*** From the Archives ***

This article is from November 21, 2011, and is no longer current.

Free For All: November 2011

2012 Calendars in PDF, Illustrator, and InDesign Formats
Ready or not, Mayan prophecy or not, 2012 is rapidly approaching, and calendars are required for many publishing projects — newspapers, newsletters, magazines, catalogs, brochures, event schedules, and, of course, calendar products themselves. Having toiled through the creation of quite a few month and year calendars myself, I’m grateful to Rob Cubbon for generously making his 2012 calendars free to the rest of us. Grab a hold of these calendars in PDF and native Illustrator and InDesign formats to get a jump on the new year’s designs.

Pre-Press Symbols & Markup Kit
This unique kit of vector objects makes it easy to add elements like color scales, registration marks, fold lines, cut lines, and much more to any design for press output.

Fonts
Enjoy this baker’s dozen of free typefaces, hot and fresh from the oven.
Gothic Extras (A–E, 5 Fonts)

Signify Lite

Novecento Wide (6 Weights)

Grogy (2 Styles)

Tetra (7 Fonts)

Vampirr

Telefono

PavoRoyal

Bond Is Dead

Kabel (but not that Kabel

Absinthe (3 Fonts)

Egypt 22

Network

60 Paper Stock Photos
Turning once again to my favorite free stock photography site, Stock.Xchng, I’ve put together a lightbox of 60 free images of, or inspired by, paper. The collection includes background textures, envelopes, cards, and a whole lot more, all hand-picked by yours truly. So head over to the lightbox, set up a free Stock.Xchng account, and get to downloading.

Smash Your Fax
The facsimile machine is a relic of equipment that some businesses refuse to let die. One of the main reasons the fax machine and faxed documents still draw breath, however laboriously, is the continuing need for rapid document signing. With a fax a document can be sent for signature and received back signed within moments. Of course, a fax requires a telephone line that’s not a mobile number, something more freelance and small business creative professionals are foregoing — or would drop were it not for that darned fax machine.
Well, smash your fax! There’s a better way. (Here’s a fun video of some folks doing just that. Caution: One curse word in the audio toward the end.) EchoSign, a service Adobe recently acquired, offers easy, fast online document signing. The free account offers a single user — you — to seek up to 5 digital signatures per month from your clients or whomever and will store your last 5 documents for access anywhere. EchoSign even lets your clients print, sign, and — shudder — fax documents back to you via EchoSign’s toll-free number; the faxed document is digitized and returned to you fully executed. If your needs go beyond the limits of the free account, EchoSign offers higher limits and more features starting at $14.95 per month.
Before you pass on EchoSign as a good idea startup that clients may, someday, accept, you should realize that it’s already well established. Not only is it an Adobe property, but EchoSign already has 3 million users and is an important tool for some of the world’s largest brands. You can refer your doubting clients to the “Who’s Using EchoSign?” page of the EchoSign Website.

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 often links 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.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of many books and articles that empower, inform, and connect creative professionals.
  • Anonymous says:

    Yay! Thanks.

  • Anonymous says:

    How in the heck did I get onto the daily email list?

  • Leah Hanlin says:

    Another wonderful list of goodies! Stock x.chng is wonderful. Thanks, Pariah!

  • Pariah Burke says:

    You are absolutely welcome! I’m glad you like this month’s Free for All!

  • Anonymous says:

    Great article, always get a lot of fonts and whatnot off of these free posts. I found a free tool I thought I’d share with you that you may want to include on your next article…

    I’ve been using the free edition of Approval Manager to manage my proofs and customer feedback for a while and have found it to be a pretty awesome tool to get for free. Worth taking a look I thought.

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