BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek and geeky style or provide crisp, attractive icons for your modern and fashionable-looking interfaces. All the icons in this pack — 60 icons in total — are designed in Round Rectangle shape.

Download the icon set for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed or rented. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

• large preview
• download the set (.zip, 5.1 Mb)

A word from the designers

As always, here are some words from the designers of the set:

Dear Smashing Magazine readers, 

IconEden’s 2nd birthday is coming! And we’re as excited about it as you’re. To celebrate our two years of rocking the icon design world, IconEden collaborated with Smashing Magazine to craft a small set of 60 wonderful icons called “iCandies”! And it’s all yours. 

Similar to previous collections, iCandies comes in vector and pixel formats and can be immediately be built into your projects at no cost. You can use the icons for any commercial and personal projects.

Thank you very much, guys! We appreciate your efforts.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related releases:

• The Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, incl. PSD sources)
• Free Medical Icons Set (60 Icons)
• Yummy! Free Food and Cakes Icon Set (20 Icons)
• Quartz Icon Set (90 clean sharp icons)
• gCons: Free All-Purpose Icons for Designers and Developers (100 icons + PSD)

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: Freebies, Icons

Today we are glad to release Color Stream, a free iPhone App, created by Sahil Lavingia (@slavingia on Twitter) and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Color stream lets you create and store color palettes that are either created from scratch or generated from a photo, or even generated automatically using a built-in color schemer. The color schemer supports analogous, monochromatic, triadic and further color schemes. As usual, this iPhone app is released for free.

The tool automatically generates a combination of colors from a picture either selected from your device’s photo library or from your device’s camera (if it has one). You can save multiple color palettes, name them and rate them for quick and easy access. You can also save any one of your palettes to your photo library (and have the option to make it your wallpaper), send it via e-mail (with included hexcodes and sample html) as well as browse Flickr for appropriate color-related pictures. So if you want to use it as a color scheme generator, you don’t even need to be online!

Download the iPhone app for free!

• download the iPhone app from App Store (for free)

Screenshots

Motivation behind the design

Here are some insights from the developer:

Color Stream was built to fill a gap in my life; on transit from one place to the next there was no tool to continue my design workflow. This app allowed me to constantly be working on my designs no matter where I was, without excuse. And in the past months, it’s helped thousands of other designers with their own lives and clients.

Being focused at designers, I knew the app had to be extremely polished and well designed. Not just pretty, but functional and fast too. I think I succeeded. The basic movement and flow of the application isn’t too far off of Apple’s default applications, but I have created my own navigational elements where I though they improved on the experience (like the custom stars to rate a palette).

I include many tips on how to customize your own iPhone apps to help new developers like I once was as part of another project I did, One Week App.

— Sahil

Thank you, Sahil. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: app, color, iphone

This one’s easy: take a shot, send us the image and win a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS digital SLR camera. Typography and icons are everywhere: they surround us, guide us, help us find the right path every day. As Web designers and graphic artists, we can learn from observing the type and public signage around us. How do designers of those graphics combine type, visual design and pictograms? How do they guide us through our day? More importantly, how do they design their graphics to meaningfully serve their purpose in particular settings?

That’s what we want to find out with this photo contest. We encourage you to go out with your camera, shoot nice typography or public signage, and send the photo (or photos) to us (see details below). And the best part: everyone can participate.

[By the way, did you know we have a free Email Newsletter? Subscribe now and get fresh short tips and tricks in your inbox!]

What Are We Looking For?

We are looking for original, manually shot photographs of typography and public signage. The most obvious elements that come to mind are street signs, building facades, highway markers and road signs, as well as wayfinding graphics (i.e. directional signage) in public venues such as stadiums, malls, museums, cinemas, theaters and cafés. Bus stop signs, underground signs, park signs, metro signage, hospital room signs, conference, hotel and office signs, emergency and exit signs and signs in shops and stores would work, too. Look around, pay attention and have a camera ready. That’s really all you need!

At Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, numbers in each terminal’s letter indicate the walking time. Simple yet beautiful. (Image credit.)

It would be nice to see signage in a variety of languages and in globally diverse locations. We’re hoping to find similarities that communicate visually across cultures. Please feel free to submit unusual and humorous signs as well! Check out examples of what we’re looking for to get your creative juices flowing.

“This Is How You Find ↓.” A wayfinding sign in IKEA in Sweden. (Image credit.)

