Design Resources

Photo courtesy of ©vectorstock.com/ma_rish

Hi friends. I come across great design resources all the time and today I thought I’d share some of my new favorites with you. I have separated them into categories so you can easily scan the list and see what you might find useful.

For designers/crafters:

1. Here are some great online resources for color inspiration and coordination help. ColorZilla for Chrome  has an Eyedropper, Color Picker and more; COLOURlovers is a creative community that creates and shares colors, palettes and patterns; On colourco, type in your color and then choose a colour scheme: mono, mono-d, mono-l, ana, comp, ana-c, triad, and quad; colorsontheweb has a Color Wizard which is a color matching application. Type in your color and the application gives you hue, saturation, and tint/shade variations.

For authors/designers:

1. To create 3D imagery such as a 3D book, check out these resources: livesurface, psdcovers, pixeden, actionuser
2. eBook templates: These templates are for creating a print pdf or an ePub file. They work in Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages.

For selling a product:

1. Sell your products for the Price of a Tweet—it’s a social payment system that’s super easy to set up.
2. Design Sponge ran a very helpful article for a Facebook marketing campaign, “How to get a Facebook Ad Campaign Up and Running by the End of the Day”.

For learning new things (online classes):

1. skillshare has project based classes that are creative and collaborative on everything from programming to design to crafts. They have interesting topics such as illustration and lettering, map making, iOS app design and many more. I can’t wait to find some time to take one or two of these classes!
2. craftsy has classes on cake decorating and gardening and other crafts.

For computer technical help:

1. ifixit is a great source of tutorials for how to fix your Macs, PC’s, iPhones and more. I’ve used the tutorials to pull a hard drive out of my old, dead iMac, replace a fan and the harddrive in my MacBook Pro. I highly recommend these tutorials!
2. screenrecycler: Recycle your old iMac, PowerBook or even Windows PC as an additional display for your Mac. I was able to hook up an old iMac that wasn’t functioning well as a monitor for my laptop.

Helpful software:

1. DeltaWalker: File, folder comparison and synchronization for Mac OS X. Lets you compare, edit, and merge files and synchronize folders. When I was transferring all my files from my old computer to the new one—I had a lot of problems. This program helped me verify that I had copied all the files.
2. backblaze: A friend told me about this service. Online backup for $5/month. Backs up external drives and multiple computers. This is what they say: “You download a tiny application that installs in three clicks and doesn’t require a credit card or any information to start using it. This internet backup application automatically finds all your photos, music, documents, and other irreplaceable files—no matter where they are on your hard drive—and compresses and securely encrypts them. When you’re not using your computer, it sends them over the Internet to the remote Backblaze datacenters.” I haven’t had a good backup system in place for awhile now. I plan to sign up this weekend and start backing up all my files!

I hope you were able to find these resources helpful! Please share with me any great resources you use.

P.S. Remember my post on plant starters using egg shells? Look at how big my little seedlings are now!For instructions on how you can germinate your own seeds, see this post.