I’ve been working on an icon set off and on for a number of months—basically whenver I can find a few spare minutes here and there. I’ve finally completed the entire set, including 40 total icons, designed in a minimal, pictogram style. You may recognize some of these icons too! The set actually started as the collection that I specifically designed for the current version of this blog, and I’ve just been adding some extra icons as time went on.

The first ten are basically just simplified icons for some of the more popular social media and social voting sites, mostly design related. Again, you can see these icons in action by scrolling down to the bottom of this post.

For the rest of the icons, I actually reviewed a number of different websites and tried to compile a list of what would be some of the most useful types of icons, and used my findings to guide the design of the rest of the set. Here is a preview of all 40 icons.

Here's a preview of all 40 icons included in the set

The icons themselves are all vector-based, and designed in Illustrator CS4. They scale up and down well, and remain fully editable, in case you need to make slight (or even significant) changes. Also, they are designed as fully “cut out”, meaning that the various negative areas within the icons are actually transparent and not white. This should work fine in the majority of cases, but if you do need these areas to be filled with white, just drop a white shape behind the icons!

To download this set, just click on the image below!

Echo Minimal Icon Set (Downloaded 5180 times)

The set is completely free, and you can use it in both personal and commercial works. There are just a few simple restrictions, which are outlined in the release file included in the download, so please review that document before using the icons. Also, If you do any of them design, please consider shooting me an email. I always love to see my freebies hard at work, and I would really like to see what you’ve come up with.

Let me know your thoughts on this one! Do you like the icons? Would you like to see more icon freebies on here?

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So I’m back with yet another texture pack for you guys! Way back in July 0f 2009, only about a month after the Echo Enduring Blog actually launched, I released a Texture Pack 2, which contained five wood textures for you to download and use in your designs. Since then, I’ve been meaning to do a follow up with even more wood textures. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally done it, and brought you five more wood textures!

The previous pack consisted mostly of different wooden surfaces that I had come across when I was out on walks with my wife and daughter. As such, there was a certain weathered quality to the textures. This time, however, I focused my camera lens more on the polished, interior woods of floors and furniture. This gives the textures a much different feel.

Here are a couple samples:

a light coloured wood

medium coloured wood texture

There are another three awesome textures in the pack too, and all of them are saved as high resolution JPEGs with no compression, to help maximize overall quality. A couple of them are a bit more blurry than I would have liked, but they should still be useful at smaller resolutions. So go ahead and download the pack by clicking on the preview below. I’ll bet you can find some awesome uses for these textures!

Texture Pack 7 - More Wood (Downloaded 7751 times)

If you do decide to download and use these textures in some way, I’d love it if you shot me an email or quick tweet to let me know or to show me a sample of your work. I love seeing my freebies in action!

Anyhow, I have plans for a couple more freebies over the course of the year, so do keep an eye out! And feel free to leave your thoughts or comments below!

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If you’ve been around the Echo Enduring Blog for a while, chances are that you will probably know that the site is built on and driven by WordPress. I love WordPress, with all its open source goodness and remarkable extensibility, through the immense library of themes and plugins that exist out there on the web.

However, when it comes to deploying websites, WordPress is not the only tool I use.

I am also very fond of the much lesser known CMS called Concrete5. WordPress is great for blogs, for websites that feature a blog, or even just for sites that are built on an articles/publication type architecture. However, while it is certainly possible to create a more static “brochure” type site with WordPress, I have typically found the content management solutions provided by Concrete5 to be a better fit in this area.

In fact, my portfolio is built on Concrete5, as is the website for my recently launched Survd app. It’s a powerful system that often gets overshadowed by some of the bigger players, but which has a dedicated and loyal user-base that is determined to see its market share grow. I certainly hope it will, because I think it’s a great system!

Anyhow, all of that is presented not only as an introduction to the CMS itself, but also as a precursor to the newest giveaway here on the Echo Enduring Blog. Our friends over at the html2c5 Network also love Concrete5 and have put together a bundle of addons to help build upon the already extensive core functionality. Selling for only $50, this bundle contains $590 worth of goodies including themes, functional addons and other extras.

Two of my favorites include:

• Clearview Theme – this is a beautiful and elegant little theme with some pretty slick menu animation. Make it your own  by changing the background image!
• Defunct Testimonials – need to manage testimonials on your website? This package makes it super easy. Planning on incorporating this one into a website already!

There’s all kinds of other stuff too, like chat functionality, a story boarding app and even a tool for adding rounded corners to anything (if you’re not inclined to style them yourself). Be sure to check out the c5bundle website for a complete listing of everything that is included in the bundle!

