Photoshop brushes can be powerful Web design tools, both enhancing a graphic artist’s work and enabling design projects to be completed faster. The more brushes a designer has in his or her collection, the more flexibility they will have with their designs. Fortunately, several websites have emerged over the past few years to provide designers with a multitude of options when it comes to brushes. Below are just some of the top sites that provide attractive, easy-to-use and free downloadable Photoshop brushes. Brusheezy Founded in 2006 by a designer who grew frustrated by the lack of options for easily searchable…more»

Google has released the first version of Swiffy, a Google Labs product that converts SWF files (Flash) to HTML5. Users only need to upload a SWF file and Swiffy produces an HTML5 version which runs in modern browsers with lots of SVG support such as Chrom and Safari. While Swiffy won’t convert all Flash content, it seems to work well for ads and basic animations. Google provides several example of SWF files converted through Swiffy. Check out the Google Chrome ad and Symphony Orchestra ad for examples. According to Google, Swiffy uses a compact JSON representation of the animation, which…more»

Several Adobe Photoshop Touch apps were released today including Adobe Color Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav for Apple iPad. The apps were developed using the Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit (SDK) and demonstrate the potential for new interaction between Photoshop and tablet devices. Using the suite of Photoshop Touch apps, Adobe is enabling users to create custom color swatches, paint directly onscreen and use popular Photoshop tools from their tablet devices. Adobe Color Lava for example allows designers to use their fingertips to mix colors on the iPad, creating custom color swatches and themes which can then be transfered…more»

Freelancer.com has released the Freelancer Fast 50, which is the company’s findings on the fastest-growing online outsourcing jobs of the first quarter of 2011. The Freelancer.com Fast 50 charts the top 50 rising job categories in the online labor market quarter by quarter, providing a rolling, up-to-the-minute account of online freelance job trends. The top three trends for the quarter included the following: • Panda Pounds Writers: The most noticeable digital labor shift this quarter was not seen in what went up, but what went down. Freelancer.com has cited a massive decline in content writing jobs all across the board…more»

Adobe today announced the availability of Create Suite 5.5 – and the designers and developers rejoice! Creative Suite 5.5 delivers important advances in HTML5 and Flash authoring, lots of innovation in video production and editing, and some powerful tools for digital publishers (tablets anyone?) for delivering work to multiple platforms, operating systems, browsers, and smartphones. Over the last year Adobe and publishers including Condé Nast and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia have worked to develop new digital publishing workflows based on Creative Suite and Adobe InDesign®. Prepare to be dazzle – by our estimation Creative Suite 5.5 will enable print publishers…more»

A recent blog post that caught the attention of readers included a summary of the annual report from online employment platform Elance. Another Web employment marketplace, oDesk, has released its own year-end report with similarly positive views of both the year in review and the year ahead. The report from oDesk says that employers spent $115 million on online work in 2010 and that job opportunities doubled from 2009 to approximately 602,000. Mobile was the best bet for job-seekers, and positions involving Android expertise shot up 680 percent from 2009 while iPhone-related jobs increased by 152 percent. Social media was…more»

Work has been going pretty well lately, it’s proving to be a bit difficult on my inspiration though. I have the stamina to complete the tasks I have, there’s no question about that. The issue is where I’m unable to come up with ANYTHING for the new clients coming in that hasn’t been done before. I know there are some very creative people out there but it’s one of those situations where once you’ve seen it done before, you know it’s wrong to go out of your way to recreate it and then pass it off as your own. Of…more»

I just downloaded a new program called Morpheus Photo-Morpher. It gives you the ability to morph numerous images together into one larger image. I’ve seen a few instances of it being used as a photographic time line and part of me thinks it would be a great resource for those creating digital scrap books. I’ve seen a lot of people use time lines where they go to other websites, load in all the images, and then embed a flash image into their page. The cool thing is you can save these morphs in any file type that you wish, I…more»

I’ve been slacking off, I know!

It’s my anniversary and while I’m waiting very patiently for UPS to show up and deliver my gift for Sean, I’m also sitting here enjoying mine. He purchased me a new graphics card and it’s much nicer than his, the one he’s so proud of, so that has me feeling all warm and tingly inside.