Free For All: Great Resources On the House

Pariah Burke

Winter Photoshop Brushes
It’s December. The air is crisp and invigorating, full of the promise of snowball fights and snowmen, snowflakes melting on your tongue, and icicles dripping from the rooftops. Even if snow isn’t in the forecast where you live, cuddle up with you computer and blanket your designs with the soft hush of these snowy Photoshop brushes. Click the images to download the brush sets.






Twitter Themes and Palettes
If you’re looking for a little variety in your Twitter background, check out COLOURLover’s new Twitter theme and palette generator, Themeleon (pronounced like “chameleon”).
You begin by selecting from dozens of background patterns in customizable colors, then either choosing a pre-created color theme from the COLOURLovers community or building your own. Themeleon updates in real-time to show you a preview of your new Twitter profile page design. When you’re satisfied, log into your Twitter account through Themeleon and apply the design.
After you’ve changed your design, tweet us; we’d love to check out your results. I’m at
@iamPariah, and CreativePro.com is at @CreativeProse.

Images to CSV for InDesign
For you InDesign users out, here’s a script to help with data-merge document production. This free InDesign CS3 or CS4 script for Mac or Windows will generate a comma-separated list of the full path to, and file names of, a folder full of images. The script saves the list as a CSV file, ready to be defined as a data source in InDesign’s Data Merge panel. Then, when you perform the data merge, those file paths will be replaced by their actual images. It’s a great bulk image import tool for catalogs and other image-intensive publications.
Download the script directly, or visit the Web site of creator Loïc Aigon.

The Photographer’s Ephemeris
Landscape photography is performed on a schedule set not as much by the photographer as by celestial elements. A beautiful shot of the sun setting over the sea can only be shot at sunset, for instance. Similarly, the phase of the moon can turn a good mountain range picture into a spectacular vista. You can find times for sunrise and sunset and information about the phase and path of the moon from almanacs and online sources. But for information relative to, say, a topographical map of your intended shoot location, you need the Photographer’s Ephemeris.
This cross-platform Adobe AIR application lets landscape photographers plan the best time and location for shoots. It includes celestial data integrated with precise global positioning and satellite and terrain maps from Google Maps. Photographer’s Ephemeris was created by photographer Stephen Trainor.

Concept Feedback
Two heads are better than one; unfortunately, freelancers don’t always have a second head to consult. We can run designs by friends and family, but they’re probably not trained in our field. The Web provides many feedback venues: user forums, mailing lists, and social media like Flickr and Twitter. But the feedback mechanisms of these services are ad hoc. A designer posts a potential design, asking for feedback, and in return receives replies, comments, or 140-character tweets, most of which are short, vague, and possibly completely off topic. Still, it’s the best we’ve got, right?
It was. Then along came Concept Feedback, a free, pseudo-social service built for creatives seeking peer review. Instead of asking a group of people “what do you think” and hoping for constructive replies, Concept Feedback breaks down the characteristics of a design and asks users to provide specific feedback. Respondents use a five-star scale to rate a concept’s design, fitness to purpose, originality, and audience engagement. Respondents may also write more detailed reviews. The original designer then has specific, targeted feedback from peers and a better sense of how well a design will perform, and in what areas it needs improvement.

Instant Mac, Windows, Linux Icons
Although I’m sure this next resource will appeal to fellow iconoholics, I offer it primarily for user experience and interface designers. iConvert is an online application that converts icons and images to Mac-, Windows-, and Linux-compatible system icons.
Looking to beautify your computer environment? iConvert lets you use virtually any icon or icon set you find online, regardless of the platform for which the icon or set is designed. Mac OSX .icns icons can be converted lickety split and used on Windows. Windows version .ico icons and even .cur cursors can be converted to Mac-compatible icons. Both can be made into Linux icons.
The real utility of iConvert, however, is for those creating professional icon designs for user interfaces or apps. Instead of using OS-specific dedicated software to convert your .png or .jpg images into icons for each platform on which your software will run, you can simply upload them to iConvert, click the Convert button, and get all the platform-specific icons you need at once.
iConvert can generate 32-, 8-, and 4-bit icons, and accepts the following incoming file formats: ICNS, ICO, SVG, GIF, PNG, TIF, TGA, CUR, BMP, JPG, XPM, and RSRC.

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.