Coffee is a topic we like to discuss on this blog, from time to time. So when I saw this icon set I had to share it with you! It’s a free download, but if you are a designer, make sure to take advantage of the membership. It’s a really really good deal. For $19/ month, you get a bunch of really amazing icons, with full rights.

Anyway, go check out this icon set, download it for free, and take a look at the membership too if you often need good high quality icons!

These are really cool! Social media icons all themed on a coffee cup:

Spill a little coffee on a brown paper bag and you get this:

Nice (but a little blurry) ‘coffee stain’ social media icons:

Nice looking cup of coffee with some other icons:

Another coffee stain:

An icon set in coffee brown:

Coffee cup RSS icon from Smashing along with a few others:

Coffee cup on a folder (hey how about newspaper instead?):

There are loads of combinations of these breakfast icons everywhere but they are pretty nice:

Some more nice breakfast icons:

Nice icon set, including a cup of java sitting on a coffee stain:

Big cup of coffee:

A bunch of 31 coffee icons:

Ah coffee, the thing we can’t do without in the morning, and that most of us would not dare do at night. It helps us think, we say, and makes us shake. It gives us headaches when we drink too much and headaches when we don’t have enough.

Here I’ve compiled a bunch of humorous, creative, or beautiful coffee graphics. I hope you enjoy them!

Adobe Fireworks (free trial of it is available here) is my tool of choice for creating my web design drafts, graphics for sites, and anything else that requires me to manipulate or create graphics.

Last week I wanted to create a new theme for my Twitter feed, that would be really cool. Since it’s getting close to Christmas, and there is snow and cold, I thought a nice winterland theme would be nice, and appropriate.

So how I started was to begin with a new file, and I chose 1500px wide to make sure I would go across most major monitors. Only the hugest screens will have my image starting over to the right. Next, I laid out the spacing for the two bars at the right and left of the twitter stream. This is a judgement call. I chose to space them as if it was going to be on a 1280×1024 screen size. This is the majority of windows, so it will still miss in 800×600 and 1440×900 and other resolutions. Oh well, since Twitter does not allow anything dynamic or flexible, it will have to do.

Next step, deciding on color scheme and starting to create the elements. Since it’s a wonderland scheme, blues and greens work well. So I picked a few nice colors. For the trees, I went with a few different colors of green with a little brownish tint to make it look more real.

To create the trees, I made 3 triangles on top of each other for each pine tree. For the trees that were closer to the front, I also did a ‘combine paths’ and chose ‘union’ with an oval at the bottom of the triangles, to make it look rounded. I used the ‘chiffon’ texture at 50% which looked a lot like pine branches, and I did a gradient with a darker band in the middle, to give the tree some perspective.

The closer trees, I did a ‘Commands’, ‘creative’ and ‘add shadow’ with a blue color, and then I overlaid a gradient that faded from bluish to transparent over the trees in the back, to make them look more distant.

I also made an oval with a feathered edge, to look like a hill in front, on which the closer trees are standing.

Once I saved the completed image, I used PNG Gauntlet to compress it so that Twitter would allow me to use it for my background, and I loaded it.

It took me a few hours to complete it, and I think it turned out pretty well, do you agree?

Here is another nice set of free icons for you to download, this one comes from the blog of Danny Outlaw …

Here’s a free download I found of some really cool icons of guitarists and musicians, go download them, they are awesome!

OK, you have to see this. Thanks to Layers Magazine for showing it to us. It’s some of the most detailed and incredible digital art you will ever see. And it’s done by a master, Bert Monroy.

He is a pioneer and if you want to be great just have loads of talent and spend thousands upon thousands of hours perfecting it!

Here are a couple incredible examples of really nice space-theme graphic art. Presumably it also falls under the 3D category, surely some of them are done using 3D rendering software.

Here are some examples by Greg Martin:

In graphic design, there are loads of places you can find tutorials online. Sometimes, if you are looking to kickstart your brain, you don’t even have to actually do anything else but browse through the thumbnail images that lead to different tutorials.

Here’s a great collection of 80 tutorials I found, and by the way, I’ll be doing some of these myself And here are a few screenshots of the tutorials on this website:

Here are some great tutorials, these are from PSDTuts.com.

This blog post has 192 collected advertisements many of which involve some very nice graphic design creations. Here are a couple samples: