Today, the awesome guys at Tutorial9 released The Ultimate Pack for Web Designers. It’s a pack containing hundreds of freebies such as icons, Wordpress themes, Tumblr themes and a whole lot more! Another cool thing about this is that one of the icon sets I’ve created for them is included in this pack! I’ve created the Sketchy Web Icon Set – an icon set consisting of 30 128×128 icons in transparent PNG format.

The icons can be used for both your personal and commerical projects but may not be sold or redistributed.

The Ultimate Resource Pack for Web Designers is only available for a week (from November 9th to 16th) so what are you waiting for? Download the pack now!

Update: Contest has ended. Winners will be announced soon.

Ever lost track of the time you spent on a project? Do you find it a bit of a hassle to manage and bill all the work done on your projects down to a single penny? Well, here’s the answer to all that!

Once again, we are holding an awesome contest here on Dawghouse Design Studio! We are giving away a Free license of Fanurio, a time tracking and billing software, to our loyal readers!

What is Fanurio?
Fanurio is a time tracking and billing software application, highly appreciated by freelancers for its intuitive interface, flexible timer and ability to produce detailed invoices.

Whether you need to round time, use multiple currencies or create invoices with your own layout, Fanurio has the right tools to help you get paid.

Track time with a little effort

Fanurio provides multiple methods to help you track time with little effort. You can track time manually or using the timer. It also has a few reminders to help you start, resume or stop the timer automatically. More details

Get paid for all your work

From the moment you get a new contract until you are paid in full, Fanurio offers you the right tools to manage and bill all your work down to the penny. More details

Analyze your performance

Fanurio comes with powerful time and money reports. They can help you understand how your business is doing so that you can make well-informed decisions about your projects and clients. More details

Runs on multiple platforms

Fanurio is built using Java technology which enables it to run on Windows, Mac OS X including Leopard, Linux and other flavors of Unix. More details

Here’s how to join:
1. Leave a comment on this post saying why you would want to win a free license of Fanurio Time Tracking Software. Make sure you leave your name and a valid email address.
2. Subscribe to our feed to keep you up to date with the winners and future contests

Contest ends on November 09, 2009. Winners will be notified by email and will also be contacted by Fanurio for further instructions.

Good luck to everyone!

If you guys like these textures or have some suggestions for next week’s texture freebie, feel free to leave a comment below. Each texture can be downloaded via Flickr. These textures are free to use for both your personal or commercial projects but may not be redistributed or sold in any way.

Brick Texture 1

Brick Texture 2

Brick Texture 3

Brick Texture 4

For this blog post, I would like to introduce you to one of Dawghouse Design Studio’s Sponsors, Pixel Crayons.

The Design process alone is so time consuming that you are not left with much time and energy, if you are a designer, to even code it. Giving the design work a perfect touch from every corner does not only need time and hard work but also a free mind so that you can concentrate and complete it rather than just wrap it up in hurry.

Converting your PSD to HTML or its extension is not only about error free coding but also about its W3C validation, cross browser compatibility and resemblance of HTML file with its PSD which not every PSD to XHTML service provider can produce.

Though many service providers promise to meet your expectation but not even half of them successfully meet your requirements. Writing a service review for Xhtml.Pixelcrayons.com was easy as I have used their services couple of times and they really helped me out with their turnaround time.

*As we mostly cater to US clients so we specifically needed WAI 2.0/Section 508 Compatibility which they provided me with 100% hand-coded neat XHTML code.

Order form
By filling some simple blanks and expressing your specifications, you can upload your file in formats like PSD, JPG, GIF, PNG, AI, ZIP or PDF. An order confirmation notification will be sent to you after you place the order and soon a project manager will assist you who upon confirmation of the order will start working on you project.

Work process
The order form on Pixelcrayons website is structured very precisely and collects all the relevant information about the project like your name, email address, phone number and other useful things.

The moment your order gets confirmed it is sent to review to one of their departments. From there it is sent for conversion process and then to their quality analysis team (if no software implementation is required). After their QA team gives the green signal the project is delivered to the clients.