Anyhow, it’s a pretty slick bundle of goodness and we’re giving you the chance to win one of three copies! So get to know Concrete5 and get in on the awesomeness!

Here’s how to enter:

1. Follow me on Twitter. Trust me, I won’t clog your feed and I always try to tweet interesting articles and resources!
2. Follow c5bundle on Twitter.
3. Mosey on back here and comment. Include your Twitter handle (eg. @echoenduring), your email address (so I can contact you if you win) and a note about why you want to win this sweet prize!
4. Spread the word! Tell everyone you know! Tweet this post, stumble it, blog it or post it to your favorite social network of choice! I’d really appreciate it! (optional)

A few basic contest rules:

1. Only enter once.
2. Contest closes after midnight (Standard Eastern Time) on Jan 12 2011.
3. I will be tabulating entries, and selecting and contacting the winner within several days of the contest closing.
4. We will then make arrangements for you to claim your prize!

So there you go. That should be all the details you need. So go on, enter this contest! Oh, and don’t forget to head over to take a closer look at the c5bundle to look at everything that is available for yourself.

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I hope everyone had a really awesome Christmas. I had a great day, with the exception of the fact that my little girl wasn’t feeling just the best. My wife bought be a book full of website inspiration, which was pretty darned cool, and when we checked the mail today, my copy of 8 Faces had arrived, which was just awesome. I now have some awesome design-related reading material to peruse.

On the blog front, I’ve released snow textures, my WhatsThis jQuery plugin and a pack of candy cane seamless vector patterns over the past few days! I hope you’ve taken the opportunity to download the resources. I am also continuing the string of freebies again today with yet another set of textures.

If you liked the snow textures, I think you are going to like these too. In fact, I think this is probably the best set of textures that I have ever released, with the possible exception of the watercolour set from about a year ago. For this set, I specifically stained and distressed different types of paper and took some grungy photographs. I then took these and processed them with blending modes and filters in Photoshop to create some really cool looking textures!

Here are two of my favorites:

A nicy, grungy texture with a assortment of levels of luminoisity

I really like the colour, balance and such of this one

There are another three awesome textures in the pack too, and all of them are saved as high resolution JPEGs with no compression, to help maximize overall quality. So go ahead and download the back by clicking on the preview below. I’ll bet you can find some awesome uses for these textures!

Texture Pack 6 - Grunge (Downloaded 4588 times)

If you do decide to download and use these textures in some way, I’d love it if you shot me an email or quick tweet to let me know or to show me a sample of your work. I love seeing my freebies in action!

Regardless, I hope you enjoy the pack. It was a whole lot of fun creating and experimenting with these as I put them together, and I’ll probably be making some more in the future. Do let me know if there’s anything specific that you think I should try and tackle or offer up. It would be fun to work on something like that!

Anyhow, I have plans for a couple more freebies for you before the end of the year, so do keep an eye out! And feel free to leave your thoughts or comments below!

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Merry Christmas! I’ll be honest, I put this post together yesterday and won’t actually be doing much on the blog on Christmas. I’ll be spending time with my family and friends and just enjoying all the incredible blessings of the season. But I’m still planning on giving away another freebie today, to go along with the snow textures and WhatsThis? plugin from the past couple of days.

Since this is Christmas, I wanted to do something related to the season itself. Not that that really narrowed things down all that much, since there are all kinds of things that are associated with Christmas. Snow, bells, Santa, reindeer, mangers, stars, wise men, holly, mistletoe. The list goes on and on and on.

Finally, I decided I would create some seamless vector patterns based on the iconic candy cane! So here they are. This package contains 6 different variations on the basic striped candy cane pattern, in both AI and PNG formats. I started with the traditional red green and white, then created a few different variations.

Candy Cane Pattern (Downloaded 1189 times)

It’s a pretty simple looking pattern, but I have to say that it took me longer than you’d expect creating these patterns. Getting those stripes to line up was pretty tricky until I found this awesome little article over at BittBox, explaining how to use Illustrator’s blend tool to create a striped pattern. As long as you have proper alignment, the technique works like a charm!

Anyhow, I hope that you enjoy these patterns and can find a use for them, either this holiday, next Christmas or any time in between (changing the colours can make them much more non-candy-cane-ish).

Even more importantly, have a very blessed and merry day, wherever in the world you are!

Let me know your thoughts on this one! Do you like the pattern? Would you like to see more pattern freebies on here?

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Today, we’re continuting with my series of freebies to celebrate the Christmas season. Yesterday, I posted a set of snow textures, which have already been download a bunch of times. Today, we have some jQuery goodness, in the form a small-but-useful plugin.

