Today I'd like to talk about Vector Art. Bitmaps are generated from chunks of colors, kind of the same way that Icons are designed and made. Vector Art, however, is designed using Math to generate several points in a line that connect to form a more detailed image. Vector Art images can be magnified to large sizes, without showing great loss in detail. It's also like looking at a well defined Mandelbrot image. You can also magnify these images to huge sizes.

Here is a very good article that explains Vector Art compared to Bitmap generated Art.
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/shoptalk/vectors-and-bitmaps.html

I've tried to find some websites where you can download vector art and use the images for either personal or commercial projects. Here some of the better websites that I've found:
http://www.vecteezy.com/ Vecteezy is a community of vector art.
http://vector4free.com/ vector4free.com is a web site dedicated to free vector graphics
http://www.vectorjunky.com/ All The vector mentioned are the property of their respective owners, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain. Please use these images responsibly.
http://vectorlady.com/ Ann has a good site set up with some free vectors.
http://www.vectorjungle.com/ Some nicely done vectors, illustrations and layouts.
http://garcya.us/ Free vector graphics, vector icons, templates and free tools for web designers all around the world!

There are so many ways to discovery vector art. If you are into Desktop Publishing the quality of vector art images will certainly make your projects and layout stand out in this highly competitive market.

Free Picture/Photo Sources

These sites are considered 'free' picture sources, but you need to read the terms of use to each site, to protect yourself. At most, all you may have to do, is to acknowledge the author of the picture by placing a link below the picture.

http://search.creativecommons.org/ A search engine for Creative Common licensed pictures.
http://gallery.hd.org/index.jsp DHD Multimedia
http://www.everystockphoto.com/ Every Stock Photo. Searches Free Photo sites.
http://www.flickr.com/ Lots of pictures to choose from, but watch out and head the licenses.
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ 1,000's of free photos to choose from, nice previewer.
http://www.freefoto.com/ Photos listed Geographically and by subject.
http://freerangestock.com/ Totally free Stock Photography and Textures.
http://www.morguefile.com/ The place where old projects and picture campaigns go to die.
http://www.openphoto.net/ Several categories to choose from.
http://www.pdphoto.org/ Thousands of free royalty-free pictures here. Link back to this site.
http://www.photorack.net/ Free stocked Photos.
http://www.public-domain-photos.com/ 5,000 free pictures and 8,000 free cliparts.
http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/ Many pictures free, including commercial, with a link back to this site.
http://www.sxc.hu/ Nice mouse over previews of each picture.
http://www.unprofound.com/ Choose photos by color or search for them.
http://visipix.dynalias.com/index_hidden.htm Just supply a link and you can use the picture.
http://wikipedia.org/ Note the terms for each picture.
http://woophy.com/ Large selection. Can be used non-Commercially on a website.

It's best to treat each individual picture as it's own unique license. Don't take for granted that just because one picture on a website is free, that they all are. In the case for the above sites, most authors just want recognition for their work. Some will even allow you to crop the picture or to alter it in some slight way, but again, make sure that you read the terms of use for each one.

Fonts

I'd like to continue my discussion with fonts, because they are so plentiful and there is so much that you can do with them.

I'll start off with a link to a great website.
http://www.fontcraft.com/fontcraft/

Think of fonts as designing the interior of a home in the right color and fabric groups. Obviously not everything will match, the fun is finding out which schemes work.

Dingbats. No, I'm not calling you a dingbat! Dingbats represent little images that each letter of the keyboard will generate. You can put these through programs like Photoshop and Photo Filtre to add textures, solid or graduated colors to them. Some graphic artists have gotten pretty creative incorporating these into their designs.

Categories. What is the definitive category list for fonts? Is there one? Serif, Sans Serif, Decorative. There are so many!

Styles. There are so many different ways to designs fonts. You can have picture fonts, with a picture in the font instead of a solid color, you can have a gradient (Photoshop specializes in them), you can have Gel fonts (some great ones in the Adobe community), patterns/textures (there are thousands of them!)

