I recently made some fractal brushes for Little Box of Ideas . They had a good response so I thought I’d make some for you guys too .

These are all made at 2500 pixels and should work in photoshop CS and above. If you enjoyed use them please feel free to link to them but please don’t redistribute as your own.

It looks like we’ll be publishing a new brush set every week so if you have any requests for brushes leave a comment saying what type your interested in or email us. Please retweet this and be sure to get out RSS feed.

download: 6 Free Stunning Fractal Brushes Which You Need (21.17MB) added: 10/03/2010 clicks: 1 description: 6 Free Stunning Fractal Brushes Which You Need all at 2500 px Photoshop CS and above

These packaging designs are a great source of inspiration. This is a showcase of the most creative and cutting-edge designs from the world of packaging. Package design is a very important design element due to its direct relationship with the environment and therefore climate. A recent calculation estimated that if Coca Cola didn’t use paint on their cans in just one year they would save around 24 billion cans worth of paint.

This is an excellent example of how innovative and forward thinking package design can literally help save our planet, which is always a very good thing. Other ideas include doubling the usage of a product, for example the dumbbell packaging that is originally a drinks bottle.

Although most of these incorporate recyclable materials and are environmentally conscious designs some of them are purely aesthetically pleasing and great for design inspiration. Please retweet this and remember to subscribe via RSS

Prototype Packaging

Prototype Packaging: This is a product named the Wine Can and took the 2006 Swedish packaging design award. This product, designed by Jens Andersson and Jonas Forsman, has a beautiful matte finish and a lot of appeal. Image Source

Resealable Soda Can

Click here to view the embedded video.

Resealable Soda Can: This really interesting packaging concept that allows for a soda can to be resealed called Soda-Seal. Image Source.

Reebok Exta Grip

Reebok Exta Grip: Packaging : Packaging idea for Reebok climbing shoes. Image Source.

The 360 Paper Bottle

The 360 Paper Bottle is the first of its kind in the world, and a true environmentally-friendly solution to the problem of plastic water bottles: Image Source.

Meat Shorts

Weird packaging for Weird Clothing :

Internet-shop Weird Clothing offers bermuda shorts with meat print. The appropriate package not forgotten with “Human meat” label. Image Source.

An­ti-Theft Lunch Bags

An­ti-Theft Lunch Bags are zip­per bags that have green splotch­es print­ed on both sides, mak­ing your fresh­ly pre­pared lunch look spoiled. Don’t let a sticky-fin­gered cowork­er or school­yard bully get away with lunch theft again.Image source.

Fruit Juice Packages

Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa has created a series of creative fruit juice packages that have the look and feel of the fruit they contain.Image Source

Dumbbell / Cleaner

Tommaso Ceschi designed this lovely innovative packaging which can act as a water bottle, a cleaning detergent container and a dumbbell!

Image Source

CHAIR/CHAIR

CHAIR/CHAIR
An inspiration from the American contemporary artist Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chair. Instead of giving new definition, I redefined the concept of a chair by using alphabet. One is able to construct a chair by assembling the redesigned alphabets.

11 Free Web Design Icons Digital Art Empire

Introducing another icon pack exclusive to Digital Art Empire. I spent the some time answering emails from a few readers and put together this set. I really hope you find theme useful  and enjoy them .

I find creating these packs very useful for my designs too. Again if  you would like to request any icons please leave a comment or send me an email.

There are 3 different sizes : 256 x 256 128 x 128, 64 x 64  – PNG

License/Usage : Free for personal and Commercial work , please use an attribution link back to ‘ http://digitalartempire.com/‘

download: 11 11 Free Web Design Icons Digital Art Empire (668.18KB) added: 08/03/2010 clicks: 13 description: '11 Free Web Design Icons Digital Art Empire' Contains : 3 sizes 256 x 256 , 128 x 128 & 64 x 64

Here we present the second ‘weekly best of the web’. This is a weekly post that showcases news, inspiration and interesting offerings from the design community.

If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via contact us , the image with the link from where you found it , leave your  name and we’ll credit you too.

We have worked hard at collecting all these from around the interweb and really  hope you enjoy them.Have fun, be inspired  & remember to subscribe via RSS to get our latest posts.

The legendary Higpnosis

Lamborghini Ankonian Concept

COLOR STATE by Malene Landgreen

Lenancker Romain’s Paper Installations

Echo is the next generation commenting system.

Instrumental Video Nine

Click here to view the embedded video.

