Creative Fuel #5: Free Social Media Icons, Star Wars Portraits & Type Pairings
Creative Fuel is a periodic collection of design and creativity awesomeness found around the web. Find out about new apps and services, the best freebies, and other significant news from the design community!
Design Goodies: Basic Social Media Icons & Transparent Flip Clock
First up, we have this great set of social media icons from 365psd and Fine Goods Market that by and large covers all the bases you could want for social buttons on the modern web. There are a range of variants — circle, rounded square, square, symbol and monochrome — and two size options. These cost $5.
This edition’s freebie from 365psd is a great transparent flip clock. If you need to put a countdown to an event or launch on your site, this freebie will make it super easy.
SpellTower: The Word Game with Beautiful Typography
SpellTower has been around for a while — but you might not have heard of it until recently, when creator Zach Gage started a sale campaign to take on Rovio and Zynga in the App Store charts. SpellTower never quite displaced them, but it did get a new wave of press and buzz in the process.
More to the point, if you’re a fan of word games but want to play something that feels like it pays more attention to type than, say, Words With Friends, you definitely should give SpellTower a shot on the iPad or iPhone. It’s gorgeous, and so is its website.
Illustration Inspiration: Steve Argyle’s Star Wars Portraits
At Fuel, we love great illustrations and we love Star Wars. The one thing we love even more? Great Star Wars illustrations! Check out these awesome illustrations by Steve Argyle over on Psdtuts+.
Critical Documents for Freelance Designers
What sort of documents do you need on hand to run a freelance designer? If your answer was none, you’re exposing yourself and your business to a boatload of risk legally, and a bit of frustration when you need to put something on a letterhead in a hurry. According to Steven Snell, there are seven critical documents, including contracts, stationery and more. This is a must-read for all freelance designers, and freelancers in general.
Contract and coffee photo from Shutterstock.
LayerVault
LayerVault is the holy grail of web apps for designers. With version control, unlimited storage, a toolbox of web-based design tools and features for easy team collaboration and a simple sharing tool that allows you to quickly show a client or fellow designer a file or even a single revision.
Though there’s a 30 day trial, there’s no free edition suited for amateurs, so this may only be attractive to serious freelancers or design teams in a business, but it still looks like a fantastic tool to try.
Just My Type
Having trouble coming up with a font pairing you like with the webfonts available to you? Dan Eden’s Just My Type features a collection of great pairings with fonts available from Typekit. Eden has included several options using fonts available on Typekit’s free plan, with most using fonts only available on the paid tiers, so this tool should be handy for just about everyone.
Grab the Feed
Why is the title “Free Social Media Icons” and then when we click on it, it says buy $5.00. Is this Free?
Hey Anne, that’s my fault and thanks for bringing that to my attention. 365psd’s RSS feed doesn’t include the bold price tag you see on the site, and since most of the things they post are free I assumed these icons were too. I’ve updated the post.