Noisli soothing noise generator

When you're trying to work without distraction but need a little background noise, or you're struggling to relax and fall asleep, you might like Noisli. It's a website and app that lets you pick different sounds to play, including rain, a fan, white noise, crickets, and more. Play multiple sounds at the same time if you want to get crazy. The coffee shop is the best— freelancers feeling lonely at their desks can just turn on a background hum of people talking and dishes clattering. Instant fake human contact. Try it out.

How to fix for backlit photos

A tip for Photoshop users: here's a nice action for brightening bad pictures, especially backlit photos with a blue or gray tint. It's the Sunshine Photoshop Actions set from Charmbox Studios. It contains six different actions for a variety of lighting effects. I bought it for $4.50 and it's been worth the money in time saved.

Kissed by the Sun is the most useful of this set, I think. Above is my fixed up photo.

Here's what it looked like before I ran the action:


Today I edited a few snapshots for a client. Here's the original image:


And here it is, sunnier:


I made a few minor tweaks after running the action to brighten the floor in the foreground, but the action got me pretty far.

If you're not familiar with an "action" in Photoshop, it's a series of pre-recorded steps. Instead of applying each step manually yourself (brighten, adjust levels, increase saturation, etc.), you simply click the "play" button in the Actions palette and they all happen in order instantly. A huge time-saver, and if the action is designed correctly, each adjustment layer is still editable so you can tweak effects as needed. For how to install a new action, see here. There are lots of freebies floating around the web, too. Anybody have some they swear by?

4/14/14 Update: You guys must have purchased a bunch of products, because I just got a note from Charm Box Studios. They'd like to offer a thank you! To get 30% off anything in the Charm Box Studios store, enter the code: CBS-loves-orange now through 4/30/14. One use per customer, no minimum purchase. Sweet.

Dress up plain furniture with fretwork

In my travels around the internet today, I came across O'verlays fretwork panels. They're made from PVC and are paintable, lightweight panels that add decoration to your furniture. Designs include Greek keys, quatrefoils, figure-eights, and other geometric shapes. They're especially great for adding ornamentation to plain IKEA furniture— you can choose kits specifically for the model you own. For inspiration, visit the Facebook page or the project gallery, and learn about painting options here. An interesting resource for DIY furniture makeovers.

A website that teaches you how to knit

Sheep & Stitch is a freshly-launched website that teaches you how to knit using video tutorials and simple patterns. I don't know how to knit, but if I wanted to learn, I think I'd start here. The site is clean and pretty with lovely, cohesive photography and a simple layout. Follow the knitting map to go from a person who knows nothing (me) to a person who can make a sweater. More patterns, videos, and goodies are coming soon, so sign up for the newsletter if you want to be alerted. I love how-to sites, and this looks like it'll be a good one.

Stocksy: better stock photos?

Designers and bloggers in need of realistic stock images, have you checked out Stocksy yet? I looked it up after seeing an ad in HOW. I use Getty and iStockPhoto (owned by Getty) constantly as sources of images for clients, but finding realistic-looking photos can be a challenge. Plus they're criticized for paying photographers next to nothing. Stocksy apparently pays 50% of the purchase price back to the artist who made the photo— an improvement, offers relatively inexpensive pricing to those of us buying, and the images seem much more authentic. I suppose they'll have their share of women laughing alone with salad, but maybe the women are more likely to look like your neighbor or the owner of the hipster knitting shop down the street instead of a phony model.* The search function isn't as sophisticated as the Getty sites and the image library is smaller, but I'm going to start shopping here.

*Getty's Lean In collection is a huge leap forward in depicting women; check that out, too.

Helpful typography websites

Here are a couple of useful websites for those interested in type. The first is Fonts in Use. It's a gallery of, you guessed it. Search for typefaces used by a particular industry, a particular design format, or look up particular fonts. Let's say you're considering using Cooper Black on the flyer for your new high-end hair salon, and you're wondering if it could ever look anything but dated and kitschy. Check out the designs users have shared and form your own conclusions (The answer is no.)


If you want to impress your friends because you know what the little doohickey is called that hangs off certain lowercase "g's," Aaron Bloom's Typography site will help. Read about type anatomy and classifications, consult the glossary, or take a short quiz to see if you learned anything.

Awesome free PSD mockups and backgrounds

Designers, have you visited Graphic Burger yet? It's a site full of terrific free Photoshop mockups you can insert your own designs into— great for helping clients visualize a final product. Also download free background images, PSD text effects, icons, and more. All art is fair game for both personal and commercial work.

I played with the faux letterpress effect, above.

Download high-res images from the Rijksmuseum

The Dutch national museum Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has digitized 125,000 works from its collection. They're available as high-resolution downloads free for personal use. Another 40,000 images will be added every year until the entire collection of one million pieces is available.

