Arbenting Freebies

Your Reputation Precedes You…On Freelance Logo

Rob Bowen — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:53:00 +0000

In case you didn’t catch it, Rob had a new post go up on Freelance Logo yesterday called, Your Reputation Precedes You : Planting the Right Seeds for Your Brand! This is a look at not only the importance of building up trust for the longevity and sustainability of your brand, but it also discusses some areas on which to focus in order to better facilitate said growth. So if you haven’t had the opportunity to read through it, then we recommend that you follow the link over and take a look!

Minimalism in Logo Design… on Freelance Logo

Rob Bowen — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:38:28 +0000

Rob has recently started writing for Freelance Logo and his first article went up today! Minimalism in Logo Design : Positively Perfect Negative Spaces is a look at this specific technique applied to logo design. Using the negative space to complete portions of the logo, and ways that you can effectively take this on. Complete with a brief discussion on working with negative space in general, and a showcase of effective implementation, this article can be a helpful read for any designers looking to work more with negative space.

The Perfect Brainstorm: A How To on Noupe

Rob Bowen — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:39:24 +0000

In case it happened to miss your radar this week, Rob had another new article go up on Noupe. The Perfect Brainstorm: A How To is an extremely useful post that deconstructs the brainstorming process to assist you on getting more from your storm sessions. Brainstorming is such an essential part of our everyday creative lives and the post is full of helpful tips that you may or may not know about. The only way to find out is to head that way and check it out.

Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners on SM

Rob Bowen — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:33:56 +0000

Earlier this week, Rob had an article go up on Smashing Magazine that has gotten quite a good response. The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners takes the fantastic answers from one of Smashing’s social media polls and delivers a useful guide for getting started in web design. So if you happened to miss it, head on over and give it a gander. Who knows, you might like it.

Tips for More Effective Business Meetings on Noupe

Rob Bowen — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:19:55 +0000

In case you missed it, Rob had a guest post go up on Noupe this past week on getting more out of your business meetings. Tips for More Effective Business Meetings is a bit of a different topic that Vitaly thought would make a useful post, and so I put the proverbial pen to the page, and behold the helpful advice did flow. The post was divided into both client and co-worker meeting categories for a clearer picture on the procedures that will yield more from the time you are spending in meetings.

Minimalist Resume : A Free Web Template

Angie Bowen — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:25:17 +0000

During a few of a our creative consultations, we have a had some clients come to us and say that they have been contemplating purchasing a domain name of their own name, but they are not completely sure what they would want to do with it. Having an already established portfolio at another location online, and not being too keen on the idea of moving it or having an additional one to maintain, this idea lacks appeal. Often in these cases they also have an existing blog, and are not looking to begin another one that they have to update with any level of frequency, so they steer clear of that idea as well.

In some of these cases, a suggestion that we have made which some of them warm too almost instantly, is the idea of putting a single page resume up at the site and nothing more. Simply advertising the client and their skillsets to anyone who stops by the site. Some of the clients have even taken the idea a step further and had business cards made up just for this resume site of theirs that they can hand out to potential employers or collaborators within their fields. Since the idea has landed a time or two with some of our clients, we have decided to pass it along to our readers here on the site in the way of a new Arbenting freebie.

Enter Angie’s latest creation, this simple, one page resume created exclusively for our readers.

As always, you’re free to use this in any way you like, commercial or personal as long as you don’t repackage and give it away or sell it as is.

It’s a simple design consisting only of a single HTML file and one CSS file. Angie included 4 separate color schemes as well as a print stylesheet for your convenience. These are simple enough that you shouldn’t need a lot of help customizing them, but if you do feel free to ask in the comments and Angie will help you out asap.

Everything validates other than the small bit of CSS3 that was used for the drop shadow.

Features

Clean and Minimalist Layout
4 Color Choices
Print Stylesheet Included
tested in IE 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ and Chrome

Preview

View the Demo

Please do not repackage, redistribute or direct link to the download. If you would like to share this freebie please link back to this page.

Over 550 Photoshop Brush Packs Free for Commercial Use

Angie Bowen — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:25:52 +0000

This article was originally posted on August 26, 2008. This is one of our two most popular posts of all time on the blog so we wanted to go through it and make sure it was still up to date. There have been some changes, a handful of people had changed their licenses and some were gone all together. There are also quite a few new additions that we hope you’ll find useful. As a side note, we no longer know how many packs are included so we can’t guarantee the 550+ number.

As a compliment to our tutorial post for this week, 30 Tutorials That Will Teach You Photoshop, we thought Arbenting should put together a piece to go along with it. We have scoured the tubes to find you the coolest collection of commercial free-use Photoshop brush packs we could dig up. So check ‘em out and enjoy.

