Icon Library

For animal lovers, now you can enhance your application with these icons available for free download at Iconshock’s Free Download Site. This stock contains a variety of wild animals like an elephant, hippopotamus, parrot, giraffe and monkey.

These icons are perfect for applications related to nature, ecology and environment. The bright colors, additionally to the great variety of file formats and sizes will make them useful for printables, applications and web sites.

In order to achieve a better look in our web pages or applications, changing our straight border’s corners into rounded ones is a very popular practice. In order to do so using CSS we can use this online application called CSSROUND. We just need to know our background color, our corner radius (this is how round will our corners be), text color and the fill color. We also need to tell the application the width of our round box and then, it will generate the result. This result consist on the code needed in order to make it work in our web page, the graphics of our four corners and an explanation on how to make it work. We can later customize the text (if we didn’t define it at first), and since it uses CSS we don’t need to bother on making everything fit later.

Source: WWWhat’ss New Brazil

A set of icons designed for those people who love their job featuring a mug, a lamp, paperclips, a pencil and a fax machine, in different file formats such as .PNG . ICO and .ICNS. These are perfect for customizing any desktop of enhancing your office applications in order to be more personalized. The design of these icons doesn’t have much shadows, instead it works putting bright into every one of these objects. They are very light and simple, trying not to put too much details but still look totally professional. You can download them at Iconshock and let me know what you think.

Wikipedia is one of the greatest sources of knowledge we can find online. Its content is created by the community and it can be modified in order to get more accurate information. Wikipedia became one of the most complete encyclopedia online, because of that several wikipages related to specific content were created. Design is not an exception, and for this reason, at PSDTuts, a Photoshop Wikipedia was released this week. The first pages of content are being created and so far we can find great and not so great information. In order to expand the quantity of articles and improve the quality a contest is being held where the person who contributes the most accurate content will be awarded.

Read more…

For any of you that’s interested into cooking let me recommend this set of icons inspired in Cook. A chef and some of his instruments such a pan, a mixer and a colander are featured in this set of icons available in icon formats for Windows, Mac and of course, the PNG versions with sizes up to 256×256, which makes them perfect not only for applications but also for printing.

How nice would a card, a webpage or an application would look with these bright icons! To see them all visit Iconshock’s free download page.

When designing a webpage, designers have to put a lot of effort on how it will finally look like. ExitReality is a new way of visualizing webpages. It takes the original two-dimensional design and converts it in a room that symbolizes the webpage. Your walls are painted as your background and in screens you can see the content of the webpage. Some sites have their customized room, like you tube that looks like a real theatre.

One of the greatest characteristics is that users visiting a site are represented through an avatar, which can interact between them. This can be an useful tool once more people are familiar with ExitReality, for now, the most probable thing is you’ll en up alone in a room.

This new way to conceive user interfaces is possible thanks to the VRML technology, the question is, are we ready to change our usual webpages for a three dimensional environment? I think this will still take a lot of time, as much as I love 3D, we’re used to a totally different concept and we don’t have any need to change it. In case this idea continues to be developed we might need to start thinking about three dimensional icons and content, creating a total revolution when it comes to webpages design.

Seen on: WWWhats New

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of famous Disney movies, inspired in Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris. The movie tells the story of Quasimodo a Hunchback who rings the bells of the Notre Dame cathedral and falls in love with a gypsy named Esmeralda. These two characters, as well as Phoebus, Esmeralda’s love interest, and Hugo and Laverne, two of the gargoyles Quasimodo talks to are available in this stock of web icons, which, due to the variety of file sizes and formats will fit perfectly in your application. Enjoy them

Vexel are raster images created in order to look like vectors. They take lots of time to create one of this image, and there are lots of techniques available in order to do it, like this one presented on PSDTUTS. Techniques basically consist on creating solid shapes in different layers. These files tend to be really big, since every single detail has to be created in a different layer, resulting on more than 300 layers per image. This style is very criticized since it doesn’t seem to have any advantage in front of real vector graphics and it’s mainly used by artists instead of designers.

This image shows a comparison between both styles. The result, when seen in the resolution where the vexel was originally created or smaller, looks the same as a vector image, but when enlarged, we can see how quality is lost.

Here are two of my favourite examples of vexels, click them to enlarge.

Mortal Kombat is one of the most popular videogames of the last two decades. For any fan of this videogame a set of five different icons featuring some of the fighters like Scorpion and Sub-Zero, and the Mortal Kombat Dragon Logo is available for free download at Iconshock’s website.

Icons with transparency enabled in .PNG format, .ICO and .ICNS in several different sizes will look great as application icons for your PC videogames.

When we purchase an application the main thing that makes us choose between two similar ones is how they visually impact us. First impressions are very important, and if your product isn’t friendly from the start it will most certainly not succeed. Icons are one of the key elements to manage an application to communicate what it wants and to guide users to a correct use of it. It’s fundamental that as soon as you see an icon you can identify what it means, and if you can’t do it the first time, it has to be able to create some kind of remembrance among users. Read more…

For any application regarding the music industry a set of icons is available for free download at Iconshock’s Free Download Site. Bright and vibrant elements such as a turntable, headphones, LP, a mixer and a DJ will enhance any music related application. They can also be used in websites and music files thanks to its homogeneity the great variety of file formats and sizes. These icons are available in .ICO, .ICNS and .PNG formats, in sizes than vary from 16×16px to 256×256px.

Check them out and let me know what you think

Tabs Generator is an online application for creating Tab Menus in an easier way. You can customize Height, Width, Border Size, corners, colors, fills backgrounds and then download a .PNG file which you can modify or upload to your webpage.

Tabs are a popular way to create a Menu in a webpage or an application. It’s a nice way to do something different easily. You can integrate this file in your CSS style sheet, save a lot of work and still get professional results. The interface is very clear and easy to use, although sometimes the preview might take a while to refresh the changes. The corner radius property should be fixed too, it’s not clear to have them in separate lines, it seem like two different properties.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy created by Douglas Adams on 1978. Since then books, TV shows and movies have been created, becoming very popular. On 2005 the movie was released, giving the characters a fresh look and style, used on this outstanding set of icons.

Marvin the Paranoid and Arthur are just two of the characters featured in this set of icons, which would look great in kids applications. Remember that in order to get over 120 different icons you must register for free at Iconshock’s Community Site and start swapping!

CSS Text Wrapper is an online application which allows users to create a shape and the text will automatically fit the shape you create with two lines located in the sides. You can hide the lines, change the text, the alignment, font, font size and all the details in order for you to get the best result.

Once you’re done, you’re offered 3 ways to get the text to your webpage. The first one, and also the easiest is to paste an HTML generated code, the disadvantage is that it takes a lot of space. The second one is also an HTML code but in order to apply it you’ll need a stylesheet. The last method available is through Javascript, it’s the easiest one and it only requires to load an small external javascript.

I hope you find it useful in order put more organization into your applications!

Five colorful icons featuring some of the most popular activities among kids can be download at Iconshock’s Free Download Site. Toys such as a Beach Ball and a Kite are some of the icons featured in this set. These icons will look perfect in kids and teenagers applications, specially the ones regarding educational or entertainment subjects.

The variety of sizes and formats allow users to use them in different applications and makes them perfect for printing too. Download them to check them out.