We love WordPress. There are great premium WordPress themes out there – and a lot of free Themes. If you look at the free WordPress Theme Directory you will notice that there are maybe “too many themes floating around”. So how to find good free WordPress Themes? Right now we want to help you with that and present you a collection of real great looking free WordPress Themes. We think, that these are some of the best free Themes of the last months. If you know more great free Themes feel free to leave the URL in the comments.
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Pattern8 is a great resource to find excellent free seamless patterns. The collection of patterns are grouped in colors, and this means Pattern8 keeps things simple and allows searching by color.

Going trough the site, you’ll see various type of pattern styles, such as: grungy, retro, diagonal or vertical stripes, swirls, antique, metalic & gold, minimalistic style, etc.
Many other type of patterns even have interesting shapes or character illustrations, such as: simple geometric shapes (circles, squares, stars), clouds, ornate, florals, Halloween pumpkin, cute animals, and lots more.

URL: http://pattern8.com/

Paul Ensane brings us these good looking tag icons. They come in a *.zip file with a preview image and the PSD file that contains 4 different colors of tags. This et is called “Futuramachine” and if you are looking for a nice free set of tag icons PSD files, then here you go:

http://paulensane.deviantart.com/art/Futura-TagIcons-69727386

1. Hi , who are you and what do you do?

Hi, I am a graphic designer who got into web design and blogging. Most of the time you’ll find me working for some client work, mostly on catalogues and brochures, or publishing something on Designer Daily. I’m currently trying to escape from client work to spend more time blogging and designing on personal projects.

2. Describe a typical day at work?

I usually wake up at 6:30, grab a coffee and go straight to work. From 6:30 to 8:00 I’ll do some RSS reading, social media stuff and blogging. From 8 to 17 I work on projects for clients, then I try to take a walk or do some sport to change my mind. In the evening I work on my blogs, either by writing articles, tweaking design or promoting. In the week-end I spend some time blogging, that’s when I write most of my in-depth articles.

3. What do you enjoy most about your work?

The freedom I guess…

4. What do you like least about your job?

Being in front on the computer pretty much all the time, I find it quite tiring sometimes and try to change this by doing some writing or drawing work outside.

5. What is your worst enemy of creativity?

To me, the worst enemy of creativity is… creativity. I noticed that highly creative people often face one big issue: spreading themselves too thin. Having ideas all the time, these people will often want to jump from one project to another, thus never achieve any.

6. What do you do when you start a new project and you have NO ideas?

It doesn’t happen to me to have no ideas when starting a new project. However it does happen that the ideas I have are not satisfying, in those cases I just start working even if everything I do is lame for an hour or two, the ideas will come sooner or later.

7. What inspires you the most?

For personal work, I find that the best inspiration source is to take a walk or relax a little. For client work, I think that the most important is to focus on the topic, take the time to get “in the zone”.

8. Do you listen to music while working?

I don’t listen to music while working, I find it too distracting. If I work on repetetive or boring tasks I will listen to some jazz (Nina Simone, Billy Holyday, John Coltrane,…), french music or classical music.

9. How do you deal with criticism?

If it’s pointless criticism, I just ignore it. For most argumented criticism, I’ll take notes and give myself some time to think it. From experience, taking time is the most important to take the emotion out of the reaction and respond the best to critics.

10. What does your workspace look like?

Hard to tell, I’ve moved my office four times this year so I really didn’t get time to install my office properly.

11. Do you remember the very first web-project in which you were involved?

The first personal web project I worked on was a shitty flash website I did while in school. On the professional side, it was a website for a bar (no links, too painful to share that).

12. Is there any advice you would give our readers?

To find some way to always push their skills further and think about what they do. My blog contributed to this a lot, but I know that blogging isn’t for everyone.

13. What has been the most fun project to work on so far?

Obviously my blog, I really enjoy publishing it. I enjoy working for clients too, but I’m not sure it’s exactly “fun”.

14. Imagine yourself in 15 years… what do you see yourself doing?

Huh… 15 years? I guess I’ll be old enough by then to grow a moustache or something like that. Seriously it’s hard to answer that question, knowing myself I will probably take some unexpected path.

