Cosmos Blog

I have owned many macs. The 1st was a G4 desktop never had an issue with the 2 years of ownership. The second computer was a Powerbook G4, never had a problem. Third was a Powerbook again had a couple of issues but apple was always on point. Fourth computer was a Macbook (white) I honestly liked the computer but wasn’t impressed with the overall quality of the casing.

I had issues with the build quality and took it to the genius bar a total of 3 times. They repaired it with no questions asked but the third time they called me…They decided to give me a brand new computer no questions asked for my trouble. They offered for me to get a brand new white one or the new uni body Macbook. I obviously took the new uni body Macbook and its gorgeous. They also transferred everything over for me and polished it up at the bar before handing me my brand new laptop. Apple stands behind its products and has amazing customer support.

BE NICE AND ALWAYS BE SYMPATHETIC WITH THE GENIUS BAR THEY DON’T BUILD THE COMPUTERS!! Way to go Apple!!

Google Buzz Icons

cosmos — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:44:05 +0000

Download

400+ Photoshop Floral Brushes

cosmos — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:37:12 +0000

Free Floral Brushes:

Hi-Res Floral Brushes (10 brushes)

Floral Brushes (9 brushes)

Floral Brushes (15 brushes)

Messy Flora (20 brushes)

Floral Swirl (15 brushes)

Fresh Foliage Brushes for High Resolution (67 brushes)

Floral Brushes (9 brushes)

Floral Brushes II (6 brushes)

Suddenly Spring Photoshop Brushes (25 brushes)

Floral Stroke (6 brushes)

Fantasy Floral Photoshop Brushes (4 brushes)

Mini Flower Brushes (6 brushes)

Jakandara (17 brushes)

Vector Foliage-Plants Photoshop Brushes (35 brushes)

Flowers (Let’s Say Mega Pack) (28 brushes)

Barbarja Floral01 (15 brushes)

Nature Brushes (10 brushes)

Floral Deco (72 brushes)

Swirls and Flowers (15 brushes)

Vector Flowers II (19 brushes)

Rose Garden Brushes (8 brushes)

Fantasy Floral (4 brushes)

Floral Photoshop Brushes (4 brushes)

500+ Photoshop Textures Brushes Collections

cosmos — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:07:03 +0000

Textured graphics are obviously very popular right now, and fortunately there are tons of free Photoshop brushes that will help you to quickly and easily get the textured look you want. This post is a showcase of some of the best sets of brushes available anywhere for creating textures.

Free Texture Brushes:

Dirt Spray (8 brushes)

Rust Brushes (13 brushes)

Dust & Scratches (12 brushes)

Texture Brushes (52 brushes)

Scratch Splat Grunge Brushes (15 brushes)

Dumpster Brushes (8 brushes)

Grunge Brushes 007 (7 brushes)

Digea Rust Brushes (9 brushes)

TurkHitBox Grunge Set (10 brushes)

Cracks (12 brushes)

Grunge Notion Brushes (24 brushes)

High Res Dirt Brush Set (8 brushes)

Stone and Rust (22 brushes)

Cracked Brush Set (19 brushes)

Keep Dreaming Volume 44 (12 brushes)

Abstract 17 (10 brushes)

Grunge Brushes (50 brushes)

Peeling Paint (20 brushes)

Scratch Texture (17 brushes)

Grunge Brushes 7 (30 brushes)

Grunge Brushes 8 (60 brushes)

Grunge Brushes 9 (60 brushes)

Grunge Brushes 10 (46 brushes)

Grunge Brushes by KeReN (40 brushes)

Paper Brushes (4 brushes)

Rough Edges (19 brushes)

Dirt Brushes (5 brushes)

Textured Cracks (20 brushes)

Texture Brushes (21 brushes)

Paper Textures (25 brushes)

In Obscuro Texture Brushes (9 brushes)

In Obscuro Old Paper Brushes (12 brushes)

120+ Usefull Photoshop Actions

cosmos — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:54:21 +0000

vintage wash ps actions (10 actions)

Vintage II – PS Actions (6 actions)

Old Photo

Photoshop Action 11

Vintage Colors (8 actions)

Victorian PS Action

Vintage Photo Action

Vintage Effect (6 actions)

Vintage meets lomo

Vintage Actions (2 actions)

photoshop actions – 63 (6 actions)

photoshop actions – 133 (12 actions)

photoshop actions – 136 (4 actions)

Slightly Vintage (3 actions)

photoshop actions – 41 (4 actions)

photoshop actions – 38 (8 actions)

Lith Print Action

Vintage

20+ Usefull Blogging and Social Media Icon Sets

cosmos — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:45:53 +0000

Icons are a favorite free resource of designers and bloggers. There are tons of quality, free icon sets out there and in this post we’ll feature 25 that are great for blog design. These icons sets include the those that are great for use with blogs and social media.

