I would like to draw your attention to a great icon artist previously known as FOOOD. I discovered his icons about 3 years ago. They are simply great. If you do not find what you need, you can at least get some inspiration from these joyful and colorful icons.

http://www.iconaholic.com

We are used to cropping and proportional resizing of our images to make them fit. We also spend hours carefully erasing unwanted elements from them. New technology allows content-aware image resizing. Totally genius!



Also download the publication by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir: Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing We might soon see this technology in Adobe products since they recently hired co-creator Shai Avidan.

PS: Photoshop price will go up

It has sometimes been hard for me to get ideas for color combinations to use in my designs. I tried using kuler, a mini-community for swatches by Adobe. It's just combinations of up to 5 colors that people post and rate. The idea is great, the interface is quite friendly, but it lacks the practicality that I was hoping for. It's pretty hard to imagine the appearance of my design with the colored rectangles that appear on the site.

Still, I would recommend it for people who would like to find some interesting color matches. If you're using Adobe software, it's even easier, because you can download the .ase file and use it directly.

I was looking for some 3D models for one of my projects. I came across a great site named TurboSquid, a vast repository of 3D-related resources such as models and materials. It took some time to find the quality I was looking for, since there seem to be no acceptance criteria on this site. It's unfortunate that so few models are jointed and that the search capabilities are somewhat limited. The prices are very good though.

Here is a photo-realistic example:
It's so perfect that it's hard to believe that it's not a photo. Now I just need to buy a better computer for the monster raytracing...