The Prize

The camera below can be yours. One participant in this contest will win this best-selling digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS (EOS 1000D), with a 10.1 megapixel CMOS sensor, high-precision 7-point wide-area autofocus sensor, and an Image Stabilizer-equipped EF-S 18–55mm f/3.5–5.6 IS Lens. The winner will be chosen randomly from among all accepted submissions best accepted submissions (among 30 — 50 best submissions, depending on the number of submissions).

Specifications

• Format: JPG
• All photos should have a width of at least 700 pixels.
• All photos should be of high quality and shouldn’t have any artefacts (e.g. they shouldn’t be blurry).
• The total file size of your submission should not exceed 15 MB.
• Each participant can send at most three photos.

Submission Guidelines

1. Please download the starter kit first.
2. The starter kit folder contains a plain-text file, details.txt. Please edit it by adding details about your submission.
3. Name your photos meaningfully, and don’t use empty spaces or special characters (e.g. shining-airport-signage.jpg instead of DSC0815378.jpg).
4. Please add your photo (or photos) to the folder. Do not include any advertisements.
5. With your images in the folder, archive the folder as a ZIP file. The file should have a clear name (e.g. shining-airport-signage.zip).
6. Please send your submission to contest {at} smashingmagazine {dot} com.
7. Please note: submissions will be processed automatically. Please make sure your submission follows the requirements above, otherwise it will not be processed.

Copyright, Labels, Watermarks

Embedding copyright information, a watermark or URL in a photo will spoil it; please avoid adding anything that isn’t a part of the image itself. Participants should own the copyright of any photos they send. You can specify the license under which you want your image(s) to be released using the starter kit. Photos should not be already available elsewhere on the Web.

Deadline and Announcement

Send us your photos by 27 August 2010. The winner will be announced a few days after. We will present all interesting photos here on Smashing Magazine, including the names and URLs of the participants chosen, of course. If we get enough submissions, we will sort and categorize the photos in the article.

Examples

This contest is all about creativity, so get out your camera and start shooting. Good signage doesn’t necessarily have to be “clean.” On the contrary, some beautiful and original examples can be found where nobody bothers to look. Just be curious, and take a closer look around you. You may want to look at these articles for ideas: Vintage and Retro Typography Showcase and Showcase Of Beautiful Vintage and Retro Signage.

Good luck, and get creative, folks!

(al)

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: contest, photography

Every now and then we look around, select fresh high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to.

In this selection, we’re pleased to present Piron, Nobile, St Marie, Code, Arcus, Crimson Text, Quadranta, Juice, Prociono, Mr Jones, Ibarra Real and various useful symbol fonts. Please note that some fonts are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts; they can change from time to time.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that we are publishing a Smashing eBook Series? The brand new eBook #3 is Mastering Photoshop For Web Design, written by our Photoshop-expert Thomas Giannattasio.]

New Free High-Quality Fonts

Piron
Piron is a highly legible typeface, very well suited to any display or text usage: Web, print (especially magazines), brochures, logos, posters, flyers, motion graphics. The font comes in two weights: regular and oblique. Designed by Alexander Nedelev and Veronika Slavova. Available for free and commercial use, and available in OpenType format.

St Ryde Regular (Registration required, PDF Specimen)
St Ryde is a sans-serif, very casual typeface, that works perfect in your bodycopy within the regular weights. The whole family comes in 5 weights including the matching italics, so you can choose from thin, light, regular, medium and bold. Regular is available for free download. St Ryde has a wide range of characters, including small caps, lining, proportional and tabular figures plus small caps figures, too. Designed by Sascha Timplan. Available in OpenType format.

Nobile
The font is designed to work on digital screens and handheld devices without losing the distinctive look usually found in fonts designed for print. The aim here was to design a font that would function well, have good legibility on screen yet also look good — not only at larger display sizes but also right down to small text sizes. The font is available in the Google Font Directory and was released under the Open Font License. The family comes in four weights (regular, italic, bold and bold italic).

Mr Jones Book and Mr Jones Book Italic (Registration required)
Mr Jones was originally conceived as a family for print design, consisting of a sans and a headline. The lowercase forms are wide for legibility at small sizes, while the caps are narrower to save space and keep an even balance of negative space when used in body copy. The overall widths of certain characters have been adjusted to almost extremes to keep an even balance of white space around each letter. The font works well in body copy but will need decreased tracking in larger settings. It comes with proportional, old-style and tabular figures and discretionary ligatures.

