Today I want to draw your attention to a great resource and beautiful blog called Lost and Taken and its companion texture image showcase called Zen Textures.
If you are involved in graphic or web design work, you know the importance of high-res texture images. Caleb Kimbrough of Lost and Taken has created a platform where designers can browse through free high quality texture images thoughtfully created by himself and other design oriented folk.
Lost and Taken
First off, this blog is beautiful! Caleb’s design for Lost and Taken integrates a wide array of texture-based elements, including a dark patterned background and a very cool paper stained effect within the logo. If you need any convincing that complex textures are a boon to great design, just peruse this site.
In addition to Caleb’s great use of textures, it’s worth pointing out that this blog has exceptional usability. The navigation is large and clear, with oversized drop-down menus continuing this theme.
There are a lot of texture sites out there, but most are republishing the work of others with no personal touch. Caleb breaks this mold by taking time to describe his creative process, and by giving credit when credit is due.
Blog posts are primarily authored by Caleb, with occasional guest writers, but all are laden with free texture images. All of the images are high-resolution and ready for use. Here are three I picked out of the last few posts: (visit Lost and Taken to download originals)
Zen Textures
Zen Textures functions as the companion texture showcase to the Lost and Taken blog. It provides a simple, efficient way to browse through a variety of texture image categories. Categories include hundreds of free texture downloads. Try browsing through the grunge tagged images for example, or those tagged plants. Others categories remain thinly populated, but this is understandable knowing the time and care that Caleb places on the creation of each image.
Pattern Wall
Pattern Wall is a site that Caleb just launched with Oscar Godson. They’ve spent a lot of time on the back end design, as you can see from the great user interface.
To download patterns, hover and click on one you like. A pop-up will feature the pattern and give you the option of downloading it.
In Closing
There are about two dozen blogs that I visit on a regular basis for resources and inspiration. Lost and Taken has a place in that list. I will continue to recommend this site to others both as a resource for images and as an example of their tasteful use.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?