I'm in Love. . . with this website!

Coming from a non-profit, graphic design background, I am well-versed in the economical online image search. Some time last year I found this site and have visited often when looking for the right hi-res photo for various projects.

Check out and bookmark Photos-Public-Domain!

For winter holiday / christmas/ new years / seasonal images go directly to Holidays and Seasons.

Remember this fun letterpress-style design from 2011? It's been re-purposed as the concept for an 40th birthday party invitation.  My sketch book has 3 pages of refinements of the latest design, but this page is the most coherent >> >>

To flesh out this concept, I went back to the 70's in my mind.  This was the era of the three-martini lunch, black and white teevee, a rotary phone in every parlor, Herb Lubalin and Avant Garde, flared jeans, the Jimmy Castor Bunch. I resisted the inclination to gravitate toward some of the more dated type faces; instead choosing classic serifs and deco-style sans. I skirted the cliches.

The brown texture in sample1 is a creative common found at www.bittbox.com. I always go back to this set of freebies when I need a background that begs to be touched. In this example the opacity is set at 100%--this will likely change as the design progresses.
I found the vector shapes at www.thenounproject.com and recreated them in Illustrator...each sample is slightly different:

It may not be common knowledge that in-house graphic designers are often expected to concept and design projects, create apps, manage content management systems, create social media content, and even help out staff with Microsoft Word formatting issues. Working outside of a dedicated design department or  design firm presents unique challenges. One huge challenge is that of designing on a shoestring budget.

Public Domain Photography
Your project calls for images of fireworks filling the night sky, but: you don’t have the cash to hire a photographer to shoot a dozen pics, there are no fireworks scheduled in your town for months, purchasing stock licenses is a costly last resort.

You can scour the web in search of creative commons if you have the time or you can check out this public domain photography site that over a dozen fireworks photos—plus much more.

Public Domain Quotes 
You are now tasked with creating Tweets and Facebook status updates to promote Woman’s History Month but you’ve already created 15 interesting and creative ones and your mind is completely blank.

Check out this site that offers inspirational quotes ordered by categories like: Thanksgiving, Patriotism, Women, the Tooth Fairy, and Insults--to name a few.

Wow, I thought I had more time before I had to scramble to share CCs, but alas I was wrong; Creative Commons week is here.

I went to the Newseum back in February and snapped a few pics of the letterpress installation with a Kodak Easyshare (not recommended) camera.

Some shots are very nice and some are ---well, you’ll see.

Take them, use them, share them, remix them. Enjoy!

This week I'm finishing up another poster project that will be a highlight of my portfolio!

This is actually three lists of funds. The goal is to showcase a couple hundred names and draw the eye. Initially, I created 3 design options: two traditional / bankerish choices then a third more modern list. This third included modern type, and huge blocks of color. I'm working on developing the colors and headings--I think I'll have the options to push the envelope a bit more. Anyway, I now have a good sketch of what the finished product will be. FYI, I took a quick tour of Compfight and found images from  local photographers with CC licenses. So this is what I'm working on:

This is just a quick note to let you know that if you’re still using Google to search Creative Commons on the Web, there’s a better way. COMPFIGHT.COM

Here is photo search engine that allows you to view images with “any license”, “Creative Commons”, and “Commercial” licenses. Use freely, however—if you find images with CCSA licenses—please give proper credit.

If you're on the lookout for a serious grunge look--before it completely falls out of fashion--take a look at Action of The Time - New

The latest update of this ultra-bold, distressed, grunge font shows more cross hatching than the last. It looks like what happens to glass or mirrors after some seriously rough treatment.

Note: use sparingly

I remember when I first found Bleeding Cowboys back in '07-I'd sought out the font on the urging of designer, Jay Higgert of Bittbox. Needless to say, it was love at first sight.

You can achieve halftones many different ways. The effect--properly executed-can really make an illustration or design come to life.

Here are a few of the free halftones that I've found and used from around the web. There's also a handy-dandy how-to that I've found invaluable for creating patterns.

In a recent blog redesign, I came upon a problem of finding the right image to place. I needed an afro-centric, woman-centric graphic and could find nothing suitable. Eventually, I took some existing photography and created an illustration that was suitable.

I snapped some pics of different Batik fabrics and have themavailable for download on Flickr.  The set has medium to hi-res images for ya!

Download the full set at Flickr

On a recent project, I was hard-pressed to find –in my photographic archive, istock, and wiki searches—images of Baltimore.
I  ran outside with a camera, but still couldn't find the perfect shot. Eventually I ended up hitting the mother load of creative commons on Flickr and All-silhouettes. Here are a few of the pics I found and the artist link.
spike55151 has taken nearly 20,000 photographs in his travels in Baltimore and parts beyond.Here are bits of the Baltimroe skyline, as seen by spike 55151:
-Here's Baltimore's famous Skyline
-Mt. Royal Station and Meyerhoff
-Bromo Seltzer tower
-Aquarium and Power Plant

Well, not just photographers--visual artists too.

I stumbled upon a great wall paper sharing site called Open Wall (www.owall.net). I was looking for creative commons and clicked on the unfamiliar link and got floored. People are sharing their work, rating others, and downloading like crazy.
Well, obviously, this image wasn't posted by the photographer, but it likely began life as one of the gorgeous, royalty-free images of space available on the NASA website.  Good deal.

I've come to use Open Wall as a resource for fun images, wall papers and even as inspiration for compositing in photoshop. Take a look and enjoy.

AND Speaking of NASAs royalty-free space shuttle/Hubble images...
Be sure to read the Image Usage Guidelines

JQuery is functional and fun to look at but—by god—it’s a ton of coding. A metric ton if you’re a graphic designer not well versed in the development side of JavaScript.
Thankfully, others saw the demand and have come to your rescue. Here is a Creative Commons solution to get your lightbox portfolio up and running:

prettyPhoto Lightbox Clone

To see this professionally executed JQuery clone in action,  view the PORTFOLIO page of the Robust Web template.

...my  site has one, anyway.  This new design is courtesy of TemplatesDock.  The design is called BestFolio released under a Creative Commons license. I know what you're thinking, "A Web designer using another designer's template!!! Unheard of." I disagree.


I often view great Web templates created by talented developers. These sites are functional, creative,  and technically  exceptional. Bestfolio is a simple one with all the elements that I needed to revamp my site in a timely manner ---it took me approximately 6 hours to customize the template.

Learn more about : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Kudos to TemplatesDock