Every now and then, we release useful freebies for all of our highly valued readers. Today, it is our pleasure to present to you Cuberto‘s fantastic St. Valentine’s icon set  —  exclusively designed for Smashing Magazine and its loyal readers. The icons presented are available in transparent PNGs as well as Photoshop PSDs (128×128 px) and are perfect for any projects you have coming up for St. Valentine’s Day. Enjoy!

Download the Set for free!

This icon set is completely free to use for commercial or personal applications without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

• large preview
• download the .zip-package (.zip, 2 Mb)

Initial sketches of Cuberto’s St. Valentine’s icon set.

Quick preview of the icons in the set.

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designers:

“Our goal was not only to create nice icons but also a functional set that can be used in navigation elements as well as gifts throughout social networks on the upcoming sweet Valentine’s day. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.”
 —  Peace and Love

Thanks Cuberto, we sincerely appreciate your time and your intentions!

(il)

© Smashing Editorial Team for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

This article is the fourth in our new series that introduces the latest, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts. Today we are happy to present Cameron McEfee’s Photoshop extension GuideGuide which provides a tool to create pixel accurate columns, rows, midpoints and baselines.

Take a moment and think about creating a multi-column grid in a Photoshop comp. Have your palms started to sweat? Yes, creating grids in Photoshop is a pain indeed. Some designers just estimate and drag guides arbitrarily onto the stage. Others draw vector shapes, duplicate them to represent columns, then stretch them to fit their design. The hardy few who don’t say things like, “I’m a designer, not a mathematician,� generally use a little math and logic to calculate their grid. If you were to boil that math down, it probably ends up looking something like this:

(siteWidth - (gutterWidth × (numberOfColumns - 1) ) ÷ numberOfColumns = columnWidth

I was sitting at my desk one day doing this exact equation when I thought, “Man, this looks just like code. I wish someone would make a plugin that would do this for me.” Several months and many grids later, it occurred to me that I could probably build the plugin myself.

Enter: GuideGuide

I created GuideGuide for the sole purpose of making one of the most time consuming parts of Photoshop based design as easy as possible. Enter in a few numbers and GuideGuide will draw a grid on your document using Photoshop’s guides. You’ll become drunk with power the first time you watch it happen, I promise. Even better, GuideGuide’s real power is Photoshop’s marquee. If you have an active selection in your Photoshop document, GuideGuide creates the grid you specify within the selection’s boundaries. Anything GuideGuide can do, can be done using either the document or a selection.

Columns and Rows

Designing a site that needs multiple columns and gutters? GuideGuide has your back.

Midpoints

GuideGuide makes finding the midpoint of items within your design a breeze. Simply draw a selection or ⌘ + click (ctrl + click on Windows) to create a selection around the item you want to find the midpoint of. To find its midpoint, click one of the midpoint buttons.

GuideGuide places a guide at the midpoint of the selection. Now you can easily center align elements under the original item.

Save It For Later

If you find yourself frequently using the same grid over and over, you can save it as a set for later use.

The Fun Part

Sure, GuideGuide has its basic rows, columns and midpoints, but with a little creativity it can do a whole lot more.

Measure Navigation

I hate figuring out how wide a navigation element needs to be to evenly fit across the width of a site. Instead, I let GuideGuide do the work for me.

1. Make a selection the width of your site
2. Enter your info, thinking of the columns field as the number of navigation items and the gutter field as the space you want between each item (if you want it).

Element Padding

Want to draw a box around an item but don’t feel like measuring it out exactly?

1. ⌘ + click (ctrl + click on Windows) the item to make a selection around it.
2. Enter a negative margin in one of GuideGuide’s margin fields, and click the icon next to it. GuideGuide will fill that value into all the margin fields.
3. Use the newly placed guides to draw your box.

Baseline Grid

Using GuideGuide’s explicit row height, you can easily create a baseline grid for your design.

1. Enter your desired line height in the row height field.
2. Align your type and other elements to your new baseline grid.

Thoughts?

Do you have an unconventional use for GuideGuide? Post it in the comments of this post. I love hearing the clever and unusual ways people use GuideGuide. Found a bug or have a feature request? If you’d like to request a feature or have found something that is broken, please create an issue on GuideGuide’s support repo over on GitHub.