My cars (showreel) Pantural

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another awesome giveaway this time its the largest we’ve had so far

500 – 14 pt gloss cardstock, 14 pt matte cardstock or 13 pt recycled uncoated cardstock

Giveaway Prize:

500 Business Cards for One (1) Winner

Sizes:  2 x 3.5”, 2 x 3”, 2 x 2” (square card) or 1.5 x 3.5” (slim card)

Paper: 14 pt gloss cardstock, 14 pt matte cardstock or 13 pt recycled uncoated cardstock

Specifications: Full Color Both Sides; Offset Press; 3 Business Day Printing

Shipping: FREE UPS Ground Shipping

Eligibility: Limited to US Residents only

Business Cards Online -   Here is the UPrinting site

Promotional Printing

How to enter

1 – Follow Digital Art Empire on Twitter

2 - Tweet the post with the tweet meme button

3 – Leave a comment ( the most important step) with your Twitter ID and email address so we know who to send the prize to.

4 – subscribe to our RSS feed (to receive the latest posts and giveaway’s on Digital Art Empire direct to your reader),

* Please follow the rules or you will not be eligible for the competition : )

‘Visualization is daydreaming with a purpose.’

Bo Bennett

Introduction  : What is mind mapping?

Mind mapping is designed to mirror how the brain functions in a radiant manner rather than linear.

Picture the internet without links and pictures – just lines of text with no relation or connection - perhaps with a doodle here and there – this is what your notes plans and essentially strategy is without a map, a mind map.

A mind map is simple a way to express your thoughts on paper using associations connections and triggers to cultivate further ideas.

It’s similar to how Mnemonics works in that it uses all your faculties to recreate your mental processes. Mnemonics is a way of remembering things through associating easy to remember ideas and data. So for example a song is used to remember your new office address. This is how people display extraordinary feats of memory

How it works

The basic idea behind a mind map is that you write down your initial idea with an image, say a simple initial idea for a project. From there you can draw branches to the programs you may use, the places you’ll have to visit and how long this may take.

Popularity

Since its creation 1960’s by Tony Buzan, it has had a widespread use in almost all industries including design studios across the globe. It is acknowledged it is used by 250 million people.

Here Chris Pirillo talks about the benefits of mind mapping and some online software to help you mind map.

Text 2 Mind Map

Click here to view the embedded video.

A few tips to help you mind map

Mind mapping especially for a creative boost should be fun, draw out the initial idea, which could be anything from the clients brief, your audience or even just some colors. The main idea is link as many choices as possible together with as many triggers as you can, visually. Then label the first sketch with something memorable and descriptive.

The structure is like a tree, with one branch leading to another pool of ideas and choices. Once you have the first few ideas down you can go ahead and add more detailed images or if you like memorable colours. For example the red ideas could represent a deadline, or a drawing of a book could mean the Facebook app your developing.

Free mind mapping software:

Freeplane is a free, open source software application for creating mind maps (diagrams of connections between ideas), and electronic outlines. Written in Java, Freeplane is supported on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Compendium is a computer program and social science tool that facilitates the mapping and management of ideas and arguments. The software provides a visual environment that allows people to structure and record collaboration as they work through “wicked problems”.

WikkaWiki (often shortened as Wikka) is a free, lightweight, and standards-compliant wiki engine. Written in PHP, it uses MySQL to store pages. WikkaWiki is a fork of Wakka Wiki to which a number of new features have been added. It is designed for speed, fine-grained access control, extensibility, and security, and is released under the GNU General Public License.

VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) is a free, open source concept mapping application written in Java. The application is developed by the Academic Technology group at Tufts University. VUE is licensed under the Educational Community License. VUE 3.0, the latest release, was funded under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

SciPlore MindMapping is a mind mapping application written in Java. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and based on the open source software FreeMind. The focus of SciPlore MindMapping is on combining mind maps with PDF and reference management.

XMind is an open source brainstorming and mind mapping software tool developed by XMind Ltd. It helps people to capture ideas, organize to various charts, and share them for collaboration. It supports mind maps, fishbone diagrams, tree diagrams, org-charts, logic charts, and spreadsheets. It is often used for knowledge management, meeting minutes, task management, and GTD. XMind is compatible with FreeMind. The latest version is XMind 3.

Pimki is a PIM derived from the Ruby-based Wiki-clone, Instiki, written and maintained by Assaph Mehr. It is “the place to dump your brain, organise your thoughts and Get Things Done.”

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool.

Thankyou to Aranya ,jmmcdgll,torres21 for the images used.

After searching the interweb I was surprised to not be able to find any apple/ ipod  brushes. So I immediately thought of my readers and created this set. Its amazing to see the evolution of  the iPod , its such a revolutionary piece of design we can be sure it will be around(in some form) 20 years from now.

