Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Cool Photoshop Textures – free – commercial use

One of the biggest problem designers and graphic artists have is in finding content that can be used commercially. It often seems that even content you pay for you have to jump through hoops to read the fine print to determine what exactly you can do with it and it often  has overly restrictive limits.

Today I found a great site. Great because of a number of things:

1. The content is free.

2. The textures are gorgeous and varied and hi-res.

3. You are free to use them for commercial purposes.

4. Attribution is appreciated but not required.

Verbatim, here is the terms of use: “Lost & Taken textures are made freely available for use in both personal and commercial projects including web templates, designs, and other materials intended for distribution. Attribution is appreciated, but not required.”

The textures fall into a  number of categories including: Vintage damask, torn paper, skin, bubbles, wallpaper, book covers, subtle grunge and lots more. Check out the vintage wallpaper ones on the home page they are so totally cool.

To view and download textures head to the Gallery.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 7:33 am3 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Microsoft PowerPoint – Free!


If you don’t already own Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, did you know you can download a 30 day trial version for free from Microsoft?

PowerPoint comes bundled with Office 2010 and the entire downloadable trial version of Office is available from the Microsoft web site. If you like what you see, you can purchase the full version later on.

If you like PowerPoint but can’t afford to shell out for the suite, why not settle for a cut down version – free – available online? You can find PowerPoint at www.skydrive.com sign in using a Windows Live ID – if you don’t have one (but you probably will), you can sign up for one here. Then click the Office link at the top of the page and you can choose to create a new PowerPoint presentation online.

The PowerPoint tools are a cut down version of the full PowerPoint program but they are all you need to get a good start on a presentation – you even have access to a range of great looking themes to kick start your presentation.

Better still you can share your PowerPoint presentation with others so they can view it and even edit it online and you can download the finished file to your computer. Of course, your files are stored online too so you can access them any time you like and Microsoft gives you a hefty 25GB of online storage – more than enough to create all the presentations you’re ever likely to need.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 11:32 am7 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

We make the “Best 50 Photoshop blogs”

Very cool… a site called Guide to Art Schools just published a list of their Best 50 Photoshop blogs and Projectwoman.com came in at number 17 of “the rest” meaning that after the top 5, this blog is rated 22. Not too poor a showing, thanks guys.

Interestingly they talked about the blog as being woman-centric which is pretty funny since there is nothing I see that is woman centric about this blog at all! But it made me think back to why it is projectwoman.com at all.

The name projectwoman.com harks back to a magazine that used to be around called Mac Home and I used to write project articles for them – sort of the how to style stuff that is my specialty.

Some time in early 2000, the editor David Weiss and I were kicking around ideas and he suggested we title my column Project Woman as in a woman who wrote projects – it sounded like fun so I took the opportunity to register the domain name just in case it all came to fruition and became something big.

As it happened only a few columns ever appeared in the magazine as it got sold then it crashed and burned along with some other stalwarts of the industry – many of which I wrote for – in the aftermath of the dot com crash. So, that’s the history of the name – thanks to David Weiss for the idea!

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 7:10 amNo Comments links to this post

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