To download GuideGuide and learn more about some of its hidden features, head on over to guideguide.me. OS X Lion users with CS5 will need to download a patch for Adobe Extension Manager before they will be able to install GuideGuide.

(il)

© Cameron McEfee for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

Today’s freebie may be the last one for this year, but that doesn’t mean it will be the last of our freebies on Smashing Magazine — no siree! Before this year does come to an end, we are happy to present to you a fresh new Web UI set includig 91 icons created by August Interactive for the holiday season. The set is a collection of widely used UI elements, including volume, zoom, player, view, and download controls.

Designed by Tomas Gajar, the set was developed using Adobe Fireworks and has been exported as a fully editable layered Photoshop file as well. The set is clean, pixel perfect, and meant to full your everyday needs for UI design.

Download the Set for Free!

This freebie offers vectors, all scalable, Adobe Photoshop PSDs as well as Fireworks PNGs. The icon set is completely free to use for commercial or personal applications without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

• large preview
• download the free icon set (.zip, 3,4 Mb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designers:

“For us, the end of the year usually brings some precious time to reflect on our work and how our love for design remains relevant to the user interface design community. Our revelation this year is that clean, pixel perfect vector icons have become immensely important to our work. This means we typically spend the extra time to develop the icons that fit the specific need of the job at hand. As you can imagine, this ‘extra’ time takes considerable effort — effort that is often not a part of a clients’ original scope of work.

These holidays, we decided that the best gift we could offer our friends and colleagues is free access to some of our favorite custom UI icons. They are available in Adobe Photoshop PSDs, and for our really special friends, Fireworks PNGs. All vector, all scalable, all free to use for commercial or personal applications. Stay tuned for more in 2012!”

Thank you, Tomas Gajar and August Interactive. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial Team for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a Twitter GUI PSD for the recently released Twitter UI update, designed by Jon Darke of Every Interaction and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The PSD provides the full mockup with all layers in vectors, allowing you to scale up the design elements without loss of quality. The set includes two versions: one for personal accounts and also the new Twitter Enhanced profile page with 835×90 header image for brands and advertisers. The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS4+.

Download the Set for free!

You can use the freebie for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the file as you wish.

• large preview – personal profile (.png, 0.3 Mb)
• large preview – enhanced profile (.png 0.3 Mb)
• download the .zip-package (.zip, 2 Mb)
• download mirror (.zip, 2 Mb)
• release post on the designer’s website

Features

• 100% pixel-accurate
• 2 versions: personal and enhanced profile pages
• All assets redrawn in vector, hence scalable
• All layers labeled and grouped
• Adobe Photoshop CS4+ compatible

Behind the Design

“As designers, we often produce various assets for our clients, be it their online presence on their Web pages or in social media. Hence, often we need to skin pages such as the Twitter profile pages for brands that we are working on. When those sites update their UI, we also need to update our resources in order to be able to display an accurate representation of what a client’s Twitter page would look like. So we thought that we could share the PSD file we created with the rest of the design community. Hopefully, it will help you save some time to focus on the creative work!”

Thanks Jon, we sincerely appreciate your time and your intentions!

(vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

The year is slowly coming to an end and we’re glad to present to you a festive icon set to inspire you in your designs. In this post we present a minimalist collection of 20 free festive vector (.EPS) icons created by offset media. The pack includes color and grayscale versions. The pack includes mostly Christmas related icons, such us the gingerbread man, nutcracker, snowman and the very well-known fir tree.

Feel free to also have a look at some of our previous Smashing Christimas icon sets: Free Smashing Christmas Icon Set by Icon Eden (2009) and Free Smashing Christmas Icon Set by SoftFacade (2008).

Download the Icon Set for Free!

The pack is completely free to use in personal and commercial projects without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

• large preview
• download the free icon set (.zip, 665 Kb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“Like any design studio, here at offset media, we prefer to create our own festive greeting cards to give to clients. This year I had a very clear vision of the overall look I wanted, a single white festive character on a solid red background.

Knowing the look, but unsure of what character to use, I ended up creating a bunch of icons to choose from. Once we were happy with the card design (choosing the snowman), we had all these unused icons lying about, and being someone who does not likes things going to waste, I decided to share them with others who could possible make use of them!”

