Fonts in use is a blog that features, well… fonts in use!  It’s fairly self explanatory.  It’s a treasure trove of typographic examples.  Every post spotlight one or more fonts being put to use in real world examples and includes details about the font’s name and origins – which I appreciate.  If you an aficionado of typography like myself you may want to take a peek 🙂

http://fontsinuse.com/

This is a really nice resource I found for free icons.  They have over 200 thousand icons that you can use.  Not all have commercial licenses, but a lot do.  They’ve got just about every kind of icon you might need, for social networking, e-mail, user interfaces.  So next time I need some icons I think I’ll stop on by 🙂

I’m currently using this set for my social media icons: http://findicons.com/pack/2052/social_network

http://findicons.com/

http://www.icojoy.com/articles/26/

Free stock photography can great great for low-budget or…no-budget projects.  In a lot of cases you get what you pay for, but there’s some really nice shots hidden in there too.  Some resources that I like to use are:

http://sxc.hu/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://www.freestockphotos.biz/
http://www.rgbstock.com/
http://pixabay.com/

I contribute to stock exchange myself. Also, if you’re looking for textures you’ll have a much easier time finding some free resources.  There’s a lot of different texture websites out there, but my favorite so far is:

http://www.cgtextures.com/

A few more that have some restrictions:

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
You can only get very tiny photos here

No longer free u.u

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/
They only allow you to download one photo for free

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go through the arduous task of making a seamless pattern! Well, I actually like making them, but it can be time consuming.  I found this website online that will make seamless patterns online for free.

http://www.studioludens.com/repper/

It comes out a little odd if you were to put a picture of a person in there, but for making seamless patterns of textures this rocks!

There are also online sites for making diagonal stripe, and tartan backgrounds that I have used in the past:

http://www.stripegenerator.com/
http://www.tartanmaker.com/

These are a few anime wallpapers I made back in 2005~ for anime wallpaper community called Mini Tokyo.  The images are either scans or scans traced in Illustrator.