In these times of advanced utilities, learning the ropes to complete a task or even to satisfy the imagination, resources and tutorials from every angle is always welcome. In this case, we have compiled a few articles on some of the best tutorials and free resource sites.

RETURN OF THE OLD SCHOOL CONCEPTS & COOL ICONS OF THE HIGHEST QUALITY
Sure, today is about advanced designs, but that does not mean that old school ideas or designs can be just thrown away. Paul Kadysz made this message clear in his designs at Freebies Dock.

How did I get the idea? There’s a lot of free icon sets containing modern, shiny icons. Servers, hard disks, consoles, globes, speakers, LCD screens, etc. But what about good old times? Why not to have an icon of an old school camera on your desktop? I started with the TV icon and than got some ideas from friends.

Speaking of icons, Elite By Design is a cool blog that has links to various useful freebies, but has taken the time to compile a list of the very best icon sets from around the world, providing the idea-seeking designer a chance to download some inspiration.

Icons are a staple of the design industry – every day new sets are being released into the world, most often with little to no attention. Today we are going to showcase new fresh high quality icon sets perfect for your design project. Enjoy!

 

FREE WEB 2.0 LOGO DESIGN DOWNLOADS
Logo designs are constantly evolving to suit the identity of the company it represents. At Logo Instant, we can get all the inspiration we require to create or emulate any kind of logo. Here are but two of the many logos that you can download for free:

 

 

COLLECTIONS OF DESIGN ELEMENTS
Design is the name of the game, and having a vast array of inspirational designs you can draw from, can certainly help us out of a pickle. We discovered Pattern Tap, which showcases good interface design elements. Finally, someone is following in the footsteps of the Smiley Cat!

 

Speaking of Smiley Cat, we thought it best to re-introduce the Elements of Design as an alternative web design showcase (through the Smiley Cat Web Design Blog by (Christian Watson) that serves as one of the best resources for specific design elements such as search box, comment cards and much much more. Christian recently starting adding online shopping cart elements as well…

 

ADORABLE AVATARS
Dezinerfolio compiled a cute collection of Human Avatars that can help to better present the identity of an individual, and with 25 different sets to choose from, practically all of us would be covered…

 

 

SOME OF THE HOTTEST FREE FONTS TO DATE
Snap 2 Objects offers free design tips, and loads of freebies for inspiration. They recently compiled a list of some of the coolest free fonts being used today…

 

 

Tutorials helps those who want to learn the ropes before engaging in their own creations on the web. Here we have compiled a few interesting tutorials that may be of help to you and your assignments. PSDTUTS (Photoshop Tutorials) provides some of the coolest tutorials around in creating great work to display anywhere. Perhaps one of the most profound of these tutorials is a recent one by Collis (the master and chief) that teaches us how to enhance a simple design layout by giving it a more professional look.

In this tutorial we’re going to put together a quick, simple but effective layout and then create variations using backgrounds, photos and patterns. We’ll also look at how to make seamless tiled backgrounds out of a photo, methods for ending a single photo and simple ways to create pixel patterns.

 

PADOLSEY’S GUIDE FOR A GREAT WEBSITE DESIGN & EXECUTION OF WEB EFFECTS
Nettuts (Net Tutorials) featured one particular freelance web developer known as James Padolsey, who has a knack for details in making a website effective and interesting.

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create a style switcher using jQuery and PHP. The end result will be an unobtrusive & entirely degradable dynamic style switcher which will be quick and easy to implement.

 

Here we learn how to mimic the i-Google Interface in another of Padolsey tutorial from Nettuts

In this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to create a customizable interface with widgets. The finished product will be a sleek and unobtrusively coded iGoogle -like interface which has a ton of potential applications!