Free For All: Old Type, New Tablets, Web Icons, & Grunge Textures

Pariah Burke

1920s and 1930s “The” and Ampersand Clipart
“Sale!” “New!” “Sex!” These are the golden buzzwords of advertising, words that make people take notice. For designers, a different trio of words catches eyes: “Free!” “Vintage!” “Typography!” While everything in “Free for All” is free, this particular freebie combines all three of those designer buzzwords into an extra-special download.
Cathe Holden has assembled a collection of gorgeous Thes and ampersands from advertisements and designs published in the 1920s and 1930s. The collection is in the form of a PDF, which you can open in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to extract individual scans, or you can place the PDF into a page-layout application and crop the PDF to show only the desired mark. There are more than 50 Thes and ampersands to spice up your retro designs.

iPad Rendering Actions for Photoshop
You know how to create mock-ups of print projects, websites, maybe even 3D packaging. But what about iPad app and site comps? While capturing an iPad’s screen is easy — just press the power and home buttons simultaneously — creating an image of that screen on an iPad isn’t so simple. Usually it involves photographing an iPad and compositing the screen capture onto it. And if you don’t own an iPad, you’re out of luck.
At least, you were until the folks at 36Pix created the oddly named Jesus Pad Actions for Photoshop. These easy-to-install and easier-to-use actions take any image you have and add it to photorealistic rendering of the iPad. Check out the renderings I did with screen captures of CreativePro.com and the previous edition of “Free for All”:

I took those screenshots on my computer, then used the Jesus Pad actions to render iPads from scratch (no photograph needed) and apply the website screenshots to the iPads’ screens. And I only used two of the six angles and views of the iPad available in the actions set. The set includes actions to create straight-on portrait and landscape rotations as well as rotations in angled-left and angled-right variants. You can automatically generate shadows and reflections, as well. Because the actions put everything on layers, it’s easy to adjust or disable the reflections, shadows, screen image, or parts of the iPad itself.
Visit the Jesus Pad Actions for Photoshop page to download the action sets, but don’t just download and leave. The first time through the actions, be sure to follow the simple step-by-step instructions provided by 36Pix. Each action is in two parts, and you’ll need to perform a manual copy and paste operation between running part 1 and part 2 of each iPad generation set.
Massive Collection of Web Media Icons
IconShock, a design agency specializing in the super-niche of icon and user interface button design, created a spectacular and massive collection of icons ready for free download. The set includes representations of everything from Apple to Amazon, Behance to Blogger, Diigo to Design Bump, Facebook to Friendfeed, Wikipedia to WordPress, and everything in between. And they aren’t just plain old PNGs and ICOs — IconShock went all out. There are PNGs and ICOs, but the collection also includes vector and PSD versions, nine sizes of every icon, monochrome versions, and multi-state colored versions. If you need Web or social media icons for a website, app, or mobile interface, download this collection. Visit the download page and scroll way, way down to the easily missed graphic emblazoned with “Download the most extensive and sexy social icon set ever.”

Slum Textures
Designer Von Glitschka spent part of this spring in the Mathare Valley Slums near Nairobi, Kenya. While there, Von took many pictures, among them textures throughout the slums. After refining the textures back home, Von released what can only be described as truly grungy grunge textures. The free and royalty-free set includes 35 textures in three versions — the original source image, a PSD version, and a black and white texture map in TIFF format — for maximum utility and creative flexibility.
Because the entire set of Slum Textures is so large, it’s four separate downloads at the bottom of Von’s Blogspot page. Each download is under 200MB.

Comic Strip Creator
I like throwing in the occasional quirky freebie that you may not ever use. But don’t sell it short; even if you can’t find a business use for this next freebie, maybe it’ll become another outlet for your personal creativity.
The Comic Sketch online application and service is a Flash-based comic strip creator and animator. You can draw directly in your browser, add animation, and build multiple panels to create a pseudo-animated comic strip.

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.