 —  George Neocleous (aka GeoNeo) is a full-time designer and illustrator, who works at London-based design studio offset media and blogs (sporadically) at Geoneo’s Blog.

Thank you, George. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs. Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set.

Download the Collection for Free!

The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word or give it a tweet or share it on Facebook! You may modify the file as you wish but please do not redistribute them elsewhere without written permission from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.

• high resolution preview
• download the icon set for free (.zip, 1.7 Mb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“This set was started out in January 2011, so the whole design process took me nearly a year to finish. Including all the tiny, little, shy transparent PNGs and keys, the set is build out of 145.728 pixels. All icons were made with love in Cologne, Germany.

If you think that some icons are missing in this set, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below, contact me at aroma[at]addictedtocoffee[dot]de or find me via twitter at @mywayhome. Oh and did I mention: I’m always available for exciting freelance projects :)

Stay tuned! You never know  —  there might be a second part of the set coming out quite soon!”

Thank you, Oliver Twardowski. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs. Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set.

Download the Collection for Free!

The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word or give it a tweet or share it on Facebook! You may modify the file as you wish but please do not redistribute them elsewhere without written permission from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.

• A High Resolution Preview
• Download The Set For Free (.zip, 1.7 Mb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“This set was started out in January 2011, so the whole design process took me nearly a year to finish. Including all the tiny, little, shy transparent PNGs and keys, the set is build out of 145.728 pixels. All icons were made with love in Cologne, Germany.

If you think that some icons are missing in this set, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below, contact me at aroma[at]addictedtocoffee[dot]de or find me via twitter at @mywayhome. Oh and did I mention: I’m always available for exciting freelance projects :)

Stay tuned! You never know  —  there might be a second part of the set coming out quite soon!”

Thank you, Oliver Twardowski. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs. Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set.

Download the Collection for Free!

The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word or give it a tweet or share it on Facebook! You may modify the file as you wish but please do not redistribute them elsewhere without written permission from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.

• A High Resolution Preview
• Download The Set For Free (.zip, 1.7 Mb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“This set was started out in January 2011, so the whole design process took me nearly a year to finish. Including all the tiny, little, shy transparent PNGs and keys, the set is build out of 145.728 pixels. All icons were made with love in Cologne, Germany.

If you think that some icons are missing in this set, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below, contact me at aroma[at]addictedtocoffee[dot]de or find me via twitter at @mywayhome. Oh and did I mention: I’m always available for exciting freelance projects :)

Stay tuned! You never know  —  there might be a second part of the set coming out quite soon!”

Thank you, Oliver Twardowski. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs. Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set.

Download the Collection for Free!

The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word or give it a tweet or share it on Facebook! You may modify the file as you wish but please do not redistribute them elsewhere without written permission from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.

• A High Resolution Preview
• Download The Set For Free (.zip, 1.7 Mb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“This set was started out in January 2011, so the whole design process took me nearly a year to finish. Including all the tiny, little, shy transparent PNGs and keys, the set is build out of 145.728 pixels. All icons were made with love in Cologne, Germany.

If you think that some icons are missing in this set, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below, contact me at aroma[at]addictedtocoffee[dot]de or find me via twitter at @mywayhome. Oh and did I mention: I’m always available for exciting freelance projects :)

Stay tuned! You never know  —  there might be a second part of the set coming out quite soon!”

Thank you, Oliver Twardowski. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 



 

Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs. Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set.

Download the Collection for Free!

The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word or give it a tweet or share it on Facebook! You may modify the file as you wish but please do not redistribute them elsewhere without written permission from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.

• A High Resolution Preview
• Download The Set For Free (.zip, 1.7 Mb)

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“This set was started out in January 2011, so the whole design process took me nearly a year to finish. Including all the tiny, little, shy transparent PNGs and keys, the set is build out of 145.728 pixels. All icons were made with love in Cologne, Germany.

If you think that some icons are missing in this set, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below, contact me at aroma[at]addictedtocoffee[dot]de or find me via twitter at @mywayhome. Oh and did I mention: I’m always available for exciting freelance projects :)

Stay tuned! You never know  —  there might be a second part of the set coming out quite soon!”

Thank you, Oliver Twardowski. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

(il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.