So whether you are creating a notice for a birthday party or a professional layout, there is a font style for you. Can you be creative enough to make it stand out and to be your own unique style?

Photo Stock

There are many premium priced and competitively priced photo stock web sites. The very first thing that you need to know are the terms and conditions of the photos that you'll find there. One place to find out is: http://www.stockphotoguides.com/use You want to make sure that you're not breaching the terms and conditions of the copyrighted images that you'll be using.

That said, it's time to move on to some links of some of the best stock photo sites on the internet.
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/ Over 4.5 million royalty-free stock photos and growing.
http://www.corbisimages.com/Default.aspx Corbis images. Some impressive collections here.
http://www.deviantart.com/ search the photos here, but watch the sizes and copyrights.
http://www.dreamstime.com/ close to 8 million images to choose from.
http://www.flickr.com/ Watch for larger sizes. Best to get author's copyright permission.
http://www.fotolia.com/ on a tight budget, this may be your place.
http://www.fotosearch.ca/ many photo stock collections are listed here.
http://www.gettyimages.ca/ conceptual rights-managed and royalty-free creative images
http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php 6.5 million royalty images to choose from.
http://www.jupiterimages.com/ one of the leading suppliers of stock photography in the world.
http://www.photospin.com/default.asp Another reasonably priced photo stock site.
http://www.shutterstock.com/ Over 10 million royalty free, stock photographs.
http://www.sxc.hu/ Stock.XCHNG. Now owned by Getty images. The best free stock site.
http://www.veer.com/ Reasonably priced photo stock.

Textures

As I look all around I see all kinds of textures. The most natural ones are the textures in nature, the way the sunlight shines on the trees, the clouds, even the verdant grass. Textures are a great way to get away from the solid color monotonous effect that can be placed into fonts or background design.
There are many free texture sites on the Internet. One site of note, which boasts over 30,000 textures is: http://www.cgtextures.com/ There are many categories for you to peruse and to decide upon when doing your layout. Other great sites would include:
http://mayang.com/textures/
http://www.imageafter.com/index.php (see second drop down menu from the left for these full paged textures that can be idea for web pages).
http://texturez.com/
http://www.texturise.com/
These are just a few of the many free textures out there. Just watch out for the copyrights, some images might not be available to use commercially. Respect the designer's wishes.
I also have some of my own designs that I will be including at a latter date. I created them using some basic graphic programs like Starfish. There are other commercial programs that work very well such as GenTex (still the best), Illusionae, and Wood Workshop. You can integrate the generated images through photo editing software, even programs such as the 'timeless' 2pic at http://2pic.moor-software.com/ There are other programs that will super impose one picture into the other as well. Just realize that not all textures will super impose the way you might want them to.
I look for textures that have a lot of contrast in them. The more muted tones seem to all blend together and stand out more like one color. The fun part is experimenting within different graphic programs like Photoshop, Paintshop and even Photo Filtre. Once you get the hang of working textures into your layout, or into fonts, then you may be pleasantly surprised.

Dale's Designs

Welcome to my brand new home!

On my website I will have a lot of information and resources that deal with Graphic Designs. I will introduce you to some quality links and important information in this wonderfully diverse field. I also will be putting up some of my designed personal poetry, which I will eventually sell at a competitive price. But for now, welcome one and all!

Today I would like to talk about texturized fonts. If you get the chance, check out some of the great fonts sites out there. For today's example, I am using Fontspace's website. The links is:
http://www.fontspace.com/category/textured As of today, they show 86 different fonts, but they also have more specialized fonts such as the attractive looking Art Deco Fonts.
The first and most important thing that I must say, is to make sure you know what the copyright of the font is before you use it in any application. Know the terms and conditions because these people put a lot of work into designing their fonts.
MyFonts has a section as well, with some good examples of how the layout will look like, along with the prices. They have a good listing of fonts, by their tag.
Their link is: http://new.myfonts.com/tags/textured/

So whether you are designing an elegant layout, or one more grungy, you might consider this method. It adds great diversity to the font and personifies it's appearance greatly.