Web and graphic designers have a lot of free resources at their disposal. Thanks to an active design community, finding quality free resources is possible. In this post we’ll feature some of the best free vector packs that are available for download. As always when you are working with freebies, be sure to check the license and guidelines established by the designer.

City Skyline Vectors (7 vectors)

Photoshop brushes can be a great time saving resource an they can make it much easier to create attractive designs. From time-to-time we showcase the best Photoshop brush sets of various kinds, and today we’re focusing on lines brushes. This post features 16 excellent, free sets totaling over 250 brushes for creating lines.

Distorted Lines Brushes (1 brush)

We try to provide readers with links to resources that will make designing easier, more effective, and more fun. Today we have a collection of free Photoshop brushes that will allow you to easily add spray paint effects to your design. Have fun experimenting and see what you can come up with!

High Res Spray Paint Brushes (18 brushes)

WordPress is a popular blogging engine and CMS in part because of the active community of users and the vast resources that are available. There are thousands of plugin developers that have worked to extend the possibilities of WordPress, and these plugins can provide plenty of opportunities for you to add new features and functionality to your site.

In this post we’ll look at 13 powerful plugins that allow you to take your WordPress-powered site well beyond just a blog. These plugins will help you to create e-commerce websites, mobile-friendly sites, forums, community-based sites, and more.

MobilePress
MobilePress is one of several free plugins that helps you to create a mobile-friendly website. With MobilePress you can create custom themes for different handheld devices. It also integrates with Aduity for serving ads on your mobile site.

In the past few years the growth of the premium/commercial WordPress theme market has grown exponentially. While there are also premium plugins available, they generally get far less attention than premium themes. The right plugin will allow you to improve your site through specific functionality that might otherwise take a lot of time and/or money to set up.

In this post we’ll feature 15 premium plugins that may be able to help you with your own site or with those of clients. Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments at the end of the post.

Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a form creation and management plugin that makes it quick and easy to add simple or advanced forms. Features include conditional form fields, email notification routing, dynamic field population, reply to entries from WP, autoresponers, allow users to create posts through a form (example, community news), and much more. A single-site license costs $39 and an unlimited developer’s license costs $199.

Icons are a favorite free resource of designers and bloggers. There are tons of quality, free icon sets out there and in this post we’ll feature 25 that are great for blog design. These icons sets include the types of icons that are great for use with blogs and social media.

Cute Blogging Icon Set

Photoshop Actions allow designers and photographers to quickly edit photos in a specific way. The right action can save a great deal of time as opposed to doing all of the work manually.

In this post we’ll feature 40 free Photoshop actions (many are actually sets of multiple actions). Our past collections of Photoshop actions continue to draw interest, so we hope many of you will find these to be useful as well. If you see something that you want to try out, click on the image or the text link and you’ll be able to download the actions from the source.

Action Set 1

Most designers love Photoshop brushes because they can make it quick and easy to create impressive results. In the past we have posted numerous collections of various types of Photoshop brushes, and today we’ll continue with rust brushes.

The use of rust and texture in design is very popular right now, and a good set of brushes can make it easy to add this style to your own work. In this post we showcase 13 of the best packs of free rust brushes for Photoshop users.

Concrete Rust (9 brushes)

Browser testing is one of the parts of the design and development process that is necessary but never really enjoyable. With the number of browsers and operating systems that are available, it can be a very time-consuming process to test your website in the environments of visitors. There are a number of tools and resources that have been created to help with this situation, and we’ll profile 15 of them in this post.

In 2008 I published a post of 10 Helpful Resources for Cross Browser Testing, but a lot has changed since then. This post provides an updated look at the world of browser testing and showcases some new products and resources that were not available a few years ago.

Adobe BrowserLab
Adobe BrowserLab is a free resource that allows you to see how your site looks in a wide variety of browsers in Windows XP or Mac OS X (you will need an Adobe account). Once you’ve chosen a browser and an operating system you can enter the URL to see how it looks. You can view one at a time or side-by-side from two different browsers.

Firefox is the browser of choice for most designers and developers in part because of the vast selection of add ons that are available. While Chrome does not offer anywhere close to as many extensions (yet), there are still a number that can be very handy for designers and developers. In some cases they are not as robust as the Firefox versions (example, Firebug and Firebug Lite), but if you are using Chrome you may be interested to know about the extensions that are available. Additionally, Chrome comes with some developer tools built in.

In this post we’ll feature 17 of the most useful Chrome extensions for designers and developers. Hopefully in time the selection and quality of Chrome extensions will be able to rival those of Firefox.

Speed Tracer

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).