Pricing:
The Basic Package – starting at $99

• Markups: HTML 4.01 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• W3C Validation: CSS, XHTML & HTML
• I.E 6.x / 7.x, Mozilla Firefox, Safari

The Professional Package – starting at $199

• Markups: HTML 4.01 Transitional, HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict
• W3C Validation: CSS2 (Advanced CSS Code Structure), XHTML & HTML Browsers Compatibility: I.E 6.x / 7.x, Mozilla Firefox, Safari 2.x/3.x, Opera, Konqueror
• Includes: SEO Semantic Code, Load Speed Optimization, Complete Presentation Separation, Maximum Cross-Browser Compatibility

*Money Back Policy
*50% Discount Scheme

Client support:
The agile client servicing at Pixelcrayons keeps you informed about the swift processing of your project. Minimal response time with efficient client support helps you to get easy clarifications on design implementation promptly. The instant chat option also helps to communicate directly with their sales representative 24×7.

Conclusion:
After experiencing the service it can be concluded that anyone who wishes to save time and get quality code can reach Xhtml.Pixelcrayons.com to hire their services.

I had the opportunity to once again contribute for Six Revisions. I’ve written tutorials for them the past couple of months but this time, I’m contributing an icon set – 20 Old Bottle Crowns Social Media Icon Set. This is the very first icon set I’ve contributed to them and I hope you guys will like them as much as I enjoyed creating them! The icon set consists of 20 very unique and never before created bottle crown icons such as Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter, Delicious, Technorati and a whole lot more!

These icons are free to use for both your personal and commercial projects but may not be redistributed or sold in any way.

Now let us head over to Six Revisions to download the icon set!

For this week’s free texture giveaway, we are giving away 6 High-Quality Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag Textures. I’m not a very big fan of coffee as my favorite drink in the morning is Milo (yes, I’ve been drinking that ever since I can remember!) but I sure had a lot of fun creating these textures so I sure hope you can find good uses for these!

If you guys like these textures or have some suggestions for next week’s texture freebie, feel free to leave a comment below. Each texture can be downloaded via Flickr. These textures are free to use for both your personal or commercial projects but may not be redistributed or sold in any way.

Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag 1

Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag 2

Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag 3

Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag 4

Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag 5

Coffee-Stained Brown Paper Bag 6

In this Photoshop tutorial, we will learn how to create a real-looking, worn-out movie ticket. It’s a pretty simple Photoshop tutorial involving some basic procedures which I’m sure will be very helpful especially for anyone with beginner skills.

This is going to be our final product:

Materials Needed:

Grunge Brushes
Light Grunge Textures by Bittbox
Green Creased Colored Paper

1. Create a new document in Photoshop with dimension 400 x 300.

2. There are many wood textures available for download from resource sites. Choose which one you like best and drag in onto our document.

3. Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), draw a rectangle.

4. Using the Gradient Tool (G), fill our rectangular selection with #dd9800 to #a97200. Make sure it is set to Linear Gradient.

5. Again using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), draw a circle and fill it with any color. Duplicate the circle 3 times and place it across all 4 corners of our rectangle. Merge all 4 circles.

6. Hit on CTRL/CMD + Click to select the 4 circles. Hide the layer where they’re in and go back to our rectangle layer. Hit on Delete and we should now have something like this.

7. Now we will be creating the perforation on the left and right sides of the ticket. Hit on the Eraser Tool(E). From the Brushes panel, choose a regular brush from the default set of brushes. Make sure it’s not feathered. Open the Brush Presets panel (F5) and apply these Settings.

8. Erase off the sides of the ticket by running down the eraser from the top and bottom. Don’t forget to press and hold the Shift key while doing this to make a straight line.

9. Let us now add a slight Drop Shadow to our ticket to achieve some depth. Go to Blending Options > Drop Shadow and use these Settings.