So recently, I’ve been working on the development of a new application called Survd, which I’ll be posting about in much greater detail at some point next week. A large portion of the development uses the jQuery framework and I wrote a number of custom methods to introduce different bits of functionality that I needed.

One of my favorites is a little method I call WhatsThis?

Basically, the plugin is designed to add a simple information button beside a targeted element. When a user hovers over the button with their mouse, a simple tooltip pops up, providing more information about the element. It’s a great little technique for adding basic, inline help to a site or web application, so go ahead and grab it.

WhatsThis? jQuery Plugin (Downloaded 687 times)

One important thing to note is that this plugin relies on the jQuery Tooltip plugin in order to function. If you are using or want to use a different tooltip plugin, it should be possible to modify the code to make it work.

The download package contains a full version of the .js file, along the jQuery library, the jQuery Tooltip plugin, and a demo page which explains the various options that can be used to configure each initialization of the plugin’s functionality. If you want to check out the demo page without actually downloading the entire package, I’ve also uploaded it here.

View the demo

So far, I’ve tested the plugin in recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer 8. It uses basic jQuery methods, so any browser that supports jQuery should be able to handle this one.

As with the Contained Sticky Scroll jQuery Plugin, if you have any questions or issues with the plugin, feel free to leave a comment. That being said, if the plugin becomes successful in the future, I may carve open a separate forum or something to deal with support requests.

Anyhow, go ahead and download the plugin. Have fun with it. If you do end up using it, I’d love to see it in action or hear your thoughts on it.

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In the Spirit of the holidays and Christmas season—one of my very favorite times of the year, I’m going to be giving away a few different design freebies over the next few days. I have some textures, icons, patterns and even a bit of jQuery goodness that I’ve whipped up (some cool stuff). All told, it should make for a pretty wicked collection of resources.

To kick it all of, I journeyed out into the blustry cold of winter in Ontario and put together Texture Pack 5, containing 7 high quality photographic textures of the snow around my house. It may not seem like much, but in the past I’ve had a few occassions where I needed a snow texture – usually in the summer or fall when the stuff isn’t readily available in mounds and drifts everywhere you turn!

Well, now you don’t need to go hunting. They’re right here, so let it snow in your designs!

Texture Pack 5 - Let It Snow (Downloaded 5095 times)

In terms of the textures themselves, I tried to include a bit of variety. There are a couple top view shots of plain, flat snow, along with a number of angled shots where you can see more mounds and undulations, and even a few little imperfections. All in all, I think that the variations make for a pretty useful and versatile pack.

Or, at least as versatile as snow textures can be!

Anyhow, I hope you find some awesome uses for these textures. I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out. If you use them, please do let me know. I always love to see my work in action.

Also, don’t forget to stay tuned for more free stuff over the next few days. It’s going to be good.

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It’s been a while since we’ve had a giveaway here on the Echo Enduring Blog, but a little while ago I was contacted by the good folks at Marketcircle, the creators of the popular Billings app, a nice little piece of Mac-based software for time tracking and billing purposes. They offered to provide free licenses to 3 lucky readers!

We’ll get to the details below. For the past year, though, I’ve been using Billings 3 exclusively for all my billing and time tracking needs, and I’ve been extremely happy with it. It’s nicely designed and easy to use. Here are some of my favorite features:

Integration with OS X Contacts - Instead of just creating new clients from scratch, I can actually create them right out of my native Address Book, which makes for great integration with the rest of my apps. When I get a new request for some design work through email, I can just use Mac Mail to create a new contact, add any extra information in Address Book then bring the client in to Billings and create new estimate. Easy as pie.

Time Tracking – Billings make time tracking easy. As long as I have it open I can start, stop and even switch between timers right from my application bar. I can even start a new timer and then link it to the appropriate project later on. If you’re like me, though, you may not always remember to start the timer. No problem. Billings lets you go back and manually create your time slips too!

Billings allows you to create invoices from beautifully designed templates, or create your own designs

Professional Templates – Billings comes packed with all kinds of awesome, professionally designed templates for creating your estimates and invoices. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, there is even an entire branch of the app that allows you to create your own designs. Personally, I just use a heavily modified version of one of the basic templates, though I may be creating a new custom template soon.

Extensive Reports – Periodically, I like to check out how I’m doing. Billings can help with this too, offering all kinds of built in reports about clients, billings, payment, taxes and so forth. This makes it super easy to do quick check and see where I stand in relation to my goals at any given moment.

