*** From the Archives ***

This article is from December 20, 2010, and is no longer current.

Free For All: Freebies from Us to You

Document Templates
There are dozens of templates in EPS format for Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXPress, and more at PrintingForLess.com’s template center. They run the gamut from business cards, #10 envelopes, brochures, and invoices to door hangers, Post-It Notes, table tents, and rack cards.
Each template contains fold lines (where applicable) and guides for trim, bleed, and live area.

2011 Calendars in InDesign, Illustrator, and PDF Formats
Every year, designer Rob Cubbon sends Christmas cards to his clients, but those cards don’t get thrown away after New Year’s. In a stroke of marketing genius, Rob adorns the back of each card with a calendar for the following year, ensuring that his clients will keep the cards–and Rob’s name–in front of them all year long.
As generous as he is smart, Rob has made his calendar templates available gratis to the rest of the design community. In addition to instructions for using the 2011 calendars and turning them into perpetual calendars, you’ll find downloadable single-page 2011 calendars in PDF and Adobe Illustrator format and 12-page 2011 calendars in PDF and InDesign formats.

New Metal Grids Textures and Patterns
I’m a sucker for clean, sharp metal grid textures and patterns. If you are too, download the excellent examples I’ve recently discovered–all free, of course.




Free Fonts
These twelve free fonts span the gamut.












Stripemania
With apologies to Hershey’s, sometimes you feel like a stripe, sometimes you don’t. When you do, consider Stripemania, a browser-based utility to create tileable striped images in seconds. You can create patterns comprised of a background color and up to 8 stripe colors. Precision controls help you specify the stripe width and amount of spacing, and well as the orientation of the pattern, either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally striped. Once you’ve completed your masterpiece stripe, it can be downloaded with transparent or opaque backgrounds and either used directly in a Web page or imported into Photoshop.

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.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of many books and articles that empower, inform, and connect creative professionals.
  • Anonymous says:

    I love fonts, and work for a library, so we have few funds to purchase them. Thanks for helping us get the word out to our community about all the great things our library has to offer (by providing eye-catching fonts!).

  • Anonymous says:

    Hello Pariah, Thank you for linking to my free 2011 calendars for download – lots of designers are coming by to download them! Happy New Year!

  • Anonymous says:

    Thanks! These are way cool and fit my Christmas stocking just perfectly. Keep them coming!

    …and Happy Holi-daze to all!

  • Anonymous says:

    Hi Pariah,
    Thanks for all the freebies. I’ve always hesitated to use free fonts. Almost everything I work on is sent to press. Do these free fonts work just for home printing on desk-jet printers, or will they work fine for high-res press-quality work?

  • Anonymous says:

    Pariah, I love all of your stuff and thanks for your continuing efforts! Here are some things I’m always looking for:

    1. Find what you can about color trends. There are services that release them for the fashion industry but they’re expensive. Pantone also has some, but I’m sure there are other free sources for them that I haven’t had time to ferret out.

    2. Also, I have an insatiable desire for new color schemes. I use ColourLovers and ColorHunters, but can you suggest others?

    3. Trends. Trends. Trends. Hey, I’m an old man. I need all the fresh juice you can pour for me. Type treatments, trailblazing layouts, fresh ad campaigns. Feed them all to me.

    4. Design business managment. The longer I’m a freelancer, the more complex my life becomes. I need help managing all of it. I’d appreciate sources for keeping all of these ducks in order.

    5. Macintosh Font Management. What’s the best approach? I was fine using OS 9, but I’m still in a fog with OS X.

    Will the above keep you busy in 2011? Hope so!

  • Anonymous says:

    Thanks for some excellent tips here – really like the one about Christmas Cards – must remember that for next year!

  • Anonymous says:

    Really appreciate the Free for All from Pariah S. Burke. Would like to see some things for InDesign such as templates, scipts, etc.

    thanks

  • Anonymous says:

    “…Christmas Cards – must remember that for next year!”
    Submitted by Guest on Fri, 01/07/2011 – 02:23.

    “Thank you for linking to my free 2011 calendars for download – lots of designers are coming by to download them! Happy New Year!”
    Submitted by Guest on Mon, 12/20/2010 – 09:27.

    Don’t worry, they’ll “recycle” it again, and again…

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