If you are needing a quick way of catching up on what has been happening within the design community after the festive holiday period, this is the round-up for you. Oh, and welcome back to work!
We love to share fresh design related news and resources through Twitter, this post is a collection of everything resource we have tweeted about in the past week.
Just in case you are not one of our Twitter followers, click here: twitter.com/speckyboy.
As always, if you have any cool links that you would like to share, do not hesitate to send them to us here: Submit News. Thanks to everyone that has been emailing.

Free Furry Cushions Social Icons Set – Noupe

The Furry Cushions Social Icons, is an icon set with 6 transparent .png format icons. You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions and you can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes.

Beautiful Designs with Smoke Typography

There is something very beautiful and mysterious about smoke. Using smoke in a design can produce some amazing visual effects, as you will see in this collection. In case you want to incorporate smoke effects in your own designs, they've also included some design resources in this article that you can check out.

The 50 Best Adobe Illustrator Tutorials from 2009

This huge post is a collection of the best Illustrator tutorials from 2009.

The Best Photoshop Tutorials of 2009

With every year comes a large wave of great art, new techniques, and new artists on the scene, and this year was no different. In 2009 a lot of new trends emerged and a lot of new tutorials were made to show how to create awesome artwork.
This roundup focuses on the fifteen best tutorials that were given to Psdtuts+ in 2009. Five of these tutorials are the best of Psdtuts+, and the other ten are from other sources around the net.

Free TrueType Arcade Font Download

Top Web Design Blogs of 2009

The advent of design and especially web design – related blogs, sure didn’t start this year but it was a good one in terms of new references and quality. The amount of people willing to share is amazing and the community is a really vibrant one, making it awesome to be part of it.

Know Your Type: Part 2 – Type Categories

In this tutorial you can learn about the categories in which a type can be classified. Knowing the terms and characteristics of these groups can help you in the process of selecting the appropriate type for your project.

35+ Beautiful and Inspiring Sand Sculptures

Sand sculpting/Sand art is the art of modeling sand into a beautiful and aesthetic form. The only ingredients required to make these sand sculptures are sand and water. This article has a collection of over 35 captivating and really inspiring sand sculptures created by talented artists from around the world.

250+ Free Photoshop Spray Brushes

Spray brushes are useful in adding effects on your images in Photoshop. Especially if you’re into graffiti, grunge or dirty style of design. These will aid you in establishing more artistic and realistic images. A combination of the correct usage of brushes and the right dose of imagination can produce wondrous and excellent result.

50 Awesome Resources for Design Inspiration

Web and graphic designers are always looking for excellent sources of inspiration and, in this post, the author has collated an awesome collection of 50 of the best places to get design inspiration online.

Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips

Depending on the effort it takes when interacting with your website, is critical to its success. This article discusses five important usability tips that your site can’t live without.

69 Coolest Web Apps Of 2009

Designers, developers and programmers will like this list, but you can also use them and will love them whether you are an office worker, a manager, a supervisor, a student, a home user, etc. They are really amazing in respect to their features. This is the list of 69 Coolest Web Apps Of 2009 at Work.

10 Keys to Growth as a Designer

In this post they take a look at 10 keys to growing as a designer. This list and discussion serves as a reference or guide for any designer that wants to improve. Focus on these areas and you will become a better designer.

Is Fireworks better than Photoshop?

An age old question, with an obvious answer. Or, is it? What do you think?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5655″>KwiClick Add-on for Firefox

At first glance I didn’t think I would like KwiClick, I don’t like anything too obtrusive. How wrong I was.
If there is ever going to be an app or an extension that was going to change the way I like to browse, it would be this one. By tweaking and customizing the settings, KwiClick has integrated itself into my browsing environment with ease, its features always on call when I needed them.
Basically, KwiClick enhances the way you interact with content from your favorite services. It delivers search results from your favorite services directly to you, so you don’t need to open new tabs or go back and forth between pages.
Want to view the results of a Google search without going to Google? KwiClick gives you this. Want to watch a video while you surf around the web? KwiClick makes this easy.

40 Breathtaking Examples of Aerial Photography

Aerial photography can be very inspirational since it provides a view of our environment and surroundings from a perspective we are not used to. In this article there are 40 breathtaking aerial photos for your inspiration.

3+ Ways to Preload Images Using CSS, JavaScript, or Ajax

Preloading images is a great way to improve the user experience. When images are preloaded in the browser, the visitor can surf around your site and enjoy extremely faster loading times. This is especially beneficial for photo galleries and other image-heavy sites where you want to deliver the goods as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Creating a Time Saving CSS Template

If you are a freelance developer then saving time always works in your favor. One way to help you save time, especially if like me, you find yourself doing a lot of the same kind of work over and over, is setting up templates. In the case of web development, having a customized template for your CSS stylesheet can save you from repetitiously typing the same bits of code that you include in most of your web dev projects.

A Colorful Clock With CSS & jQuery

18 Latest jQuery Plugins for Your Next Project

Over this past year, there has been tremendous growth in the jQuery community. jQuery released version 1.3 in January 2009 and more and more plugins have been appearing online at a tremendous rate. Included in this article are 18 of the best jQuery Plugins that were released in 2009.

45+ Magnificent WordPress Portfolio Themes

Offline Inspiration: Urban Photography

Stepping into Year 2010 with 20 Fabulous + 5 Exclusive Wallpapers

Showcased in this article is a fantastic collection of Year 2010 wallpapers designed through the creative use of typography and effects. This collection will appeal to typography enthusiast and anyone who appreciates well designed wallpapers.

30 Examples of dark sci-fi art

Selected artworks with a dark science fiction tone, concept art, illustrations and digital paintings compiled from artists Rado Javor, Szymon Biernacki, Robin Olausson and Marek Okon.

24 Typographic, Clean and Minimalist Motifs to Inspire

Typography is one of the basic elements of print media, web layouts and clothing designs. In this post you’ll find a collection of 24 beautiful and creative typography designs to inspire you that will allow you to expand your knowledge base of what typography really is.

10 WordPress Dashboard Hacks

The dashboard is a very important part of a WordPress blog. When you are building a site for a client, it is especially important to be control WP’s dashboard and making the clients understanding of WP easier. In this article, they have put together 10 extremely useful hacks for WordPress’ dashboard.

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