Extensive reporting makes tracking your success easy

Billings for iPhone – You can also get Billings Touch for your iPhone, which can be synced together with Billings on your Mac. I’ve just recently acquired this app, and it’s an awesome way to stay on top of invoicing and payments while on the go!

Billings offers a ton more features too. There is the ability to link files and URLs to projects and create notes, all things that I would like to start doing a bit more myself. I highly recommend Billings to any freelancer, and with the recent release of Billings Pro, I would probably even recommend that larger organizations and agencies at least give it a look!

All that being said, then, I was super excited when I was offered three licenses to give away to you guys, so let’s get on to the details!

Here’s how to enter:

1. Follow me on Twitter. Trust me, I won’t clog your feed and I always try to tweet interesting articles and resources!
2. Follow Marketcircle on Twitter.
3. Mosey on back here and comment. Include your Twitter handle (eg. @echoenduring), your email address (so I can contact you if you win) and a note about why you want to win this sweet prize!
4. Spread the word! Tell everyone you know! Tweet this post, stumble it, blog it or post it to your favorite social network of choice! I’d really appreciate it! (optional)

A few basic contest rules:

1. Only enter once.
2. Contest closes after midnight (Standard Eastern Time) on Dec 1 2010.
3. I will be tabulating entries, and selecting and contacting the winner within several days of the contest closing.
4. We will then make arrangements for you to claim your prize!

So there you go. That should be all the details you need. So go on, enter this contest! Oh, and don’t forget to head over to Marketcircle and take a closer look at Billings, Billings Pro, Billings Touch and Daylite.

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If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed something a wee bit different in terms of how the advertising is working here. After talking to the guys at AdPacks.com, who take care of all my advertising sales, I elected to try to improve advertising performance a bit by having the ad box “stick” to the top of the screen as you scroll down. It helps keep the ad in the window and increase overall visibility.

Now I know that not everyone will be a fan of that kind of thing, so I’ve tried to strike a bit of a compromise. You may also notice a simple circumflex (^) to the right of the ad space. If, at any time, you want to un-stick the ad box, just click that and the whole thing will go floating back up to its default position.

I like this solution because it helps me bring greater benefit to the awesome advertisers who help support this site, but also offers choice to the user.

So what does all this have to do with a freebie? Well, after searching the web for a while, I couldn’t really find a jQuery plugin that would really do what I wanted. You see, I wanted to make the ad box sticky, but I also only wanted it to scroll within the limits of its parent element. The sidebar is specifically designed to exist in the main content area, and I certainly didn’t want it floating down over the comment and footer sections. I’ve seen this done before, so I’m sure there’s something out there, but I couldn’t find it.

So I wrote my own, which is now finished and working (or should be working). I’ve decided to release it as a freebie here too.

Freebie: Contained Sticky Scroll jQuery Plugin (Downloaded 5582 times)

The download package contains both full and minified versions of the .js file, along with a demo page which explains the various options that can be used to configure each initialization of the plugin’s functionality. If you want to check out the demo page without actually downloading the entire package, I’ve also uploaded it here.

View the demo

So far, I’ve tested the plugin in recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer 8. It uses basic jQuery methods, so any browser that supports jQuery should be able to handle this one.

This is my first jQuery plugin, and I’m not really sure what to expect in terms of reception. For now, if you have any questions or issues with the plugin, feel free to leave a comment. That being said, if the plugin becomes successful in the future, I may carve open a separate forum or something to deal with support requests.

Anyhow, go ahead and download the plugin. Have fun with it. If you do end up using it, I’d love to see it in action or hear your thoughts on it.

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It has been far, far too long since I actually released a freebie here on the Echo Enduring Blog. So, today I’m going to rectify that situation, by bringing you my third set of free vector patterns – Tribal Fire – to go along with Imperial Leaf and Abstract Blobs.

This pattern emerged out of a session of experimentation. It had been a while since I created this kind of intricate vector pattern, and I wanted to keep my skill sharpened in that area. So, I just sat down with Illustrator and my Wacom tablet and started to play around with different curves and shapes. The results of this experimentation are the Tribal Fire pattern!

Tribal Fire Pattern (Downloaded 1034 times)

Anyhow, you can download these patterns by clicking on the preview image above. The download will include the original black pattern along with three colourd variants – “Sunset Flame”, “Undergrowth” and “Morning Frost”. There are also PNG versions of these. Feel free to come up with your own custom colour combos though.

If you do use it in a design, please consider shooting me an email. I always love to see my freebies hard at work, and I would really like to see what you’ve come up with.

Let me know your thoughts on this one! Do you like the pattern? Would you like to see more pattern freebies on here?

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Current Freebie Code - 7ev165dd