Design

8.       www.ColorBlender.com – Give this website a color, and it will give you 6 colors that compliment it. This is a great place to go when you need to design something and have no clue where to start, or even what colors to use.

9.       www.stripegenerator.com (Slide 2)– This does exactly what you think it does, generate stripes. If you want to create a striped background for a design or web project, this website gives you some really great looking stripes in seconds, and it is super easy to use.

10.   Adobe Creative Cloud (Slide 3)– Photoshop is a phenomenal program with infinite possibilities. It’s what I use to design every brochure and website I build, and I’d recommend any ministry that wants to be taken seriously to start using this program too. 5 years ago, if you wanted to use Photoshop, you’d have to pay $500 to $800 for the privilege. Now, you can purchase a monthly subscription to use the latest version of Photoshop for $10.00 a month! If you are interested in Adobe’s other applications, like Premiere and After Effects, these can also be found in the Creative Cloud for much cheaper than it would cost to buy it. You can check out their plans here: https://creative.adobe.com/plans

11.   GIMP (Slide 4)– If you want to go even cheaper with your graphic design application, you can use a free program called GIMP (download it here: http://www.gimp.org/). GIMP acts very much like Photoshop, but it is open source and freely available. To be honest, I find that GIMP feels a little clunky after having used Photoshop for the last 10 years, but it can definitely get the job done if you are in a crunch. GIMP can even open Photoshop files, which is really handy.

12.   https://creativemarket.com/free-goods (Slide 5)- Creative Market is a really top notch online store for designers. What’s even better is that they give away excellent free stuff all the time. And if you like their Facebook page, you can double what you get from them free, every single week. I’ve found tons of great backgrounds, Photoshop actions, brushes, fonts and more here.

13.   www.brusheezy.com – Photoshop Brushes act like stamps that you can use in your design. Some brushes are more abstract and recreate the look of watercolor, chalk, sponges and other real world artistic tools. Many other brushes imitate the shapes of objects like animals, plants, buildings, people and more. They provide a super easy way to make your design look more professional, and Brusheezy.com has a ton of awesome free Photoshop brushes.

14.   www.iconarchive.com (Slide 6)– Ever wanted an icon or logo for a project? I use this site all the time because it offers thousands of excellent icons for just about anything you can think of. Whether you need a sharp looking Facebook icon or an icon for your church ministry, this is a great place to start looking.

15.   www.thebestdesigns.com (Slide 7)– I’m not that creative. Most of my best designs are just stolen inspired from work that I see elsewhere. TheBestDesigns.com is an excellent site to go and grab inspiration for your next design project. This website features websites, but even if you are designing a flyer or sign, it still can give you great direction for color combinations, font ideas, and more.

16.   www.designinspiration.net – This is another great place to get some ideas about your next design. You now have no excuse for producing something boring. Warning, this site is super addictive… it’s hard to get away once you start scrolling through design ideas.

17.   www.google.com/fonts - Speaking of fonts, Google’s font library is completely free and completely legal to use in any way, shape or form that you choose. There are tons of really excellent fonts to choose from. You can even use their fonts on your website.

18.   www.cgtextures.com – This website is all about backgrounds. You can find just about any background texture you can imagine, from rusty metal to green grass to faded wood planks. All you need is a free user account to get started.

19.   www.wordle.net (Demonstration)– Give this website a chunk of text, and it will give you a clever design using that text. The bigger the word, the more common the word in your chunk of text. At the very least, this site is a ton of fun, but you could definitely use this site to produce t-shirt designs, poster designs, and more.

20.   www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials - This website is packed full of excellent Photoshop tutorials. If want to learn how to use that new cheap Photoshop, this is a great place to start.