One of the great things about working with WordPress and developing your own themes is the community and all of the resources that are available. If you’re not sure how to do something or looking to see what solutions other theme designers and developers are using, you can find plenty of infomation and tutorials to help.

In this post we’ll feature a wide selection of resources that are extremely useful for theme designers and developers. If you work on custom themes for clients, themes for your own use, distribute free themes or sell premium themes, these resources may prove to be highly useful for you.

All of the resources in this post are categorized and hopefully you will find a number of new resources that will be practical for your own work.

Having the right icons for a web design project can greatly enhance the end results. Finding the right icons, however, is not always an easy task. Fortunately, there are some sites that exist specifically to help people find the icons that they are looking for. If you find yourself looking for icons to use in your own work, try these resources.

Iconfinder

Iconfinder is the best icon search engine. There are a lot of high-quality icons available, and you can filter the results to show only those that are licensed for commercial use.

One of the major benefits of using WordPress is the large, active community of users. You can find just about anything you need by doing a search. Chances are, someone else has already provided answers to your question on a website, blog, or forum. In this post we’ll feature 15 blogs that produce excellent content that is highly relevant to WordPress theme designers. If you do a lot of work with WordPress, either for your own site or for clients, I recommend that you bookmark these blogs or subscribe to their feeds.

WpRecipes
At WpRecipes Jean-Baptiste Jung publishes short posts that include code snippets for accomplishing specific things with WordPress.

Almost every website uses a form of some kind. Contact forms and other types of forms can be enhanced with the use of a number of jQuery plugins that are readily available. In this post we’ll feature 25 useful plugins that you may be able to use in your own work with forms.

jqTranform

jqTransform will make it easy to give your forms a more attractive look as compared to the default form.

For Illustrator users, high-quality brushes can save time and help to produce impressive results. In this post we’ll feature 27 sets of free brushes to spark your work with Illustrator. For more brushes, see 45 Excellent Sets of Adobe illustrator Brushes and 30 Sets of High-Quality Adobe Illustrator Brushes.

Chalk Illustrator Brushes

Today we are going to feature 25 of the best sets of Photoshop brushes for creating grungy designs. You’ll find a variety of different types of brushes that will all help you to give your work a rough, grungy look. If you’re looking for a way to create a grunge-style design, brushes can be an easy, effective solution.

Grungy Texture Brushes (12 brushes)

Patterns can be extremely helpful for Illustrator users, and there are many good ones that you can download for free. In this post we’ll feature more than 225 repeating patterns that can be downloaded. We’ll start with pattern sets and then we’ll include some individual patterns at the end of the post. As always when you are working with freebies, be sure to check the terms of use or licensing set by the designer.

Pattern Sets:

Organic Patterns (3 patterns)

There are plenty of highly-useful resources and web apps that have been created with freelance designers and developers in mind. But for many freelancers, especially those who are just getting started, pricing can be an issue. In this post we’ll feature 29 resources that are not only very useful fore freelancers, but also extremely affordable. Many of them are free or offer a free plan, and the others are priced below the competition.

Hopefully you will find some resources here that will help you to save time and make your work more efficient and effective. If you have suggestions of other resources aside from those that are listed here, please leave a comment.

1. Project Bubble

Project Bubble offers free web-based project management and invoicing. Add clients, create projects, track your progress, and invoice clients all from Project Bubble.

Today we’ll continue our series of posts featuring collections of Photoshop brushes. In this post you’ll find 16 sets of free smoke brushes. These can be great for adding touches to your designs, especially on dark backgrounds.

Thick Curly Smoke Brushes (21 brushes)

While there are a lot of powerful and feature-rich content management systems available to choose from, designers often have the need to work on small sites for clients that may only have use for a fraction of the features offered by the CMS. In theses cases the ideal solution is to use a simple CMS that may offer limited features, but will be easier for clients to use.

If you’re finding that some of your clients are confused by extra options, consider finding a CMS that has been created specifically for smaller projects with simplicity in mind. In this post we’ll look at 13 options that are available. All of these CMSs should make it easy for you to set up the site, and easy for the clients to manage content.

GetSimple

GetSimple claims to have “everything your clients need, and nothing a CMS dosen’t.” GetSimple is XML-based rather than using a MySQL database, and has been created specifically with the needs of small websites in mind. GetSimple is free and takes about 5 minutes to install.