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 5161 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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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 1188 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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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 1032 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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It’s the first Friday of the month again, which means it’s also time for another installment for First Friday Giveaways. First, though, it’s also time to announce the winner of last month’s (non-First-Friday) giveaway of 500 free business cards from U-Printing. The winner is:

Karissa Wingate (@karissawingate)

Congratulations Karissa! I hope you can put the cards to really good use.

Okay, so this month we have an incredible prize up for grabs, as the good folks over at TrendyPacks.com have made a single license of their incredible Infinity Design Pack, which literally contains thousands of vectors and other design elements. This will make an incredible addition any designer’s arsenal of resources.

Trendy Packs Giveaway

I’ve had the chance to check out and work with the elements in this pack, and I have to say that they totally rock. The vectors are all of incredibly high quality, and there’s all sorts of different things to choose from. The pack contains all of your staples, such as grunge elements, floral, a few wings and, of course, skulls for rocking off trendy t-shirts. It also contains some awesome character illustrations, some great animals, and a whole miscellany of cool elements.

Here are some of my personal favorites

Awesome Animals

Marvelous Mushrooms

Cartoony Characters

Heroic Heraldry

Most of these vectors are also available as Photoshop brushes too, which makes the entire pack almost twice as valuable.

And, as if all those vectors and brushes weren’t enough, the Infinity Design Pack also comes complete with 13 complete and beautiful website Photoshop templates. These can be incredibly valuable resources for designers, providing layout ideas or a starting point that you can completely customize to your own needs and tastes. I’ve had a look at these templates too, and I have to say, I’m pretty impressed. They are lovely, and more importantly, very well organized!

That’s a ton of great resources, and this amazing pack be yours for free if you’re the winner of this giveaway!

So 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. 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!
3. 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 June 28.
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 TrendyPacks.com and take a closer look at their full range of awesome design resources!

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So here we are with the second installment of my First Friday Giveaway series. Last month’s giveaway went pretty well, and I’m excited to be back with another great prize for all my readers. As many of you probably already know, I do some work creating design resources for MediaLoot, a new resource base for designers that totally rocks.

MediaLoot - Premium Graphic Design Resources

Well, this month’s giveaway brings my work for MediaLoot and you, my readers, together. I have three design “grab bags” that I will be giving away to three lucky winners. These packages include 10 vector characters (5 male and 5 female), 10 book cool cover textures, 10 hand painted watercolour textures and a collection of watercolour brushes for Photoshop. All of these resources have been designed by yours truly and are currently part of the general MediaLoot library.

Here are some previews:

Cartoony Vector Characters - Guy

Cartoony Vector Characters - Girl

Great Hand-Painted Watercolor Textures

Book Cover Textures

Hand-Made Watercolor PS Brushes

All of the resources are of the highest possible quality, and I’m sure that you will be able to find some sort of use for them in your various design work!

So 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 MediaLoot 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 one of these sweet prizes!
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! We’d really appreciate it! (optional)

A few basic contest rules:

1. Only enter once.
2. Contest closes after midnight (Standard Eastern Time) on April 16.
3. I will be tabulating entries, and selecting and contacting the winners 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 MediaLoot and take a closer look at the full range of design resources that they to offer! You can expect some more resources from me soon!

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Today I am bringing you another awesome freebie. I haven’t given away a vector freebie in a while, so I figure it’s about time to release another one for you all. Wouldn’t you agree?

The vector that I am releasing today is actually something that I designed for a tutorial that I recently had published over on SpyreStudios. It is a glossy heraldry vector with a Valentine’s Day theme. Yes, I know I’m a few days late, but I prefer to think of it as being a few months early. Besides, the tutorial itself was actually released on Valentine’s Day, and I wanted it to hit the “airwaves” before I released this freebie!

Anyhow, you can just click on the preview below to download the vector.

Heart of the Unicorn (Downloaded 844 times)

Obviously, this vector was inspired by my love of heraldry design, but with a bit of a twist. Instead of using the classical shield as the center point of the image, I elected to go with a heart instead. Then, because the heart kind of lead into a romantic theme, I decided to add in a couple of unicorns too, since the unicorn is often associated with young maids and such.