Brush Collections

57 misc sets including lots of hand drawn designs and people

31 brush sets, mostly abstract in nature. Lots of great textures, swirls and circle designs.

40 sets of misc themed brushes. Has quite a lot of animal skull brushes which I find kind of strange but some might find them useful.

52 brush sets. The moon & star set and the tree set really stand out.

236 brush packs – lots of gothic, art deco & animal brushes as well as a great selection of borders.

3 sets of tree brushes

Sites That Distribute Free Brushes

All of the Arbenting Photoshop Brushes are free for both personal and commercial use with no attribution required.

Best of BittBox Part 1: High Resolution Photoshop Brushes – Here are some of the highlights of the site. While they don’t have a specific category for photoshop brushes, you can do a search for the term to find all of the great resources on the site.

Web Designer Lab also doesn’t have a specific category for photoshop brushes. However, since the majority of their resources are photoshop brushes, you can easily just browse their Resources category.

Hawksmont Universe doesn’t post brushes often but what they do post is quality.

Individual Brush Sets

By Smashing Magazine

Innocent Invaders – 15 different creatures accompanied by 10 background illustrations
Grunge Photoshop Brush Set – A huge pack of 74 high resolution brushes!
Splatter and Watercolor Brushes – 3 sets of brushes, 24 brushes total
30 Swirl Brushes
Health And Beauty Set – Another large collection of 67 high resolution brushes.
23 Light Blurs
12 Messy Watercolor Brushes – It’s the second freebie listed
Space and Canvas – Two sets including 15 space themed brushes and 55 painted canvas brushes.

Miscellaneous Brushes

Morning Coffee – A set of 10 coffee stains
Splatter Brushes

If you know of any of your favorite commercial free-use brush packs we have ignored to add, hit us up in the comments and drop a link.

Thesis the Antithesis of WordPress…sort of

Rob Bowen — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:28:28 +0000

So after watching the Mixergy interview between Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson concerning the violation of WordPress’ General Public License (or GPL) by the Thesis theme (and I would have said alleged, but given that the GPL clearly states that all derivative works based on a GPL framework must also be released under the same licensing agreement, and also given that Thesis actually uses WP code and simply expands on it in one area specifically, perhaps more, rather than working along with it but effectively requiring it, then Thesis is a derivative work subject to the same licensing concessions that everyone else is.), I have this to say, “Chris, with all due respect, in our humble opinion, you are wrong.”

The Crux of the Situation

Chris’ argument, no matter how passionately made, is in direct contrast to the GPL that WordPress was built on, and though he wishes there to be some sort of legal basis for his argument, from our understanding of the situation, there is not one. Basically it all boils down to this…WordPress was released under a GPL and anything built on top of that framework must also share this same license. Plain and simple. Chris built Thesis, a WordPress theme framework that was built on top of WP, meaning it should have to adopt the license.

However, Chris seems to take a hard principled stance that because his framework has been so beneficial to WordPress, and (by his own exaggerated claims) has helped to ensure their success among far less than 1 percent of their 25 million user market, the inherent complicity of the licensing does not apply to him and his derivative software. Thereby allowing him to attach whatever kind of licensing that he wishes to his product, which he firmly expects others to solemnly adhere to, no matter how much benefit they may bring to Thesis through their innovative additions built over the top of it (even if they were to say, make it secure and safe from malware penetration, they would still have to comply). Chris would still expect them to follow the licensing he established for his product.

So then why does he not feel that the developers who created WordPress deserve this same respect extended to their product? A valid question indeed, that in the entire hour plus interview, Chris never came close to answering. Instead, he weakly defended his position repeatedly saying that neither his software, nor WordPress could operate independently of each other. However, while this is half true (Thesis certainly cannot operate independently of WP), WordPress works independently of Thesis on over more than 24,000,000 sites. So his assertion was less than accurate, it was completely without basis.

As the interview wore on, Pearson rigorously and humbly trudged through a virtual label-fest, at once proclaiming himself to be one of the three most important names in WordPress today, to one of the people who are on top of the online world (which is why everyone is gunning for him), winding on down to setting himself up as a victim of Mullenweg’s throng’s of supporters. Even going so far as to urge Matt to take more responsibility with the things he says, being that he is in such a position of authority online, and telling him to think about the consequences of what he is saying in a public forum.

But if we are to believe Chris’ own interpretations of online status rankings, and he is in fact in such a lofty position and held in such high regards, shouldn’t his dismissal of General Public Licensing’s enforceability and sustainability be subject to the same sort of thoughtful vetting before he greedily denounces it to the public without any real substantial legal basis? Or is this yet another area where the rules should only apply to everyone who is not Chris Pearson?