Cute Blogging Icon Set

Extended Set of Social Icons

Web 2.0rigami

Socialize Icons

Grunge Peeling Stickers

Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set for Bloggers

Sketchy Web Icons

Glossy Blogging Icons

Function Free Icon Set

TurboMilk Icons

Blogging Icon Set

Social Bookmark Iconset

Social Bookmark Iconset – Part II

Handycons

Old Bottle Crowns

Heart

Pixel Perfect Social Media Icons

Social Media Icon Set

Rivet Social

Circular Social Media Icons

Cheers

Color Stroked Icons

Polaroid Icon Set

Handy Icons

Social Icons

Free iPad Icons, Tutorials and PSDs

cosmos — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:37:10 +0000

Since its controversial release, the iPad has been both criticized and admired by the design community.

In this post we have compiled a list of great resources, that teach you how to create your own iPad icons, as well as a collection of ready made icons and PSDs.

To download the files, please click on the preview image to go to the source site and remember to check the terms of use before using them in your projects.

If you know of any other great iPad freebies, please add them in the comments section below and we’ll include them in this post when appropriate.

iPad Tutorials

Callum Chapman’s iPad Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial, Callum explains the process of designing the Apple iPad from scratch in Photoshop using shape tools, layer styles and blending modes. You will also use the brush tool to create detailed chrome and lighting effects.

Chris Spooner’s iPad Photoshop Tutorial

Chris Spooner also creates an Apple iPad from scratch in Photoshop using simple modification tools, the pencil tool and transformation tools.

iPad Icons

Seeing how many great iPad icons are already available to download for free across the web is pretty amazing. Here is a small collection that will surely grow.

Enthusiastik iPad icons (2 icons; PNG format)

Chris Spooner iPad Icon Set (1 icon; PSD, PNG and ICN formats)

KR Design iPad Icon (2 icons; PNG format)

Sudhithxavier iPad Icon (1 icon; PNG format)

Chris Noakes iPad Icon (1 icon; PNG, ICO and ICN formats)

Adidadidu iPad Icons (18 icons; PNG, ICO and ICN formats)

TinyLab iPad Icon (1 icon; ICN format)

Bisiobisio iPad Icon (1 icon; PNG, ICO and ICN formats)

Santieldarlaine iPad Icon (1 icon; PNG format)

iPad PSD Documents

If you’re looking for something a little easier to customize, try out these iPad PSD documents.

Kevin Anderson iPad PSD

This PSD is completely editable. Every object was created using vector masks, meaning you can scale it up or down without any loss of quality.

Mppagano iPad PSD

This huge and incredibly detailed iPad PSD comes in at a whopping 2400 x 2400 pixels, large enough for almost any design project.

Geoff Teehan iPad GUI PSD

This one is for the application developers out there. The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it is fully editable and scalable. The workable screen design is formatted to 768 x 1024, so anything you design in the Photoshop file can easily be brought over to the SDK. This is a beauty of a document, coming in at around 24 MB. Start designing those apps!

10 awesome PSD to XHTML tutorials

cosmos — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:30:22 +0000

How to Convert a PSD to XHTML

Source

Creating a CSS layout from scratch

Source

From PSD to CSS/HTML in Easy Steps – Part 1

Source

From PSD to HTML, Building a Set of Website Designs Step by Step

Source

How To Create a Horizontally Scrolling Site

Source

Converting a Design From PSD to HTML

Source

The Design Lab: PSD Conversion

Source

Web Design Layout #9 SiteBuild

Source

Convert a Photoshop Mockup to XHTML/CSS

Source

Coding a Clean Web 2.0 Style Web Design from Photoshop

Source

19 CSS Tools For Web Developers and Designers

cosmos — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:10:58 +0000

Even if you know CSS very well some tasks take lot of time to complete and for this there are lots of tools available using which you can complete your projects quicker. These tools can help you in creating forms, buttons, curve boxes, pages and lots of different CSS generated stuff.

Today we have collected 19 popular CSS tools, which will make your life easier. Don’t forget we are here to help our design community, if i missed any good tool don’t hesitate to tell us.

1. CSS Type Generator

CSS Type Set is a hands-on typography tool allowing designers and developers to interactively test and learn how to style their web content.

2. Drawter

This tool gives you the possibility to draw your website’s code.

3. CSS Sprite Generator

Very helpful tool to generate sprites for your web projects.

4. Deploy

“Whenever starting a web project, I used to always begin with the tedious process of creating the basic framework structure for the site. This included creating folders for CSS and images, downloading and including jQuery, and adding a CSS reset, among other things.”

5. CSS Compressor

Use this utility to compress your CSS to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth as well. You can choose from three levels of compression, depending on how legible you want the compressed CSS to be versus degree of compression.