You are free to use this vector in your own designs – commercial or otherwise. All I ever ask is for you to send me a quick note letting me know how and where you used it. A sample of your design or a link back here would be greatly appreciated, too!

Oh, and both the wings and the unicorns were also hand drawn and then vectorized in Illustrator, so this is definitely a hand crafted vector. Also, all of the elements – heart, wings, unicorns, banner and star-burst or broken out onto separate layers. Feel free to extract any of them and is it on its own.

If you enjoy this vector, please let me know by dropping a comment or promoting this post on your favorite social media site! Keep an eye out for more awesome freebies coming your way in the future!

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Crawling Vines is a premium seamless vector patterns that I originally designed when writing an in depth tutorial about how to create a detailed, hand-drawn vector pattern. The pattern contains a high degree of intricate detail and tiles beautifully.

Of course, because the pattern is based on an original, hand drawn design element, it is unlikely that anyone would be able to replicate the exact pattern. So, with that in mind and the hopes that some people will actually want to get their hands on these, I’ve decided to release a complete vector pack, featuring the Crawling Vines pattern in nine different monochromatic colours, all of which you can see in the preview below.

Exclusive Preview: Crawling Vines

The package includes the patterns in both JPG and PNG format, as well as native AI (CS4) formats, which will allow you to edit the patterns as you see fit. Each AI pattern also contains five different groupings, making it easy to create custom colour schemes!

Here are some larger previews of some of the patterns:

Crawling Vines - Scarlet Cherry

Crawling Vines - Angelic Cloud

Crawling Vines - Summer Evening

Crawling Vines - Shifting Sands

I hope you dig these patterns! The original took me quite some time to create! Anyhow, unlike some of my completely open freebies, which anyone can download, and which are posted on a number of different freebie sites, such as Vecteezy, I am releasing the Crawling Vines pack exclusively to my subscribers, as a way of saying thanks for being so awesome!

Grabbing the pack is easy. Just check your feed reader for my most recent post, and look for freebie code at the bottom of the entry. Then, click the download link below, which will take you to the Crawling Vines download page. Enter the freebie code for immediate access to the pattern pack.

If you’re not currently subscribing to my blog, it’s not too late! Just add my feed to your RSS reader of choice! Not only will you get access to this awesome pattern pack, you’ll also get all sorts of other awesome content delivered right to your reader!

» Grab the RSS Feed

» Download the Crawling Vines Pack

If you enjoy these patterns, please let me know by dropping a comment or promoting this post on your favorite social media site! And thanks for subscribing to my feed! Keep an eye out for more exclusive freebies coming your way in the future!

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Alright guys, here it is, the freebie that I’ve alluded to several times over the past few weeks. I’ve partnered with Jon from Spyre Studios to produce this freebie, available exclusively from Jon’s website.

When we first started discussing the possibility of this partnership, Jon and I threw around a few different possibilities, and I suggested that it might be cool to create some Twitter graphics, but with a bit of a twist. Thus was Tweevil born (and affectionately named by Jon!).

So here he is, just in time for Halloween. He’s big. He’s black. He’s mean. He’s Tweevil, and he’s not your average Twitter bird!

Tweevil - The Dark Twitter Bird

The freebie pack contains four different graphics, all included in the preview above. Each graphic is highly detailed and meticulously hand drawn by me in Illustrator.  I used all kinds of photo references to help with this one, and I have to say that I’m thrilled with the results!

I hope you are too!

So, if you want to download Tweevil, just head on over to Spyre Studios, where he’s waiting for you. Each graphic comes in AI, EPS, PDF and PNG formats, and can be used for both personal and commercial projects. Please, just remember to read the license for the few restrictions.

Also, this is a Spyre Studios exclusive freebie, so you are not allowed to post this on yours or any other site. We’d love for you to share it, but please do so by linking to the Tweevil post over at Spyre Studios.

What do you think of Tweevil? We hope you love him as much as we do! Oh and if you do use him in any of your designs, please let us know. Both Jon and I would love to see Tweevil lurking ominously on your pages! Thanks!