Pigiarniq Inuktitut (Download link)
An oldie but a goodie. Heard of Nunavut? A small territory in Canada with one of the lowest population rates of the world? Probably not. Only 0.01 people live there per square kilometer, mostly Inuit. The citizens of Nunavut speak four languages: French, English, Innuinaqtun and Inuktitut. A few years ago, the government of the region decided to design a new typeface to enable its 28,000 citizens to use all four languages in a uniform manner. The result was a beautiful, rich and professional free sans-serif. The family includes bold, heavy, italic, light and regular weights, all available for free use.

St Marie
St Marie is a rich type family designed for online applications and print. This release is a preview of the upcoming family, and the designer has released two weights (St Marie Thin and St Marie Thin Web) for free. The download package contains the weights in the formats OTF, WOFF, EOT and SVG, as well as a @font-face kit. See this example of St Marie Thin Web (HTML-page).

Code: Free Font
This sturdy yet playful little font family can be applied to different kinds of graphic design work: Web, print, motion graphics, t-shirts, posters, logotypes. The font contains 192 characters and two weights (regular and bold) and is available in OTF for PC or Mac.

VAL Stencil
A quite distinctive, memorable font with two variations: lowercase letters bend to the left and uppercase letters bend to the right. This unique font will give your headlines originality and dynamism. Designed by Svetoslav Simov of Fontfabric, available in OTF.

akaDora (For personal use only)
akaDora is a fairly simple script font with wide character support. Designed by James Daniel Milligan.

Arcus and Arcus Italic (Registration required)
Arcus is a geometrically constructed font with rounded curves. The font contains a wide range of alternative signs, small capitals, lining and old-style numerals, fractions, superiors, inferiors, ligatures and discretionary ligatures; all this is within the frame of OpenType functions. The type family was designed for headlines, logotypes and corporate identities, and it is not a good fit for long text. Available for free and commercial use.

Crimson Text
Open that old tome from the bookshelf over the fireplace, stick your nose in its pages and smell the ink, the glue and the immortality of the printed words. That is what Crimson Text is meant to be like. The font is released under the Open Font License.

Acid (Free for personal use only)
Acid was designed by Stephan Baum specifically to be used in logotypes and body copy. The form of glyphs is similar to the design classic B42 by Marcel Breuer (Bauhaus) and has a very geometric character. The font contains 103 glyphs, comes in six weights (regular, regular italic, medium, medium italic, bold and bold italic) and is in the process of being developed. Released under Creative Commons.

Real Origami (Free for personal use only) (PDF specimen)
The designers based this font on an origami alphabet by Japanese artist Taichiro Hasegawa. A very original, distinctive and playful font.

Quadranta
According to its creator, this design was started with quadrant arcs. Quadranta is a display font that would fit logo designs and playful headlines. Available for personal and commercial use. Designed by Darim Kim.

Balonez Fantasia
Yet another distinctive, playful font with rounded glyphs. This would be great fit for brochures, magazine and t-shirts. Designed by Thiago Calza. Freely available for personal and commercial work. Available are two weights in TrueType.

Juice
Juice is a modern, dynamic sans-serif type family. The font contains six weights (light, light italic, regular, italic, bold and bold italic), each containing 161 glyphs. The font is available in TrueType format. Designed by Dhany Arliyanti.

Geomancy Typeface (Free for personal use only)
Geomancy is a chunky, retro geometric font that hearkens to French and American art deco. With some letterforms taken directly from posters and ephemera of the period, the all-uppercase set comes with many alternates and ligatures, so you can give a little of that varied, hand-painted feel to your work. Available in two weights: hairline and extra bold.

Prociono
Prociono is an Esperanto word meaning either the star Procyon or the animal species known as the raccoon. It is a roman typeface with blackletter elements. The release includes both OTF and TTF. Source files are available as well.

Edelsans (Free for personal use only)
Edelsans was designed as a noble geometric font for the screen, with few corners and mostly rounded glyphs. The typeface is not completely finished but is free for non-commercial use.

Neu Eichmass
Neu Eichmass (German for New Etalon) is a typeface based on the weight 100 grams. The name is a reference to International Prototype kilogram, as a base unit of mass in the International System of Units. The typeface has a modern, cold, measured feel to it, reflecting its origin (its metal “parents”). It is a sans-serif font and takes inspiration from famous grotesques and stenciled types associated with marketplaces and street traders. Further inspiration comes from 1920s and ’30s constructivism. The font can be easily stenciled and is appropriate for different uses (street art, retail, independent shops, street markets). It comes in a headline font and a medium point body text suitable for print. Designed by Ivan Khmelevsky.