6. Blueprint Grid CSS Generator

This tool will help you generate more flexible versions of Blueprint’s grid.css and compressed.css and grid.png files. Whether you prefer 8, 10,16 or 24 columns in your design, this generator now enables you that flexibility with Blueprint.

7. Button Maker Online

Use this online tool to easily and visually create those popular “XHTML valid” micro buttons (80×15). You can also opt for the larger 88×31 button instead.

8. CSS Layout Generator

This generator will create a fluid or fixed width floated column layout, with up to 3 columns and with header and footer. Values can be specified in either pixels, ems or percentages.

9. CSSFly

CSSFly is a web 2.0 tool for easy editing websites direct and in real-time in your browser. Simply edit the (X)HTML-code and the external Style-Sheet files.

10. CSS Button & Text Field Generator

Very helpful tool to create buttons and text fields.

11. CSS Colors Palette Generator

Upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. Useful for quickly grabbing a particular color within an image for inspiration.

12. Spanky Corners

‘Spanky Corners’ is an experimental technique for using only CSS to produce ’round-cornered content boxes’ with semantically pure markup. It does not require JavaScript to work

13. Replace CSS Colors Editor

Change the entire color scheme of your site with this CSS Color Editor.

14. The Box Office

The Box Office lets you wrap/float/contour text around freeform images using CSS for usage in (X)HTML pages.

15. EM Calculator

Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design.

16. Page Maker – The Generator Form

CSS Source Ordered Variable Border 1-3 Columned Page Maker.

17. Clean CSS

A tool to optimize and format your CSS.

18. W3C CSS Validation

Check Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets

19. Markup Maker

Markup Maker takes a simple list of page ids that you enter and converts it to a valid XHTML/HTML document (scaffolding, if you like). Now includes HTML5 support

Cool Photos and Artworks

cosmos — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:40:51 +0000

25 Free Brilliant Fonts For Logo Design

cosmos — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:36:22 +0000

That rounds up 25 beautiful free fonts that would grace any logo and do it proud. These fonts perform well in all sizes and weights and are not just limited to logo design. What are your favorite free fonts to use when designing a logo? Alternatively, what are your favorite free fonts to use when designing anything else? It would be interesting to know, so share away!

5 Helpful Free iPad Icon Sets For Designers

cosmos — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:34:44 +0000

Okay, so we all went a little crazy when Steve Jobs introduced us to the iPad. Despite the mixed responses worldwide, I am actually quite excited about he iPad, but I am going to wait till the next generation devices are released before I buy it. Apart from some of us who snickedred about the ridiculous name and some very loyal fans who couldn’t stop raving about it, there were some practical people out there who actually went ahead and created some beautiful iPad icons for all of us to tout on our websites and blogs. One thing is for sure, we are all going to write quite a bit about iPad in the coming days and these beautiful free icons will grace our articles. Please link on the Download Here links to go to the artist’s page for the original icon sources.

1. iPad Icons By TinyLab
DOWNLOAD HERE

2. 18 iPad Icons By Adidadidu
DOWNLOAD HERE

3. iPad Icons By Chrisnoakes
DOWNLOAD HERE

4. iPsd Icons By SudithXavier
DOWNLOAD HERE

5. iPad By krdesign
DOWNLOAD HERE

20 Useful Fonts For Fancy Logos

cosmos — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:25:00 +0000

When designing a fancy logo, we shouldn’t be using a plain font, nor something too grungy. These kind of logos need to maintain their class. The right balance of flair and flourish in typography will render these fancy logos absolutely beautiful. I prepared 20 free fonts which are just right for this purpose. Enjoy!

1. NK38pc-d

2. NK30-d

3. Oregon ldo-extended

4. Fontin Bold

5. ARB – 187 Morderne Caps

6. NK32-d

7. Rechtman Script Medium

8. Diavlo Light Regular

9. Antipasto

10. A JasperCaps

11. Chopinscript

12. Carrington

13. NK137

14. NK107

15. NK690

16. CreamPuff

17. Aka Frivolity

18. NK122

19. NK109

20. NK102

14 Useful CSS Editors for Web Developers and Designers

cosmos — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:46:35 +0000

A CSS editor helps developers to develop and deploy cascade style sheets with ease. A good CSS editor will speed up development time and help to troubleshoot and debug.

CSS files are just text files. Any text editor will do the job. However, once CSS files begin to get complicated or get large, managing and editing them becomes more difficult if using a simple text editor.

So below are top 14 CSS editors for Developers and designers.

