi-column text was the result of single-column typeset printouts waxed and pasted by hand onto a grid; and halftone shading was usually accomplished by cutting and burnishing pre-printed sheets of adhesive manufactured by Zip-A-Tone. I stocked every dot size and every spacing width of Zip-A-Tone’s cut-and-stick halftones. I used them frequently to create toned backgrounds in one color, or, by layering multiple screens on color separation overlays, two, three, or even four colors.
The days of hand-cutting halftone screens and color separations are long gone, thank goodness, but with them went the ability to easily create halftone screens. Photoshop and Illustrator have features that let you create the effect of halftone screens, but those features require a fair amount of time and effort to produce standard halftones. If you, too, like the look of halftones in artwork but don’t want to mess around with the tweaking and limitations of Photoshop’s and Illustrator’s halftoning abilities, turn to the free Background Dotter applet by PIXELKNETEs.
The dotter instantly creates halftone background patterns using up to two foreground or dot colors and up to two background colors. Just pick your colors, set the height of the background you need in pixels, and click OK. Dotter will generate your desired halftone and set it as the page’s own background. To get the generated pattern onto your computer you’ll need to take a screenshot of the browser window, paste it into Photoshop, and crop it down to a repeatable pattern. Background Dotter lacks color pickers in its color fields, so you’ll need to know the HTML Hex codes for each of your desired colors. That isn’t a problem if you pick the colors in Photoshop; just choose a color and then, on the Color panel, double-click the swatch, which will open the Color Picker displaying the swatch’s HTML Hex code bottom-center.
Thought and Speech Bubbles
Speak up! Let your thoughts be known! Shout about your product! All of this and more is possible with MediaMilitia’s free Thought and Speech Bubbles Pack. The pack includes 104 thought and speech bubbles ready for use in personal and commercial projects. All 104 styles are available as vector EPS and 4,000-pixel, 300ppi PNG images with transparent backgrounds. Whatever you want to say or think, you can do it in style with these thought and speech bubbles.
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.