Ingleby Font
A beautiful, carefully crafted serif font, with signs of the fine antiqua tradition. Designed by David Engelby, the font comes in four weights: regular, italic, bold and bold italic.

Ibarra Real
Ibarra Real is a public domain font of Ibero-American character. Created in 2005, Ibarra Real is an elegant design, mixing tradition and modernity; a genuine badge of the particular Spanish culture that was created by Joaquín Ibarra in 1780. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Notice 1: Packaging Symbols (Download)
A symbols font with various weather, packaging and usage symbols.

Notice 2: Navigation symbols (Download)
Yet another symbols font, this one containing symbols for public transit, car and flight navigation.

Notice 3: Cloth Symbols (Download)
This symbols font contains pictograms for the clothing industry. The font is available in OpenType and was designed by the Russian studio Otlab.

Glyphyx (Registration required)
This set of two free fonts features symbols and icons for use in data visualization. Glyphyx One includes symbols related to transportation, while Glyphyx Two has symbols related to leisure activities. Available in OpenType and TrueType formats for Windows and Mac.

Free Symbol Signs Collection
Here is a collection of 50 common symbols for signage, professional designed. The symbols are free for use and are available in OpenType format. All were designed by Sander Baumann, set to the proportions of a regular typeface, so you no longer need to copy and paste such icons into your designs.

Rally Character Set (Specimen | Preview | Download)
Lukyan Turetsky released this character set of car rally symbols. The font contains standard signs of control in rallies, rally-related infographic icons, blanks for logos and other graphics, symbols for legends and other symbols and marks. In OpenType and available for free.

Oblik Serif Bold (Registration required)
Oblik Serif Bold is a sophisticated contemporary font with vivid and playful glyphs. The font could be a great fit for headlines and posters but is hardly usable for long body text. The font has wide character support and is available for free and commercial use. Comes in OpenType format.

Paranoid
Paranoid is a yet another experimental font, collaboratively designed by Simon Carrasco, John Stuart and Kevin Yeun Kit Lo. Paranoid is a purely geometric display face, conceived as a contribution to (and subtle critique of) the still growing trend of bold, geometric and counterless typography. It is equally suited to bringing back the joy of ’80s dance parties or expressing the ominous foreboding of inevitable nuclear disaster. A flexible face in spite of its limited form. Please contact the designers before using this font commercially.

01.BASE
This free font is bold and experimental. It would come handy for bold statements on t-shirts and posters. The font was designed by Fabian De Lange and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Last Click

Typedia
Typedia is a community website dedicated to classifying typefaces and educating people about typefaces. Think of it as a cross between IMDB and Wikipedia, except for type. Anyone can join, add or edit pages for typefaces and the people behind them.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 20 Fresh High-Quality Free Fonts
• 25 New High-Quality Free Fonts
• 15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts
• 40 Excellent Free Fonts for Professional Design
• You can find over 80 more free fonts in our Fonts section.

(al)

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags:

Mastering Photoshop for Web Design is the third book in our eBook series, and it’s definitely the best eBook we’ve published so far. It was written from scratch by our regular writer Thomas Giannattasio, exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. We are very proud of the result, in particular because of the high quality of tips, ideas and techniques that Thomas — who is a deep expert in Adobe Photoshop — presents in his book.

Mastering Photoshop is written for advanced and intermediate designers who want to brush up on their workflow and improve their Photoshop skills. The eBook contains 178 pages, explaining fundamental techniques that Web designers need to know to produce high-quality work in Photoshop. You won’t find any generic step-by-step tutorials or learn random effects. You will gain a profound understanding of what you can do with Photoshop and how to use it effectively in your work.

All chapters have undergone a careful technical review by well-known designer, illustrator and speaker Elliot Jay Stocks. The book was proofread by our regular proofreader Andrew Lobo, and it has an attractive layout. The PDF can be printed and read on all devices.

The Author

Thomas Giannattasio is an interactive designer who resides in the Washington DC metro area. He specializes in Web design and front-end development, particularly art direction, website design and application design, and has 14 years of experience. Thomas cares strongly about typography, simplicity and user experience. He works as a senior designer for a global marketing firm and freelances under the name attasi.

