Need inspiration for new design, animation, digital art, CG, advertising idea, flash design, etc.? Wanted to know about some outstanding designers in another corner of the world? NewWebPick provides E-Magazine specially for designers.

To start downloading the magazines, first you need to sign up as member (Yeah, it’s free!). Then go to http://ezine.newwebpick.com/, login and choose the series that you like.

Well of course not everything is free, they provide free or lite version here: http://www.newwebpick.com/_issue/. If you like their magazine and want to download the complete version then you’ll have to pay. It’s well worth anyway I think. Oh ya! The complete 16th issue is given out for free! More pages, more pictures, more designs!

“Lorem Ipsum” is simply the most popular dummy text used in design industry. Instead of waiting for the content prepared by client, which may take “centuries”, insert this dummy text to preview the design. Where to get this? Go to http://www.lipsum.com  and generate as many paragraph of dummy text as you like. Yes, it’s free and just copy and paste.

Photoshop brushes is a very convenient tool. It helps to create cool visual effects without taking much of your time.

There’s a great resources of photoshop brushes in deviantART. Follow the link here to enjoy this resource: http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/applications/psbrushes/.

You can also create your own brushes. Here’s one of the way to make it:

You can actually create the brush with almost anything. First of all, create a new file in Photoshop, set a size, say 500px by 500px, Grayscale color mode.

Copy the image over to your new photoshop file.

Adjust the image before it is brush-worthy, use the Level, Curves, Brightness/Contrast.

Make a selection around the area you want to make it a brush.

Next, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and give a name to the brush, and TADAA! The brush is created.

Now, you can choose the Brush tool, right click on the new photoshop page, choose the newly created brush, select a color (foreground color), and click on any space as many times you like to “re-use” the graphic!

Travis Beckham is kind enough to share these nice patterns for website background: http://squidfingers.com/patterns/. Currently there are more than a hundred patterns free for use, of course a credit is always a plus and appreciation to the creator or owner.

Apart from these nice patterns, Travis Beckham has a nice website and there are some works worth spending some time browsing through. Great portfolio as reference and inspiration.

Maybe some of you may have faced slightly a little problem when come to choosing nice colours combination for your design, this post might brighten up your days.

It is a community blog where all the colour lovers hang out. Whenever they’ve new ideas on the combination of colours, they’ll just post it there to share with the rest. Most of the combinations are really cool. So, refresh your ideas and start rocking on your inspirations. Let’s go!

Korean web design industry has been one of the most promising and vastly-improved industry through the last decade. If you’re looking for a web design reference or just to have a quick boost to the ideas that has been running in your mind all day long, you may want to pay this website a visit. www.dbcut.com It is Korean website design directory that host many of the great designs that has been tailored in Korea. Have fun!

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML specification and file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics)SVG wouldn’t pixelated or become blurred when we scale up or zoom in the graphic. There are some great resources of SVG files in the internet that help to speed up designing process.

• Wikipedia (normally Logos or Corporate Identity)
• http://openclipart.org/An archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used.

Here is an example of using SVG:

Say you need to insert a Nike logo in your Illustrator artwork, but the logo file is not provided by your client. Instead of tracing it (a more complex logo will take more time and might not getting a very good result), you can actually go to Google, search for “wiki svg nike”. Click on the suitable result link. Normally the first result is the one that we’re looking for. For this example, we get “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nike(c).svg“. Simply download the SVG file to your computer. Next, use the Adobe Illustrator to open the file. Here it is, just copy the vector and paste in your artwork.

Icons could spice up your website, so it won’t be too “texty”. There is a site providing free icons for download: Free Icons Web - http://www.freeiconsweb.com/index.html. Please note that some are for non-commercial purpose only. If you’d like to use those for commercial projects, you’ll need to inform the author or creator of the icon sets. Besides that, if you’re an icon designer, and would like to share your icon design, you can submit to them and show it there. Just contact them via submissions@Freeiconsweb.com. Enjoy~