Each brush can be sized to 2500 pixels so they’ll come in handy for a variety of projects, the preview only shows a fraction of their potential – they are at a good enough resolution to have good detail with any color close up (2500 px)

Here I took a selection of iPod and iPad images and created some photoshop brushes , I really hope you find a good use for them.You can use these brushes for any purpose , commercial and personal.

Thank you to the following photographer’s

FHKE /Collin Grady/hyku/nDevilTV

Here is a preview of all 9 brushes with a white brush against a white background.

download: 9 Unique and Exclusive iPod and iPad Brushes for Photoshop. (13.21MB) added: 02/03/2010 clicks: 19 description: 9 Unique and Exclusive iPod and iPad Brushes for Photoshop. Containing: 9 Photoshop Brushes Photoshop Version CS 2 , 3 & 4

After the amazing popularity of the first icon set I decided to update the set with some new icons for you. As promised I am updating the set , its great fun to create these so I’ll definitely be building the set up to 50 or perhaps 100 if they are very popular. This is a great reason to subscribe via RSS or email so you’ll never miss an update .

There are 4 different sizes : 512 x 512 512 x 512, 256 x 256
128 x 128, 64 x 64  – PNG

License/Usage : Free for personal and Commercial work , please use an attribution link back to ‘ http://digitalartempire.com/‘

Included Part II: Bebo – Blogger – Delicious – Flickr – Chrome – Linked In – Technorati

Included Part I : Design Bump – Design Float – Design Moo – Digg – Stumble Upon – RSS – Twitter – You Tube – Facebook

Part II new icons :

download: 7 Free Social Media Icon Set II Digital Art Empire (658.89KB) added: 01/03/2010 clicks: 13 description: Part II: “Social Media - Networking & Bookmarking Icon Set” Containing :9 Free Icons Four Sizes: 512 x 512, 256 x 256 128 x 128, 64 x 64 - PNG

I included the first icon set with 9 icons here incase you missed the last one.

Part I

download: Download :“Social Media - Networking & Bookmarking Icon Set” (958.38KB) added: 23/02/2010 clicks: 252 description: “Social Media - Networking & Bookmarking Icon Set” Containing :9 Free Icons Four Sizes: 512 x 512, 256 x 256 128 x 128, 64 x 64 - PNG

To boldly go where no brush has been before , joking aside these brushes are some of the best I’ve made so far . I’ve really got the knack of making them work.They are all images of Nebula galaxies and stars at a high resolution.

Each brush can be sized to 2500 pixels so they’ll come in handy for a variety of projects .These brushes are made from NASA images , they have a very open usage policy which is good thing to know about. You can use any of their images for any purpose , they ask that you acknowledge NASA as the source. Thank you NASA for helping me make these brushes.

Here is a preview of all 15 brushes with a white brush against a blue background.

download: 15 Free Space Brushes - Galaxy Nebula & Planets (27.80MB) added: 26/02/2010 clicks: 88 description: 15 Free Space Brushes - Galaxy Nebula & Planets Containing: 15 Photoshop Brushes Photoshop Version CS 2 , 3 & 4

If you found these useful the best thankyou is to promote the article or even better subcribe via email or RSS.

Typography can make or break a design; it’s a subtle yet huge element that can bring great aesthetic pleasure to both the viewer and designer, when done accurately.

There are a lot of free fonts on the interweb, I myself have added to this group. It helps massively to use different fonts in your designs and varying the typefaces as much as possible. This is to make sure you remain fresh and on top of trends. I carefully hand picked these typefaces some from my searching design blogs and some from my bookmarks – as you ‘ll see Deviant Art is an excellent source for these kinds of fonts.

The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a “family” or related set of fonts.

For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include roman, bold, and italic fonts. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size.

Thank you to the artists who provided the materials ,please remember to follow these artists rules and credit them where appropriate. If you intend to use these for commercial work please check the licenses.

Don’t forget to subscribe because we regularly publish articles like this one.

FFF Tusj by Magnus Cederholm

FONT: Chaos Math by ~finlayy

Facet font by Svetoslav Simov

Quad font by Svetoslav Simov

Karabine par Jonathan Paquette

TYPORM01 Round ans Square by ~RGSONE

Sunday Morning Garage Sale by ~Lydia-distracted

fontHMG.01: re-noise by ~soulpowerworks

ultravioleta by ~aedys

Origram by `NunoDias

Sliced AB by ~atobgraphics

ABC – Font Typeface Version 2 by ~MyFox

Akashi by Ed Merritt

MDRS-FD01 by ~mindriders

Groteska by Alberto Rodríguez’