I have put together 20 beautiful, unique iPhone wallpapers for you to download for free.

These were created using resources and tutorials from MediaMilitia.com – They have amazing Freebies and great tutorials you just HAVE to check out.

These wallpapers all measure 320px wide by 480px tall

Download 20 free iphone wallpapers (40) (1 MB Zip)

You won’t want to miss out on Media Militia’s “Getting Started With Generative Art”

I’ve been playing around, taking pictures of objects and I like the look of this Logitech Wireless mouse.

I decided to give away the full-resolution image as a Stock Photo for you to use.

The photo is 2329 x 1814 at 180 dpi (roughly 13 in wide x 10 in tall)

Download: Logitech_Stock_Photo (85) (985 KB ZIP)

I was surprised recently when I couldn’t find any hi-res leather textures for a project that I was working on. As a result, I got my hands on some actual leather hides and started photographing them. I wanted to share these with others who may also need leather textures for one reason or another. I have 12 leather textures available in high-res JPG format available in a ZIP file, after the jump.

Please enjoy!

Download:

• Leather Texture 01 (156)
• Leather Texture 02 (146)
• Leather Texture 03 (105)
• Leather Texture 04 (102)
• Leather Texture 05 (96)
• Leather Texture 06 (112)
• Leather Texture 07 (88)
• Leather Texture 08 (100)
• Leather Texture 09 (103)
• Leather Texture 10 (118)
• Leather Texture 11 (106)
• Leather Texture 12 (113)

Here are 2 simple ways you can dramatically reduce filesize of your Illustrator production files:

Step one:

Before exporting your Illustrator file to another more universal format (such as EPS), or even if you are sharing the .ai file you can remove unused swatches, brushes etc from your document; these unused components add to the size of your document!

This step is super-easy too – open your Action pallet by clicking on Window -> Actions:

Now, in the actions panel, scroll down until you see an action for “Delete Unused Panel Items.” If you expand this option you can see it actually removes quite a lot!

Press the Play button and Illustrator will go through each step and remove (like it says) all the unused components in the list!

Step two:

When exporting your Illustrator file to EPS format for sharing purposes, there is one little option which makes all the difference in file size – turning this off can reduce the size of your exported file 50% or more!

So, the typical export: File -> Save As, choose EPS and then Illustrator is going to ask you some questions in the “EPS Options” dialog box; this is where you want to make your change. Under Preview Format, the default is “TIFF 8-bit Color” Click the dropdown and choose None instead – boom, you just drastically reduced your EPS’ file size!

I wanted to write out a quick tutorial on how to create dynamic pattern text using Illustrator CS3.

This will really just cover how to add a pattern to the text, without much fuss or sweat; I did notice that the pattern I chose turned out to not work great in this instance, so be careful on the pattern you choose beforehand to make sure it will tile well (within text).

Okay, let’s get started: First off head over to a really kool site Patternwall.com to find a good tilable pattern.

Patternwall has a really neat system for picking a pattern, simply click on a swatch to see it tiled:

and click the download text to download the pattern you want; I chose to open this JPG file with Illustrator since that’s where we’re going to using it.

So this is your swatch opened in Illustrator – some swatches from Patternwall.com are bigger than others.

So at this point we want to convert this rasterized, 72 dpi image into a vector image with points/paths etc. We are going to use the Live Trace function to achieve this, but before you go hitting the “Live Trace” button on your toolbar there, we need to approach it from a better angle:
With the pattern image selected, click on Object -> Live Trace -> Tracing Options:

And you get a dialog box that pops up like so:

Choose “color” as the mode, and the default of 6 colors is fine; if you check the “preview” box you will see the output results on your screen – this is very handy when playing with something and not knowing the best results beforehand.

When you see the results you like, hit the “Trace” button in the box; the dialog box will disappear and you will be back on the main stage of Illy. Close to the upper-right of the toolbar has a button labeled “expand”. while the traced object is still selected, click on Expand.

Now open your Swatches palette by clicking on Window -> Swatches if it’s not already open.

Drag the expanded object from the stage into the Swatches pallet. This makes a swatch from the selected artwork.

Now start with a blank document – we’re going to type out some text.

Once you have your text, keep it selected and make sure the “fill” not the stroke is selected on the main toolbar. Then click on the pattern we created in the Swatches pallet.

The pattern is applied to the Fill of the text, but the first result isn’t ideal. We are going to transform the pattern inside the text to find a better fit.

Open the Transform dialog box by clicking on Window -> Transform.

For this step we want to make sure we transform only the pattern and not the object. In the upper-right corner of the Transform box there is an icon that looks like 3 lines and a downward-pointing triangle. Click this and choose from the dropdown menu “Transform Pattern Only”

You can play with the numbers until you get a result you like.

Adding a stroke to the outside of the text will help it stand out from any background you may be using.

I wasn’t too thrilled with the pattern at the very end so decided to try another pattern from Patternwall; here is the final result:

There is a lot you can do with this feature, and the text is completely editable so can be changed to read whatever you like. I hope you found this useful.

Media Militia (www.mediamilitia.com) is a great place for tutorials and freebies; and they have really outdone themselves this time with a 75-pack of free smoke textures! Simply amazing is how I describe it!

Check it out here: http://mediamilitia.com/smoke-pack-75-free-images/

I have a set of 8 free rock textures for you to download and use. These were a lot of fun to shoot; they are all shot by Canon Digital Rebel in Manual with Camera RAW output. The final images have been output to high quality JPG files compressed for easy download.

Download all 8 textures after the jump. Enjoy!

Download Orkron Rock Texture Set (50)

It was a gorgeous morning near the base of Mt. Pisgah in Oregon (near where I live), and I just had to photograph it! Something about this image just makes me want to lean my back against one of those trees and take a nice warm afternoon nap!

Anyways, I wanted to share the stock photo with you (free of course). The zip file contains the high-res JPG of the image – 3072 x 2048 pixels.

Download Mt. Pisgah Road Stock Photo (95)