10. From the Light Grunge Texture Pack we just downloaded from Bittbox, choose 3485558654_cff378930f_b.jpg. Drag this texture and place it over our ticket. Make a selection that is of the same shape as our ticket by hitting on CTRL/CMD + Clicking on the layer with the ticket. Hit on the Mask icon and change the Opacity of out texture to 48%.

11. Create a new Layer. Now we are going to add hints of grunge to our ticket. Using grunge brushes with its colors set to #906a39, add some dirt to our ticket. One of the useful points you need to take note of when designing anything grungy is to just do the clicking randomly and don’t make it obvious that you are using the exact same brushes. The dirt specks must not look like they are just duplicated.

12. Download the Green Colored Paper Texture from one of Dawghouse Design Studio’s freebies. Drag this texture over our ticket and change its Blend Mode to Luminosity. Erase off the rest of the areas of the texture except the part where the intersecting crease is. This will make our ticket look like it’s been folded.

13. On a new layer in a new folder, using the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U), create a rounded rectangle over our ticket. Set the Radius to 10px. CTRL/CMD + Click on this layer to make a selection. You can now hide or delete the layer with the rounded rectangle. Name our new folder “Content”.

14. Create a new layer and go to Edit > Stroke. Set the Width to 3px, Location to Inside and Color to #4d3011. Using the same color and the Pencil Tool (B) set to 3px, add two vertical lines opposite each other.

15. Using the Type Tool (T) with color set to #6c1301 and Typeface set to Times New Roman, type some random numbers. This will serve as our ticket number. Hit on Edit > Transform and rotate the number vertically. Add the same number to the right side of the ticket as well.

16. Using the Type Tool (T) once again, type “Admit One” on the center of the ticket. This time, set the color to #000000 and Typeface to Helvetica Bold.

17. Go back our Content folder and make sure its selected. Hit on the Mask icon. Using the Brush Tool (B), randomly mask off some areas of our ticket’s content. You may just use the Eraser Tool (E) but what’s great about the Mask Tool is that you can undo the erasures you have made by unmasking them. When Masking, make sure that the Foreground color is set to #000000 and Background color is set to #ffffff.

We now have a real-looking, worn-out movie ticket! I hope you have learned some tips and tricks from this basic Photoshop tutorial.

For this week’s free textures freebie, Dawghouse Design Studio is giving away 16 High Quality Fabric Textures! The pack comes with a variety of fabric textures – flannel, cotton, denim, corduroy and a couple more. I hope you guys find good uses for these!

If you guys like these textures or have some suggestions for next week’s texture freebie, feel free to leave a comment below. Each texture can be downloaded via Flickr. These textures are free to use for both your personal or commercial projects but may not be redistributed or sold in any way.

Abstract designs are one of my favorites. They don’t really have to mean anything to everybody but we still find them visually appealing. When designing, one of the most useful resource for designers are Photoshop brushes. As we all know, brushes save us a lot of time to help us come up with some effects that we like as opposed to having to create them from scratch. For this post, I have collected 15+ Amazing and High Quality Abstract Photoshop brush sets. Each set comprises of several brushes and altogether, the sets sum up to more than 130 Amazing Abstract Photoshop Brushes!

Most of these brushes are free to use for both your personal and commercial projects but please recheck with the authors.

Abstract Brushes 12

Euphoria

Ultimate Brush 3

Life

Abstract Brushes 13

Shadows

Sharp

Darius Brushes

Doom Chaos

Abstract Brush II

Abstract Brush Set 2

Abstract Brush Set

Abstract 08

900Kelvin Brushes

MNT Abstract Brushes

Charging

Butterfly

Nowadays, it is easy to find crumpled paper textures, however, most of these are either white or brown so for this week’s free texture giveaway, I thought of putting together a Creased and Crumpled Colored Paper texture pack. These will surely come in handy as backgrounds or if you would like to add slight textures to your designs!

If you guys have some suggestions for next week’s texture freebie, feel free to leave a comment below. Each texture can be download via Flickr. These textures are free to use for both your personal or commercial projects but may not be redistributed or sold in any way.