15. Please tell us 3 people who we should do this interview with (why them? :-) ).

John Boardley of  “I Love Typography“,  Daniel Scocco of  “Daily Blog Tips” & one of the fine editors of the “Lovely Package” blog.

Mirko…thank you very much for answering our questions :-)

So if you want to visit Mirko you should do that now: Visit http://www.designer-daily.com/ or leave him a comment here! :)

There were times when many people use blinking GIF web-graphic for websites to get viewer’s attention. Here is another better idea to create something like that with the goodness of jQuery. It’s not to blink within every few seconds, but you’ll see smooth transition of color changing on a text or background. Sam Dunn from Build Internet wrote a tutorial to create this amazing smooth color cycles with jQuery.

For the start, the background color is adjusted to have continuous loop with a jQuery plugin called: jQuery Color Animations Plugin. It will generate a random RGB color value in specific function.
You’ll need to sort what colors to change before working on the transition timer adjustment, and combine all functions to have a ready changing-color background.

Jump into another next step is to create a div ID for the solid black PNG image. The idea is to show the smooth animation of color changes (cycles) in the background trough the negative space of this PNG image.

Yes it is nifty but the FX is very nice to see. Learn the details of how to create this smooth color cycles for text & backgrounds with jQuery from the tutorial source.

site: http://buildinternet.com/2009/09/its-a-rainbow-color-changing-text-and-backgrounds/
demo: http://buildinternet.com/live/rainbow/

1. Hi , who are you and what do you do?

I’m Jeff Fisher, the Engineer of Creative Identity for the Portland-based design firm Jeff Fisher LogoMotives. I’ve been working as a design professional since 1978, with a focus on identity design since about 1995. I kind of have a split personality in the design world. In addition to being a designer, I am a writer.

I’m the author of ” Identity Crisis!: 50 redesigns that transformed stale identities into successful brands” and “The Savvy Designer’s Guide to Success: Ideas and tactics for a killer career.”
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The “Vaga Icon Set” contains 60, semi-transparent .png icons (16 x 16) ready to use and available for free download.

URL: http://www.tenbytwenty.com/products/icon-sets/vaga

Most of the time you see some carousels that uses jQuery which have a definite set of looping. It means after you’ve finished in scrolling all of the carousel’s content, the loop will back again to the first start.

Any wonder of how to create a carousel that works in opposite way? Here is a nice tutorial that will show you how easy to create infinite loop of carousel and also to set it with auto scrolling. The auto scroll will stop on mouse-over.

An event is made to trigger the next arrow in a state of being clicked then you need to set a timer to keep firing the new custom event.

site: http://jqueryfordesigners.com/automatic-infinite-carousel/
demo: http://jqueryfordesigners.com/demo/infinite-carousel-loop.html

Textures are one of the most important element in a design. You can create different touch or different look on the same web layout design template for instance, simply by adding different textures.

Callum Chapman, a graphic designer and illustrator based in Royston and Cambridge, UK shares you 10 high resolution fabric textures on his blog. Each of them has different colors and these are completely free for personal and commercial projects.

The texture set would be useful to use for web layout background, or any design project that needs large size of texture to make it brilliant. Set a bit of layer transparency or make sure you put enough color contrast for the object in front of the fabric texture, then just see what magic brings you in the end :) These free fabric textures are created in high resolution. It means, you have almost unlimited options to come out with creative ideas using these textures.

URL: http://blog.callumchapman.com/2009/resources/10-high-res-fabric-textures/

jQuote is a plugin to create semantic blockquotes with just one line of jQuery code. It is created by Jack Franklin. This plugin avoids duplicate content when javascript is not enabled which is what would happen if you did the usual method of copying or pasting text to create quotes. jQuote provides an easy option to add secondary quote styling, a person’s name to the quote, for instance. Again, it is also customizable in CSS.

It looks simple and nifty! Download this jQuote plugin to have your own stylish blockquote by visiting the source page!

URL: http://www.jackfranklin.co.uk/jquote/

Akashi is a stylised sans serif typeface featuring 158 of the most commonly used glyphs.

URL: http://www.tenbytwenty.com/products/typefaces/akashi

Your time is your product. Every minute you spend working that goes unaccounted for is like giving away your product for free. Tracking your time accurately is essential to staying profitable.

