Free For All: Cool Stuff for the Cash-Poor Creative

Pariah Burke

Save Paper When Printing from the Web
Are you looking for ways to reduce our industry’s carbon footprint? Try this environmentally friendly font that uses less ink than comparable fonts. Eco Sans includes holes in its strokes that are too small to be perceived when set at typical body copy sizes, but that actually reduce the amount of ink required to print each glyph by up to 25%!

The Dutch company Spranq released the Ecofont technology two years ago. More current news is an easy way to use fewer pages when printing online materials. PrintWhatYouLike.com enables you to instantly and easily print only portions of Web pages, leaving out ads, sidebars, headers, and anything else you don’t want. You can even remove inline or background images.
PrintWhatYouLike.com will reformat a Web page at print time to make it more ink-on-paper-reading friendly with fit-to-page text reflow and different typefaces or sizes. You can save settings as a “change set” and reapply them to other pages. You can accomplish all of this live from your Web browser via a bookmarklet, without the need to visit PrintWhatYouLike.com.
Click to see a larger version of the screenshot below:

Web-Based Font Viewer
I’m constantly impressed with the level of sophistication and utility developers can build into Web-based applications these days. Take MyFontBook, for example. It displays all the fonts installed on your system, complete with glyph tables, metrics, and customizable sample text. You can tag and rate your fonts and even print specimen sheets. And, again, all of this from within a Web browser — no need to install software. And it does it faster than the commercial best-of-breed font management software installed on my computers!
Of course, MyFontBook is simply a viewer; it can’t activate or de-activate fonts like a dedicated font management application can. But when you want to examine how a particular string of text looks in various installed fonts, turn to MyFontBook.
Click to see a larger version of the screenshot below:

Multi-Project, Multi-Task Time Tracking
A few days ago, a Free for All reader requested a free time tracker. Done! I found an application that’s cross-platform and has some awesome features.
Note that the request was not for project-management software. Time-tracking software simply records the start and end of time spent on various projects and tasks. Both types of applications handle projects and tasks — and usually clients — but while the former is ideal for team-based project management, the latter is often the preferred tool for freelancers.
Finding a good time-tracker isn’t easy. So many lack essential functions, such as the ability to track multiple projects or tasks. Others can track time spent on as many tasks as you like, but, at the end of a project, those times are locked into the program, requiring you to re-type everything for invoicing.
Hourly is packed with features that make it a perfect solution for the multi-tasking freelancer. It supports multiple projects, each with its own separate tasks, with straightforward Start and Stop buttons. When you complete a project, just click a button to export project time data to comma-separated text (CSV), which can be imported into any spreadsheet, database, or invoicing application.

The only drawback to Hourly is that it doesn’t allow you to manually enter times. For instance, if you take a meeting with a client, you can’t go back and enter that time in Hourly manually. It only accepts time inputs via the Start and Stop buttons. Even with that limitation, Hourly is the best freelance time-tracking application I’ve used in 20 years — free or otherwise. The application is built in Adobe AIR, which means it’s 100% cross-platform and ready for use on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
3D Landscape Design
Cornucopia3D’s Vue Pioneer 8 is an incredible introductory 3D landscape design application for Mac and Windows — and it’s completely free! Get your feet wet creating natural-looking, photorealistic 3D worlds with Vue Pioneer 8, and then, if you need more power, upgrade to more feature-packed products in the Vue 8 line. Watch this demo reel to see what others have created with the Vue 8 products.

The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design
In the free ebook The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design, author Stephen Hay helps you develop a process for staying consistently creative regardless of how vaguely your client communicates desires and goals. Hay presents a five-step formula to being creative no matter the client or project, and without copying peers’ work, but avoiding the tendency to jump straight into Photoshop. Instead, Hay cautions that designs must be well defined and fleshed out long before taking pencil to paper or pixel to Photoshop.
Although The Design Funnel is marred by the occasional grammatical error, its intriguing perspective is worth a read.

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.