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Hey all. Over the past few days, I have been in contact with Stefan over at ArtBox7 and together we have come up with a really awesome giveaway, exclusively for readers of the Echo Enduring Blog! You’re definitely going to want to get in on this one!

So what’s up for grabs? Well Stefan has very generously donated 5 prizes for 5 lucky winners, each of whom will receive 1 vector pack, 1 icon pack and 1 brush pack from ArtBox7′s extensive collection. I’ve had the privilege of looking at some of their work, and it really is high quality stuff!

Incredible Giveaway from ArtBox7 and Echo Enduring Media

It gets better, too. We’re not just giving away some predetermined packs here. We’re giving away choice! That’s right – each of our 5 winners will be able to select 1 vector pack, 1 icon pack and 1 brush pack from ArtBox7′s vast collection. So, not only can you win yourself some really sweet resources, you’ll also get the chance to pick the packs that will be the most useful for you!

Talk about an incredible deal!

So here’s how to enter:

1. Follow me on Twitter. Trust me, I won’t clog your feed, since I only ever tweet a few times a day!
2. Follow ArtBox7 on Twitter. Again, expect nothing but awesomeness from them.
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 one of these sweet prizes! It would also be great if you told everyone which packs you choose if you win!
4. Spread the word! Tell everyone you know! Tweet this post, digg it, blog it or post it to your favorite social network of choice! We’d really appreciate it! (optional)

A few basic contest rules:

1. Only enter once.
2. Contest closes after midnight (Standard Eastern Time) on October 31.
3. I will be tabulating entries, and selecting and contacting the winner(s) in early November.
4. Winners will subsequently be contacted by ArtBox7, and given the choice of 1 Vector Pack, 1 Brush Pack and 1 Icon pack. You will then receive an email containing links through which to download the packs of your choice.

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 ArtBox7.com now and start browsing their packs! If you win you’ll have a hard time choosing from such a great range of awesomeness, so get started now!

By the way, I have contacted the winner of my previous giveaway, and am currently in the process of working out the designs. The official announcement and runners up will be announced soon!

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Hey folks. I’m probably crazy for taking this on, but in the spirit of generosity, and in an open effort to promote this blog and hopefully pull a little more attention my way, I have decided that it is time for the first ever Echo Enduring give away!

So what’s up for grabs, you ask? Simple. It’s nothing less than a brand new vector pack. So new, in fact that it hasn’t even been designed yet, and this is where you come in. The lucky winner gets to tell me exactly what kind of theme they’re looking for and I will design a vector pack specifically with them in mind, and then grant them a free license for the pack!

Comment and Follow me to win a Custom Vector Pack!

So that’s the basic idea.

But there’s one more thing. Because the way to enter this contest involves Twitter (we’ll get to that), I am also going to go out there and say that for every 7 (that being my favorite number) new followers that I get (@echoenduring), I will also give away another free license for the vector pack. So, if you’re not our main winner, you can still get your hands on some free vectors, based on what the main winner chooses.

I’m currently sitting at 33 followers. Let’s say I hit 68. That would mean I would be giving away an additional 5 lisences to the vector pack. Pretty sweet.

So here’s how to enter:

1. Follow me on Twitter. Trust me, I won’t clog your feed, since I only ever tweet a few times a day!
2. 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!
3. Tell everyone you know! The more people who enter, the more chances you will have at winning! So tweet this, digg it, blog it or post it to your favorite social network of choice!

A few basic contest rules:

1. The final vector pack will be contain either 5 basic black and white vectors or 3 coloured vectors, at the winner’s discretion.
2. Only enter once.
3. Contest closes after midnight (Standard Eastern Time) on September 31.
4. I will be tabulating entries, and selecting and contacting the winner(s) in early October.
5. I will retain all ownership of the resulting vector pack. Winners will be granted a license to use the contents of the pack, just as though they themselves had purchased it. I retain the right to further distribute the vector pack and any of its contents.

So there you go. That should be all the details you need. So go on, enter this contest! Oh, and if you want to see a sampling of some of my vector work, head on over to my freebies page, where I have some awesome vectors that you can download.

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