Free For All: Twice As Nice

Pariah Burke

You asked for more free cool stuff for creative professionals, and you’ve got it. For the summer, you’ll get Free for All twice a month. That’s twice the free apps, twice the free tools, twice the free fonts, brushes, stock photos, vector images — twice the free everything!
Contrast-A
Although built for Web designers, the cross-platform AIR application Contrast-A is valuable in all design professions that use color. Contrast-A helps you understand and choose an appropriate level of contrast between two colors, particularly in light of common vision impairments. For example, is there sufficient contrast for your foreground and background colors to be easily discerned by anyone with deuteranopia (the most common form of red-green color blindness)? A 3D color model and various swatches will help you find out. Click the image below to see a larger version.

Free Stock Photos — On Demand!
I’ve brought you free stock photography sites before, but none like Photo Rogue. While you can browse its gallery for pre-existing photos, the main draw is that you can request a new photo of whatever you want. There are no guarantees that your request will be fulfilled, or that the quality will be acceptable, but heck, you might as well give it a try!

Special Characters Cheatsheets
You may have memorized the keyboard combination for an em dash. But what about keyboard combinations for the trademark and copyright symbol? Or accents over words such as naïve or café? Me neither, which is why I love these cheatsheets from Ilya Birman and Smashing Magazine that show you how to type many common special characters from your Mac or Windows keyboard. Click the image below to see a larger version.

Easy, Powerful Blog and/or Instant Online Portfolio
Being both a social media enthusiast and something of a content management system (CMS) connoisseur, I’ve tried just about all the blog and content sharing systems out there. Of them all, Posterous is the easiest to set up; has the most powerful, simplest, and coolest posting interface; and can instantly and automatically broadcast everything you post to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Delicious, and pretty much everywhere else you could want your content to go.
Click the image below to see a larger version.
If you’re ready to dive into blogging for the first time and don’t want to mess around with a complicated configuration, Posterous is a breeze. Just pick a username, password, and title for your Posterous site and start posting. Commenting, tagging, favoriting, and an RSS feed are built in. The default Posterous style is simple and elegant, and customization and theming is coming soon.
If you already have a blog (or two, or three), you can use Posterous as a posting interface to your existing blog. For instance, my portfolio and blog is powered by WordPress, but I use Posterous as a front-end posting client because its capabilities and ease of use are mostly superior to WordPress’s New Post screen and “Post This” bookmarklet. I can send text, pictures, video, Podcasts, and just about anything else via e-mail to my Posterous account whereupon Posterous will automatically embed that content in a post and publish it to my WordPress-powered blog — all without writing EMBED or even IMG codes.
I can do the same thing via the posting interface or through the ultra-handy “Share This on Posterous” browser bookmarklet. In fact, it’s even easier that way when I want to grab content I find online — like a video or image — because the “Share This” interface shows the media contained within a page, enabling me to pick the piece I want to share visually and without coding. Posterous will automatically add a link back to the original source of the content, saving me the potential faux pas of forgetting to credit the original author. It takes three to four times as long to do something similar in WordPress.
Even if you don’t want to blog, consider the possibilities of using Posterous as your portfolio. You can populate your entire online design portfolio in minutes by attaching images and/or video to a few e-mails. Posterous will automatically embed your video or audio within a player as the body of a post, display a single image as the body of a post, or, if you attach multiple images to the same e-mail, it will instantly build a slick jQuery gallery of the images. Instant portfolio!
Give Posterous a try, and let me know how it goes. I’d love to check out your new blog or portfolio.
Grunge Style Starter Kit
Grunge style consists largely of distressed paper textures and fonts, hand-drawn elements, and wrinkled photographs — you know, all the stuff we used to take great pains to remove from our work. Grunge can infuse dimensionality, mood, and personality into a design.
Three-column grunge WordPress theme:

Old dossier folder PSD template:

Plastic slide and photo sleeves (pristine and wrinkled):

Sticky notes:

More sticky notes:

Grungy icons. (Pay close attention to the license before you use these!)

120 hand-drawn vector arrows:

Grunge text effect style (inside PSD example):

Photo corners made of various materials:

Stained, spotty Polaroid image frames:

Print-quality scan of crayon strokes and colored areas:

Vector halftones, clean and grunge:

Wrinkled paper Photoshop brushes:

Rough paper textures:

Distressed fonts Rochester and Downcome:

Look for more grunge fonts in “Free for All: 103 Free Fonts,” and plenty of other grunge resources in previous installments of this column.
What can I find free for you? More free fonts? More Photoshop brushes? How about more online applications that do this or that for free? Click the word Comments below to tell me what you’d like to see in future installments of Free for All. 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.