Butterfly photo credit: Warren Rohner



Organic designs are always beautiful and butterflies definitely don’t escape from trendy works. These 23 butterflies that I personally caught on Flickr under the creative commons license can help you to achieve that dreamy look.

The pack consists of transparent .png isolated objects, silhouettes, b/w and color vector traced vector files in .eps and .svg of each of them and also a .txt with the attributions.

I hope you enjoy them!

**update 12/20/2007**

Photoshop Brushes added to the set :)

Image Credit: Oliver Saraja



We all heard about Linux OS. There are a lot of myths about it, not very many people are using it (all Linux freaks won’t agree with me on this – but let’s face the truth – the Linux users are niche community). In this short article I would like to show you what’s Linux is all about, and moreover – is it a good tool for webdesiger?

If you’re familiar with Linux you can stop reading now – since I won’t discover anything new for you ;).

First thing – Linux comes in distribiutions – and each “distro” can be very different from the other. All my experience with Linux comes from Ubuntu – I belive it’s the easiest and the simplest operating system I’ve seen (well – maybe Mac’s OSX is a litter easier to use and look nicer – but Ubuntu isn’t far behind).

So – let’s see how good is Ubuntu for webdesigners.

In my last post, “How To Destroy The Web 2.0 Look” based on Elliot Jay Stocks’ proposal, I showed some sites that illustrate an opposing  trend to the current popular style. This new look has rich textures and an organic feel. The purpose behind these designs is to come up with different web design approaches that to try to build up and express the each site’s personality. Now, in contrast, I would like to show 16 Beautiful, Simple Websites that are clearly influenced by the “W2L” a.k.a. “Web 2.0 Look” (brilliant contrasting colors, central layouts and big text) but you won’t see any Diagonal Lines, reflections nor “Special offer” badges while maintaining that sleek feeling from W2L.

So, we see that you can embrace trends without falling into their specific clichés. Here we see that we can still incorporate beautiful, clean designs without being a Photoshop artist.

A trend always appears as opposition to another. Detailed Gothic art was replaced with the pure straight lines from  Greek temples in the Renaissance. The tons of hair spray, glitter and multicolor spandex 80′s were demolished by the black & white minimalism from the 90′s.

The web is no exception. In the beginning, there was no light on the web. It was awfully crowded, with dancing marquees, tedious frames, unbearable midis and annoying spinning @’s. It was the dark ages of the web. Then came refreshing empty spaces, vibrant, high contrast colors, lovely gradients, big text, original gloss shine effect, diagonal lines and, of course, reflected logos, came t0 our rescue. Everything was shiny, with that great ‘breand new’ smell. The Web 2.0 look was born.

But guess what?

Dezignus.com is a newcomer design blog and is gaining popularity pretty fast. Thanks for its daily offering of brushes, clip art, icons, tutorials and many more free stuff for design. I particularly recommend the brushes and vector section of the site they are amazing.

**Update 11/20/07**

The site I have mentioned above seems to be sharing archives without holding the proper rights to do this. Please be aware of that and remember it could hurt your designs to use materials that are not properly licensed.