In addition, knowing how much time you spend on past projects, can allow you to better estimate future projects. Do you know how much time you spend in meetings? On the phone? Promoting yourself? Making sales calls? Keep track of anything with Klok’s simple work timer and visual display of how your days “fill up”.

URL: http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm

MOD is applicable for any type of graphic design – web, print, motion graphics etc and perfect for t-shirts and other items like logos, pictograms.

Format: Opentype (.otf) Compatible: PC & Mac Details: Cyrillic version, 215 Character Set, Manual Kerning, Tracking / Pairs Price: Free

URL: http://fontfabric.com/?p=396

Here comes a great set of packaging texture freebie pack by by Callum Chapman of circleboxtextures.com. The set includes 6 high resolution packaging paper textures stained with blue and blank ink. Callum produced these awesome effect in long step of craftsmanship process. Each of the paper went through several different processes to get the right effect.

These Ink Stained Packaging Paper textures are absolutely free to use for personal and commercial design projects!

URL:
http://circleboxtextures.com/2009/paper-card/6-ink-stained-packaging-paper-textures/

Here comes another goodness of jQuery. We will review a quick tutorial to create a display box of image that will have an animated comment whenever you hover it.

In the HTML code section, set a wrap div id inside the container. The wrap renders two classes which are image class and span class called: “comment”.
The image class and the comment class should have absolute position so the comment stucks on the image. Therefore, the wrap class is defined with relative position and the overflow should be set to hidden. This will hide the comment when your mouse hover-off the image.
In the end, hover jQuery event will trigger the “comment” class to animate.

Step on to the site page and the demo to find out the details. You’ll be surprise how the jQuery FX animates so smooth with very simple codes ;)

URL:
site: http://www.jcargoo.org/2009/08/overlay-text-over-image-with-very.html
demo: http://jcargoo.110mb.com/textimages/image.htm

If you’re a web developers who stick a lot to programming codes just chill out a little, as we share some good news about the Free CodeIgniter cheat sheet with you :)

This CodeIgniter cheat sheet is released recently by designfellow.com. The latest version includes 2 sheets:

* Sheet-1 contains library functions with parameters (including cart library, which is not yet released officially by CodeIgniter but available in svn)
* Sheet-2 is for helpers functions & CodeIgniter reserved names etc.

You can download this cheat sheets in .PNG & .PDF files format (A4 print out size)
It’ll be nice to have it around your work-desk while you do the coding! So be sure to have it now or mark it as saved bookmark just in case you’ll need it later.

URL:
http://designfellow.com/blog/freebies/codeigniter-quick-reference-cheat-sheet-version-2-0-released/

With WizeHive you can organize your ideas, notes, files & tasks into workspaces and pages. You can customize workspace and select colors and upload your own logo. Share, manage & track to–dos and files among your team. Of cource you can track activity and view a twitter–like feed of all workspace activity.

URL: http://www.wizehive.com

If you need a font that is good for display text on signage or T-Shirt design, Hexy Clover could be the one. The font is creatively designed by WONG Kai Zen. Each glyph has modular structures and by the name given for this font, you can also view the abstraction of clovers in hexagonal orders. Somehow when we tested this font, we suggest you to adjust the anti-aliasing setting of your graphic editor software into “smooth”, therefore you will have consistent type either at small sizes or low resolution.

Download HexyClover for free in True Type (.ttf) format and if you decide to use this font, there are some rules to follow so make sure you read the design license carefuly.

URL: http://www.fridayfonts.com/?p=361

chemist2dio.com is giving away 7 kick ass vector wings, freshly-made for your designing pleasure. Enjoy it while it’s hot! The set is available in eps format but if you want to request for another format just shout out a message at the comment section of the source site and make sure to say thanks. And now download this great set of free vector wings:

URL: http://labs.chemist2dio.com/free-vector-wings-kick-ass-set.php

Oh look what I found on this sunny day: The guys from blogperfume.com added another 10 social media icons to their social media icons pack. The new icons are AIM, Bebo, eBay, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Ning, Orkut and Yahoo Messenger. They also included an icon template PSD file. So if you are looking for some nice social media icons: get them now!

URL: http://www.blogperfume.com/new-27-circular-social-media-icons-in-3-sizes/