This amazing social networking icon pack for your blog provides over 80 PNG icons for all your favourite social networks from Facebook, Twitter, and Design Moo to YouTube and icons for companies such as Apple. This truly is a brilliant collection and of course its free, licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.   The icons were created by Rogie King of Komodo Media and while your at Komodo Media head over to the downloads page and you will also find some other great downloads you can use!  Anyway to download the Social Network Icons pack click here or the image below.

The site is also well worth a look around just for some pure design inspiration from Rogie’s “Foliage-o-Meter” to the way images fade into view as they appear on your screen. Top notch site and beautiful design.

New York is one of the most exciting and vibrant cities in the world and with so much colour, life, and action, there are endless scenes to photograph.   Here collated for you are 35 cool and beautiful photos of New York from Flickr that you can use for free.  Each one is high quality and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.  This means that you are free to copy, distribute, and use the photograph for your commercial and non-commercial purposes providing you credit the photographer with the photo.

For more details on the licence and what you can do with the photo click here.  These photographs were taken by talented Flickr users from around the world.  If you are planning to use any of these photos widely or commercially it may be worth contacting the photographer for full permissions and so they know what their photos are getting up to! :-)

You Will Never Forget. Times Square.

By Josh Libatique

Filé Of Yellow Cab

By Zitzitoune

New York Taxis

By Steve Wilson

Manhattan Bridge HDR

By See-ming Lee

Statue of Liberty

By auburnxc

Night Cityscape

By Jorge Gobbi

New York Sunset – HDR

By Ferguson Photography

Signs of Times Square in HDR

By Nimo

Lines

By Alexandra Nahum

Corner

By Paulo Barcellos Jr.

From the roof

By Paulo Barcellos Jr.

Apocalypse New York

By Nathan Siemers

Street Studio NYC

By Mohammad Riza

New York from Empire State Building HDR

By byrne7214

The Pink Shined Down on Manhattan

By Eric E Yang

Air Mo

By Mohammad Riza

Bowling Green Station

By Mat Honan

Looking down from Rockerfella tower HDR

By Chris Isherwood

Textbreak

By Mohammad Riza

Make Art

By Mohammad Riza

Empire State Pigeon

By ZeroOne

New York City Sunset

By Zach Klein

Brooklyn Bridge at Night

By Laya Gerlock

NYC.

By Jakob Montrasio

Times Square Towers

By Nimo

Take me to Funkytown

By Kenny Louie

NYPD @ Times Square

By Joi Ito

Times Square

By Joshua Davis

New York. East village.

By Luciano

Recruiting

By Stewart Butterfield

Queens Perspective

By eflon

New York City, by day, in B&W

By Kenny Louie

Brooklyn Bridge Park

By Paul Stein

On the platform, reading

By Mohammad Riza

Mounted in Times Square

By Stewart Butterfield

In-need of some design inspiration? Here are 14 websites to fuel your creativity and provide inspiration for any project.  This collection includes logo, web, illustration and general design inspiration from galleries and collections across the web.  After checking out some of these sites you’ll definitely want to get designing something new.  Don’t forget to add your inspirational sites to the comments.

Carbon Made

Carbon Made has been around for quite a while now and has gathered pace with its user-base.  Now featuring over 174,00 portfolios of work from 3D modeling to web design, this site is well worth a look and you may want to add some of your work to it.

Lemon Flip

A Slovakian adversing and design archive website with inspiration in the form of business cards, posters, logos, print items, and web design.

Web Design

CSS Mania

Around since 2004 CSS Mania has collected thousands of beautiful website designs for it’s gallery.  View the latest updates on the homepage or click on Topics in the navigation bar to view by various categories or by country.

CSS Drive

Another CSS gallery with yet more inspirational designs.  When hovering over a screenshot of a design, CSS Drive provides a hover box with the a colour scheme.  In addition this site also has some useful web design tools including a CSS compressor.

CSS Elite

A very nicely designed CSS gallery that allows you to sort through designs by various categories including clean, blog, dark, colorful, unique, splah pages and more.

Minimalsites

A minimalist CSS gallery dedicated to showcasing minimalist website designs.

CSS Remix

A great gallery that allows you to skim through many designs at once to find something you are interested in.

Link Creme

Started in 2006, Link Creme showcases selected beautiful CSS and Flash sites.

Design Snack

Design Snack is a socially-powered web design showcase where the users vote for the best designs.  Design Snack also provides filtering by CSS/HTML, Flash and by category of design e.g. Charity, Music etc.

