Finding the perfect font for a project can be a real challenge, so there’s nothing better than having a huge amount of fonts readily available in your own library to count on. And it’s always good to have websites to count on when you need to look for fonts. That’s why today we gathered 9 new free fonts for your designs.

Working as a freelance web designer you’ll find yourself naturally jumping from project-to-project. This quick pace comes with the lifestyle and requires some serious dedication. You cannot get lost in the royalties of extra touch-ups and recoloring textures.

Sliders are an excellent way to organize and highlight important content on a site. They can also be used to display a good amount of content within a limited amount of screen real estate. The most popular way to add a slider or slideshow to a website is still jQuery, which seems to have a new plugin released every day. In order to give you some inspiration, we’ve gathered 21 very good examples of how sliders are being used today.

Package design can be a good alternative place for finding inspiration. From textures to color schemes and typography, we can get a lot of references from packaging designs. A good place to browse – other than your local shops and/or supermarket – if you are also a package lover is lovelypackage.com, a nice website that curates the best of the package world. Today we gathered a few examples of inspiring packaging design from their website to showcase here. Check out each one of them and click on the images to find out more about each design and their designers.

The design industry is probably one of the fastest changing and growing. Designers have to keep their eyes on everything, including new trends in visual design, as well as interaction technologies like jQuery, HTML5, and CSS3. Designers are using these technologies to express more creativity in design production and make user experience richer.

Maybe this scenario sounds familiar to you: A few years ago I found myself working an office job that was ok. It paid ok, I liked the work ok, I liked the people I worked with ok, and I was pretty ok at what I did. Like I said, it was ok. But I didn’t love it. I didn’t wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose that drove me to excel at my job. It wasn’t what I really wanted to do, but for the longest time I put up with it because I’d done the math. What I really wanted to do was go into digital publishing, which in my mind required a new computer that would cost at least $3,000, software that my current laptop couldn’t handle, at least one or two creative/business partners, and a camera/other gear I couldn’t afford.

Every web designer loves to have high-quality icons at their disposal. While creating your own custom icons for your projects is an option, it’s rarely practical. There are plenty of quality icon sets available for purchase, but fortunately, there are also some free icon sets out there with professional quality. These free icons sets are some of the most useful and helpful resources because of the time they can save and because of the impact they can have on the sites that you are desigining.

One way to easily define the tone and mood of a website is to use a big background image. However, when doing this, you need to consider that big images often have a lot going on, so it’s important to take a minmal approach with other aspects of the design. Not doing so could result in a website that is far too busy, cluttered, and difficult to navigate. So for your inspiration, here are 20 examples of how to effectively use big background images in web design.

No matter what sort of art you create – whether you are a graphic designer, painter, illustrator, digital artist, videographer, or any other type of artist – being featured on the web’s top art and design blogs can result in a huge surge of active followers, interested fans, and of course – paying customers. For artists, just like anyone else, a good amount of our time is spent trying to wring a living out of our craft and free publicity never hurt anyone in that respect. In fact, I know for certain that there have been some artists who were featured on sites I’ve written for that successfully launched (or in some cases relaunched) businesses that where all of a sudden profitable because they received so much attention they were able to convert some of those new eyeballs into customers.

When it comes to design, things don’t have to be complicated in order to be effective. Although, it can be tempting to over design and try to work in lots of detail, it’s not always the best way. This is especially true when it comes to logo design. Usually, the best are the ones that do more with less. Here is a collection of very inspiring logos that take this approach, and rely on cleverness rather than eye candy.