So What’s behind the Principle?

Over and over again, Chris came back to the point that he just couldn’t agree with a license that would force any business to effectively adopt said license for their own constructs over any other license that they would choose for their work. In fact he continuously railed against this sort of economic system and seemed to assert that it is somehow unreasonable for anyone to suggest that he should have to partake in it. Which, we will come back to shortly.

One could argue that all there is behind this principle is a matter of semantics. An argument over what makes one product a derivative of another. Whereas, in this case, Chris does not see how Thesis is a derivative product of WordPress because of how much of the coding that controls Thesis is his own. But the fact that any of WordPress’ code is required at all to make Thesis run, and it most certainly does, makes it a derivative work and subject to the terms of the GPL, again, as we understand it. Thesis cannot be plugged into any other CMS and work properly. It only works with WP, because it was built on top of their framework.

This by very definition, again as we understand it, makes it a derivative and not in any way a stand alone product. And why? Because Chris opted to build upon this system using their pre-established framework to launch from. Seeking to take advantage of its surrounding and established community to benefit his own product and company. But if he has such a principled opposition to this type of economic system and doesn’t support the GPL’s sustainability or enforceability as he so vehemently put forth in the last portion of the interview, then why did he build on WP in the first place?

Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them.

The Philosophy of the Free Software Movement from GNU

This was another question that Chris paraded around time and again, running logical circles around the issue repeatedly as if they somehow satisfactorily answered this all important query, but they did not. And until Mr. Pearson can reasonably answer why he feels he can choose to build on a framework and not adhere to their licensing agreement, rather than just build his product independent of any other service or CMS where he does not have contend with any kind of GPL agreement, then his answers and “reasons” all feel empty and hollow to these members of the community.

And as long as this is the case, then we believe, Mr. Pearson ethically stands in the wrong. Given the supposed principled nature of his stance, we would think that the ethics of the situation would weigh heavily on Chris, but that does not appear to be the case as his actions and assertions fly in the face of the very GNU philosophy behind the licensing agreement. Just as he passionately believes he is right legally, we will always believe here on Arbenting that ethically, Chris, you are wrong.

Group Interview on Launching a Website on SM

Rob Bowen — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:14:22 +0000

Yesterday, Rob had a new post go up on Smashing Magazine called, What Is The Last Thing You Do Before You Launch A Website?, which is a look at the final steps that most developers take as they are about to launch a project. The post was scribed from ideas presented by Smashing’s Twitter followers, after they were asked this very question via the social media network. Rob took their answers in a playful and fun direction. Check out the post to see for yourself.

0 to 255 Color Tool for Web Designers

Angie Bowen — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:39:05 +0000

The following is NOT a solicited or paid review, just a helpful online tool for web designers that we happened to come across that we felt was a useful addition our design toolbox, and we thought that we would pass it along to our readers as well.

As designers we have some parts of our processes that we devote so much time to off and on throughout the span of a web design project. Choosing the perfect colors and then refining shades of said colors to brighten/darken, highlight, etc…becomes one of those tasks that soaks up minutes as they pour off the face of the clock and slip into the past. However, using 0 to 255 can help you shave precious minutes off of this task, which is always welcome.

Here is a little bit about the site from the creator.

Basically, it’s a simple tool that helps web designers find lighter and darker colors based on any color. Why is this necessary? Well, that takes a little more explanation.

I built 0to255 to make my job easier. I’m a web designer who works with colors every day. Usually, I’ll start with a color I want to use, then I’ll manipulate it for various functions. For example, I might brighten a link in its hover state or darken a button’s border to make it contrast with surrounding elements. Web designers do things like these several times an hour…

Not sure how you are with your projects, but anything that becomes repetitiously time consuming, tends to start feeling a bit cumbersome. At least it does to us, anyway, so 0to255 was pretty much a breath of fresh air in this respect. If finding variations on a selected color is something that you would like to make a little easier, then zip on over to 0 to 255, and see if it is the right time-saving tool for you and your web based projects.

As for ease of use, the overall process is pretty basic and fairly intuitive so the introduction to the tool, be you novice or nearly an expert in these sorts of web based apps, is painless without much of a learning curve to deal with. So you can quickly and easily dive right in without fear of anything in your way to hang you up at all.

…Simply pick the color that you want to start with and 0to255 gives you a range of colors from black to white using an interval optimized for web design. Then, just click the variation you want to use and the hex code is automatically copied to your clipboard.

Anyway, you probably get the picture about how this all breaks down, and if you haven’t, just follow the links over to their website for more about this useful designer’s tool. It is definitely worth your a few minutes of your time to test drive it to determine if it fits in your virtual toolbox.