General Inspiration

FFFFound!

FFFFound is an image bookmarking service that works similar to delicious but with images rather than websites.

Logo Design

Logo Pond

A community of logo designs submitted by users for your inspiration.

Logo Sauce

Another popular logo showcase.  Logo sauce also provides competitions where users post a competition to design a logo from a set brief with a set amount of prize money (min $200).  All competitions are reviewed by the sites editors.

Logo Design Love

A logo design blog with plenty of inspirational posts for logo design.

Illustration

Illypads

Illypads contains some amazing illustration work from artists around the globe.  It may well inspire your next piece of design work! (Part of LogoPond)

The are plenty of Photoshop text tutorials out there so we have trawled through all the lists to bring you the Ultimate 20 Photoshop Text Tutorials round-up.  They should all be relatively easy to create and require only Photoshop and your time. As usual if you know of an amazing one that we haven’t included add a link to it in the comments. Enjoy!

Impressive Text

Create eye-catching text with impact.

Halftone Effect Text

Go for an old fashioned print feel.

Text Made of Text Effect

Our favourite text effect here.. very cool indeed.

Typographic Poster Effect

Trendy, interesting yet simple.

Super Cool Frilly Bits Text Effect

Great for flamboyant design work.

Colourful Glowing Text Effect

Light, dynamic and easy on the eye.

Transparent Glass Lettering

Crystal, clean and fresh.

Moon Shine Text Effect

Modern, clean and user-friendly text.

Gold Text Effect

Refined, bold and established text.

Drawn 3D Text Blocks

Artwork feel, original and serious.

Cool Folded Text Effect

Modern, clean and friendly.

Smokey Typography

Scary, smokey and dark.

Candy Coated Text Effect

Innocent, sweet and enticing text.

Wet Ink Text Effect

Authors, original, important text.

3D Text in Image Effect

Impressive, colourful, and expensive.

Stunning 3D Bold Text

Bold, bright and eye-catching.

Pixel Text Effect

Computer/digital feel.

Amazing Extreme Lighting 3D Text

Bold, exciting, mysterious.

Amazing Grass Text Effect

Green, Eco-text, fresh.

ICE Cube Text Effect

Cold, bold, and very cool.

After spending much time googling the Internet for brilliant iPhone apps I discovered that consistently a few really useful ones weren’t really being talked about much – here are two.  This article is not an ultimate end-all – the 2 best image apps, but simply 2 apps that people don’t have or haven’t heard about.  If you don’t have either of these apps download them and you’ll find that they are great!

I would really like to hear about your free really useful iPhone apps that not many people know about!

1. Mill Colour (itunes link)

The Mill is an award-winning visual effects studio with offices in London and New York.  However now they are applying some amazing visual effects to iPhone user photos in the form of their free app.  Mill Colour allows you to select a photo from your iPhone gallery (or take one there and then) and apply various “looks” (colour filters) to your photos.  You can also manually adjust various colour controls.  While this may sound pretty average the results you can get from applying some of the effects are brilliant (not to mention I’ve tried them myself) just take a look at the flickr group with photos from iPhone’s with Mill Colour effects applied to them. This app is highly recommended if you use your iPhone camera.

2. Rotator

This relativity boring app does what it says on the tin really well. Simple. If you find you have photos in your iPhone gallery that are rotated the wrong way round to view (even if you rotate the device) this app sorts the problem out for free. Alternative app: Photo Mojo.

Main Blog Post Photo Credit: Andrew Stawarz

It has finally arrived: Smashing Magazine’s very first book.  Available exclusively from Smashing Mag the book is ready to be shipped.

The book which has 313 pages of full colour goodness is aimed at web designers and developers and looks at Web design rules of thumb, color theory, usability guidelines, user interface design, best coding and optimization practices, as well as typography, marketing, branding and exclusive insights from top designers across the globe.

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

It was written by a team of very knowledgeable people indeed including Jacob Gube (SixRevisions), Dmitry Fadeev (UsabilityPost), Chris Spooner (Spoongraphics), Darius A Monsef IV (COLOURlovers.com), Alessandro Cattaneo (with co-editing by Jon Tan), Steven Snell (VandelayDesign), David Leggett (UXBooth), Andrew Maier (UXBooth), Kayla Knight (Smashing Mag), Yves Peters (Typographica.org), René Schmidt and the Smashing Magazine editorial team, Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.

At only $29.90 or €23.90 plus postage its a steal so go buy.

Find out more here | Go Buy Here

P.s. This is also our very first post! – 382854NX93KG