Thomas’ articles on Smashing Magazine prove his expertise in Photoshop: The Ails of Typographic Anti-Aliasing and Unknown Photoshop Tricks and Time-Savers are two of the most useful Photoshop-related articles that Smashing Magazine has published over the years.

The Expert’s Opinion

“Photoshop is a powerful tool, and although the basics can be easy to grasp, mastering the application can be extremely difficult. This is where Mastering Photoshop comes in: it takes readers through the app in depth and relates all tasks back to the creative process. There’s much to learn in here, for beginners and experts alike.”

— Elliot Jay Stocks, designer, illustrator and speaker

The eBook, in PDF format, is ideal for archiving, for armchair or mobile reading (including the iPad and iPhone via iBooks and other apps) and of course for printing. You can order your copy of Mastering Photoshop for just $19,90 (or €16.95 if you live in the EU) starting now and exclusively in our Smashing Shop.

The book contains eight chapters:

1. Color Management
   Colors can appear lighter or darker, more or less saturated, cooler or warmer, or just plain wrong depending on the user’s environment. This can be quite a problem, especially with a client’s brand-specific colors. As Web designers, our responsibility is to ensure that the experiences we craft are as true to the original as possible.
2. Paths
   While Illustrator’s vector tools are much more powerful, Photoshop’s benefit lies in its ability to blend vector and raster data together seamlessly. Because Photoshop documents are based on a pixel grid, the path tools in Photoshop make them superior to Illustrator for designing on-screen media.
3. Layer Styles
   Layer Styles are essential to creating flexible and non-degradable documents, because they’re separated from the layer’s actual content. In this chapter, we’ll cover how to create great-looking and reusable styles. We’ll also cover some unique effects and non-typical uses that help to consolidate excess layers.
4. Brushes
   Mastering the digital brush is by no means easy. It carries the same difficulties as the sable brush hidden at the bottom of your art bin. In fact, the difficulty is multiplied by the disconnect between the hand and monitor. Developing Photoshop brush skill takes time, but it is well worth the effort.
5. Typography
   While the majority of type on the Web is rendered by HTML, Photoshop is still necessary to handle treatment beyond the grasp of CSS. In this chapter, we’ll explore Photoshop’s type tools and discover ways to maximize the software’s typesetting capabilities.
6. Photography
   A photograph — especially of the human face — immediately draws the user’s attention and can be used to direct eye flow to important areas of the page. Placing a large photograph above the fold is a common way to provide an entry point to the content. Because photographs are high above other elements in the hierarchy, they need to be handled with care and precision.
7. Exporting
   Once you’ve polished every last pixel, it’s time to get your work into the browser. This is a pretty straightforward process, but properly optimizing your images is crucial. You need to maintain a balance between clarity and download speed. This requires multiple formats, varying levels of compression and other optimization techniques. In this chapter, we’ll explore the workflow of exporting images via the “Save for Web and Devices� dialog.
8. Summary

Sample Chapter and Screenshots

You can download the Chapter 4, Brushes (4.7 Mb, PDF) for free. Please consider buying the eBook if you find it useful or helpful.

Large view

Large view

Large view

Motivation behind the book

In the foreword, Thomas describes his motivation:

“This book was written in the hope of filling a gap — a gap that has existed for as long as designers have been using Photoshop for Web design; a gap that we so often fill with tutorials focused on the latest trends and on
inspiration galleries that are quickly browsed and forgotten; a gap that is growing as quickly as our technologies. It’s a gap of foundation.

The fast pace of the Internet has focused us on the latest and greatest techniques, which typically have a lifespan of only a few months. Rarely do we focus on the fundamentals — the principles that outlive the trends. Unfortunately, the principles often appeal to us less than the shiny and new.

Photoshop tutorials offer quick results. They hold our hands step by step until something incredible appears, but they rarely explain in depth the principles that allow us to create something unique and incredible of our own. If you’re a beginner, I hope this book gives you the comprehension you need to bring your ideas to life. If you’re a veteran, I hope it unveils some of the mysteries that have always boggled you.”

The book is not protected by DRM and is available exclusively in the Smashing Shop. Please respect our work and the hard effort of our writer. If you received this book from a source other than the Smashing Shop, please support us by purchasing your copy in our online store.

Thank you.

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: ebook, mastering, photoshop, smashing