14 Resources for the Artistically Challenged

Posted on March 6.

Let's talk. You and I, we are not all that different. Unless you are an artist. If you are, please move on, there's nothing here for you to see.

Ok, are all the artists gone? Let's get back to talking. You and I, we can't do art. We just weren't born with it. Remember art class? Sure, someone might have thought your work was special, but that was your mom. You were dealt some useless talent like math or programming, and visual design was something you always avoided. Your website is no different. It's ugly and there is little you can do. You tell yourself everyday: "I'm not an artist. People will overlook that. They will still visit my ugly website. They will like me anyway." Or maybe you make excuses. We've heard them all. "It's an effective use of whitespace. It's not for everyone. My website reflects who I am, even the bad parts." But an ugly website is an ugly website, and if you can't pay someone to design it for you, you might not be able to save it.

There is, however, hope. From one artistically challenged person to another, here are 14 resources that will help you make your site more attractive. These are not tutorials but rather images, patterns, and icons ready for use, and everything is free. I know you will like them because I use them too. So enough talking, and on with the links.

Icons

famfamfam Icons: "I find churning out little web icons fairly relaxing. Other people do icons better, but I love free stuff, and I'm sure you do too." These are the words of a good person. Thanks to Mark James, you can get an entire package of icons for every use, and they all look great too. Chances are you've already seen most of these icons on other websites and haven't even realized it.
Feed Icons: Matt Brett did us all a favor by providing the new standard for feed icons in a great package with just about every image format I can think of. They are very easy to customize; just look at mine next to my feed links.
Mini Pixel Icons: Added 4-10-2006: Over 320 icons at 14×14 pixels. This set has just about everything a website could need.

Patterns

squidfingers / patterns: 140 patterns that you can use however you like. These aren't cheap patterns either; check them out and you'll see that every one of them is attractive and complex.
Pattern4u: 248 patterns. Some come from squidfingers but there are enough unique ones to make this gallery worth checking out.
citrusmoon: Citrusmoon offers free patterns, tiles, and backgrounds, and they all look great. There's also free conversation, but you can get that here.
The Inspiration Gallery: The Inspiration Gallery offers free backgrounds and borders, but they require that you link to them. Still not a bad deal, though.

Images

stock.xchng: Stock.xchng might be the leading free stock photo site, with contributions from tons of users in every category. Just make sure that you read the usage restrictions for each image; some want you to contact them before you use their image in any commercial work.
morgueFile: Just like stock.xchng, morgueFile offers tons of free stock photography.

Dingbats

Dingbat fonts are fonts sets with images instead of letters and they are a very useful source of graphics. You can type them into your graphics editor and resize them to your liking, and you will find that dingbats exist for just about every category you can think of. These are just a few links to dingbat collections on the web, all are free but make sure to check for any usage restrictions.

Bullets

Bullet Madness: The users at Stylegala have uploaded 200 bullets, arrows, and icons that make lists and links look great.

Full Templates

Sometimes you might just throw your hands up into the air and say, "Forget it! I can't do a website at all. I wish I could find one completely done for me!" Well, there are two sites that offer tons of user submitted designs that are free, and they come with everything; template files, CSS, and images.

Anything else?

I didn't mention tutorials because you can find tons of those just by searching. I also didn't mention graphics programs but I'll plug two free ones right now: GIMP for bitmaps and Inkscape for vectors.

If there is a graphics resource out there that you think should be included, mention it. If I get enough of them I'll make a second list.

So to all my fellow artistically challenged peoples in the world, enjoy. We might not be artists but there's more of us than there are of them!

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21 Comments

Jason Simons on March 6, 2006

Dude! Sweet!
FoxyLady on March 7, 2006

It's about time you shared how you managed to improve your work from "not pleasing to the eye" to this "can you do that to my website, too?" level.

Good job. I approve I hope to use some of these soon!
Kiril on March 7, 2006

These were the most personal and touching words I've came across these days :)! Thanks
Jem on March 7, 2006

Aha! I need some icons and famfamfam.com is PERFECT. Thank you for sharing!
maxpower on March 7, 2006

Nice list! It takes so long to find this stuff on your own. You might be interested in this list of free icons (GPL,CC,LGPL) I made. They are all very good.

Cheers!
Lloyd Dalton on March 7, 2006

colr.org might be handy.
Mark James on March 7, 2006

Glad that people find the icons useful, you'll be happy to know that theres a new release coming very soon (I'm hoping to hit 1000 icons in the silk set, along with a couple of slight edits and additions to the flags set to make it a little more useful).
C Montoya on March 7, 2006

maxpower & Lloyd: thanks for those links.

maxpower: Your gravatar rocks.

Mark: It's true, I've heard nothing but praise for the silk set.
Phil Renaud on March 7, 2006

Woohoo! You're getting del.icio.us'd!
Hieysk on March 8, 2006

Very nice list… A+
Ivan Minic on March 8, 2006

Great job you did collecting these Thanks!
Birgit on March 8, 2006

some of them I already know, bit anyway, very useful collection. Thank you!
Birgit on March 9, 2006

Hey Christian,
one thing I want to add:
You could maybe mention a selection of resources for Photoshop brushes!
Greetings from Germany
C Montoya on March 9, 2006

Birgit: Good idea, but I don't use Photoshop, so I don't know any resources for that. If you know any, let me know

p.s. I'm learning German, and I want to work in Germany this summer. Where in Germany are you?
Peter on March 10, 2006

Nice set of resources but I am still left with my biggest problem! I am still artistically challenged and don't know how to use those resources!
C Montoya on March 10, 2006

Peter: You may need to seek professional help
Dave Cardwell on March 10, 2006

Thank you for the resources, Christian. The icon resources will prove extremely handy for an upcoming project.
C Montoya on April 10, 2006

Here's another awesome icon set: http://ndesign-studio.com/resources/pixel_icons.htm

Over 320 icons!
Birgit on April 29, 2006

@Chris
sorry for seeing your follow-up first now.
I am in Southern Germany, near Stuttgart. Great to hear you want to work in Germany! What exactly do you have in mind?

I have a small collection of bookmarks tagged Photoshop (http://del.icio.us/bz_icehorse/Photoshop - very incomplete though), and written an article in my blog.

One of my favourite brushes page is this:
http://missm.paperlilies.com/01_brushes.html
C Montoya on April 29, 2006

Birgit: I just really want to work in Germany and I'm willing to take what I can get. I will probably end up with something in electrical engineering, but if I could get something in web development that would be cool too. I have my German resume on my "about me" page, though it's a bit sparse. It's getting close to the summer so I don't know if I'll get anything. We'll see.
Julie on August 9, 2007

Oh, great page! I'll surely be using some of these for my site.

The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

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