1. Free CSS Toolbox

Key features and benefits

Quickly create and adjust CSS code
Auto-complete and syntax highlighting makes CSS editing easy
Easily re-format any CSS code
Quickly adjust somebody’s else CSS to fit your style
Make your code pretty and easy to read
Find and eliminate errors in your code
Check your CSS against various specifications
See if your CSS is compatible with older web browsers
Reduce the size of your CSS code by up to 70%
Make your web pages load faster
Quickly validate your CSS code with the web-based W3C CSS Validator
Make sure your CSS is up to the CSS Level 2 standard

2. Simple CSS â€” A Free CSS Authoring Tool

Features and Benefits

Runs on Macs, Windows and Linux
Simple CSS allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch
With Simple CSS, you can manage multiple CSS projects and import your existing style sheets.
Simple CSS supports CSS2

3. JustStyle CSS Editor

Features and Benefits

Powerful and easy-to-use
Highly interactive
Easy deployment
Platform independent

4. A GTK-2 CSS Editor

Key Features -

Syntax highlighting
Syntax validation
MDI notebook based interface
Quick CSS properties and values insertion
Auto-completion

5. Dialog-based insertion of CSS complex values

Key Features:-

syntax highlighter for many languages (20+) and customize syntax highlighter
code completion
Php debugger
code hint for functions (also called quick info/parameter hint)
columns and row highlight
code browser
ftp edit – edit files directly on a ftp server
shtml, xml, php syntax check
included help for php, html, mysql
sql designer

6. Astyle is a visual CSS editor.

Features and Key benefits

Visual easy-to-use interface
Graphic tree-type view of attachment files and the CSS structure
Grouped view of properties and selectors
Automatic selection and grouping of CSS selectors from a markup language document
CSS, HTML, XML highlight code editor
Active preview current selectors and documents with IE and Mozilla support
Clean up HTML document via CSS
Copy, Paste and Cut operations
Drag and Drop operations

7. Eledicss is a CSS2 editor

Eledicss is a CSS2 editor implemented as a server-side PHP script. It allows editing CSS files using a web browser.
Features

Can be installed both on UNIX and Windows webservers.
If you want to directly change the css files (online), they must be writable by the webserver.

8. Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

Key Features:-

User Defined Syntax Highlighting
Auto-completion
Multi-Document
Multi-View
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Full Drag â€˜N’ Drop supported
Dynamic position of Views
File Status Auto-detection
Zoom in and zoom out
Multi-Language environment supported
Bookmark
Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
Macro recording and playback

9. Online CSS Template Generator

Key Features

Make, manage and market se friendly templates
Syntax highlighting on CSS and xHTML
Drag and drop page elements
Integrated image makers
Microstock at low prices
Template im- and export
WYSIWYG xHTML editor
Integrated help-area
Visual DOM tree
CSS wizard

10. An open-source css editor for windows

Key Features :-

Snap{css} is an extremely light-weight
Notepad-like application that allows css designers to easily edit their code
Quick acccess to helpful features such as our beautify and collapse functions.

11. Oxygen CSS Editor

Key Features:-

Support for CSS Validation
Improved CSS Content Assistant
Sortable CSS Outline view
Folding

12. Freedomeditor, Customizable browser based (text/web(WYSIWYG)) file editors

Key Features:-

TinyMCE style sheets selector.
Configurable/Loadable settings/functions for each filename-extension.
File system / Folder browser.
Bookmarker with correctly operating Firefox sidebar support, thanks to jQuery and a jQuery plugin called frameReady
Create files in your native language.
Merge CSS filesCompress and/or Categorize CSS source code, remove useless white space, tabs.
Use CSS files for database purposes.
Independent function library that you can use to parse CSS files to 3-dimensional PHP arrays.
Identify and remember color codes.
Console terminal (modified phpterm) accepting commands by url request, for automating administrative tasks.
Find/Replace on multiple files in a folder.
Easily add custom tags.
Extensive AJAX usage.

13. MacRabbit CSSEdit

Key Features

With CSSEdit, you see changes to your style sheet applied in real-time
For any Web App or HTML file
You can edit style sheets for absolutely any site on- or offline.
Making your Web 2.0 App beautiful is now easy and productive.

14. StyleMaster CSS editor

Key Features

Browser compatibility
WYSIWYG CSS design
Instant previewing

If your Favorite CSS Editor is not on this list and about the thoughts and opinions with above said CSS editors please share your comments.

30 Beautiful And Creative Logo Designs For Your Inspiration

cosmos — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:44:49 +0000

A logo is a graphic element along with a logotype makes a brand. When we talk about a brand the first think that comes to our mind is the logo of that business. A logo is the most important component of brand and also the hardest part to execute. A logo is a reflection of a business’s credibility. A logo is vital for creating a great brand identity and you should be careful when picking one for your business.

In today’s blog post I’m presenting some 30 Exceptional new logo designs for inspiration.

Why are these logos looks amazing? All of these logos use different creative ways to represent their brand through colors, shapes and typography. If you look at these logo design careful you will notice how creativity they are representing their business.