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).

Web and graphic designers have the privilege of being able to download quality, free resources that can be used in their work. Commonly-found resources include textures, Photoshop brushes, vectors, icons, patterns, and more. In today’s post I’d like to feature 20 design blogs that give back to the community by frequently releasing freebies to their readers. If you’re always on the lookout for quality resources, consider subscribing to these blogs. You may also be interested in our own Freebies category.

Lost and Taken
Caleb Kimbrough releases high quality texture packs through his blog Lost and Taken.

Crack effects are used in a lot of textured and grunge-style designs. Photoshop brushes present an easy way to add cracks to your work. In this post we’ll feature 18 sets of free cracks brushes.

Cracks Brushes (6 brushes)

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.