You can create a free Rijks Studio account and categorize all your favorite images in folders, sort of like Pinterest. (Browse other users' collections here.) You could download your favorites and decoupage them onto your calculator or print them on tattoo paper and stick them all over yourself. Another option: recolor them and make stationery like these examples by Flow Studio. Have fun!


(Thanks for the tip, Jet!)

Great upholstery staple remover

I wanted to take the fabric off the Craigslist chairs and see how tough it would be to recover them myself. In the past I've just used a screwdriver, but it can be a pain to work the tip under a staple. Frustration escalates until I want to stab the chair violently with the screwdriver, Psycho style.

My chairs have hundreds of staples hidden under single and double welt cord (which I've learned is usually hot glued on, not stapled, actually.) To avoid deupholstery rage this time, I researched online to see if there's a better tool for digging staples out, and found the DoubleRock staple remover. I bought one. It. Is. Fantastic.


All the staples hidden under here need to come out. Where are they?


The DoubleRock's prongs can wiggle under there and catch the staple, and then you twist the tool to pry it out. The nose of the tool acts like a lever so it's no sweat to raise the staple. Here's a nice YouTube video showing how to use this thing. I bought mine here at Amazon. I highly recommend it if you plan to remove lots of staples from furniture.

Free ornamental font: South Rose

South Rose is a free typeface inspired by the South Rose window at the Notre Dame Cathedral. This ornamental loveliness was designed by Sydney Goldstein, and it's available for non-commercial use from here at Behance. Grab it!

Free fonts and backgrounds for designers

If you're a graphic designer, particularly of the web variety, you'll like Freebiesbug. It's a site with a constantly-updated gallery of free resources to download. Grab fonts, backgrounds and textures, photoshop mockups that show off your branding projects, and all sorts of buttons, icons, and navigation menus to use on websites. As a print designer, my eyes glazed over when I got to "JS effects & plugins" and "HTML UI kits." If it has weird acronyms in it, usually assume it's for building spaceships or robots. I don't know anything about that. But I like fonts. Go help yourself!

Pretty, free stock photos

Rachael Smith of Love from Ginger has made a free photo library of original stock images to download. They're not for commercial use, but you're welcome to print them, post them on your personal blog, or alter them under this Creative Commons License. The spools image would be a pretty desktop wallpaper for people who sew, right? Rachel adds a new photo to the gallery every Friday.

Free vector frames and ornaments

Vectorian is a great resource for graphic designers, featuring beautifully digitized vintage ornaments, illustrations, and frames. Best of all, there are some great free .eps files you can download. If you like art nouveau or calligraphic illustrations, and you've got Adobe Illustrator so you can open and use them, go check 'em out!

Creative Market: resources for designers

Graphic designers, have you come across Creative Market yet? It's an online shop full of useful goodies.

Some examples from the store: textures for adding flavor to your images. Product mockups, like the vector iMac shown above ($2)— useful for showing off websites or desktop wallpapers. Also find fonts for sale, plus a selection of templates for everything from business cards to WordPress blogs. Personally I'm most interested in the Photoshop actions. Get automated processes that turn average photos interesting, like the 42-action set below ($10).

It's a good resource to keep in mind for projects, since there's lots of stuff that will save you time. Buy something for $5 that would take you three hours to make. Or if you've already spent those hours, consider selling your own digital products over there!

New site: The Beauty of Letterpress

Today marks the launch of a new website, The Beauty of Letterpress, from Neenah Paper. If you're a letterpress fan (and who isn't?), you might enjoy this online gallery of modern letterpress prints and resources. The site posts selections from a new curator each month.

Everyone is welcome to submit their own work, and printers can add themselves to the list of letterpress vendors sorted by location.

The website is also trying to raise funds to help preserve the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, WI. If you donate just $5, you'll receive this Beauty of Letterpress print, and Neenah Paper will match your donation. Terrific! See more photos of the letterpress print here in designer Jennifer James's portfolio.

Library of Congress images for download

I'm always on the lookout for photo and illustration sources for work or personal use. When I saw this wall art idea in the April issue of Martha Stewart Living, I followed the source of the balloon illustrations back to the Library of Congress's prints and photographs catalog. It's a gallery of digitized images you can download and print, sorted by collection. All the images I looked at had "no known restrictions on publication," and in most cases, you can grab high res files ranging from 3"x5" to 11"x16" at 300 dpi.

The hot air balloons on the clipboards are from this collection. I also loved the WPA poster collection. Enjoy!

Printable New Year's gift tags for bottles

As 2012 draws to a close, I wish everyone a happy new year! Thanks so much for reading, commenting, and sharing ideas with me this year.

If you'll be heading to a party, you might make use of these printable gift tags I whipped up. Download, print, trim, and fill out the "to" space to make a bottle of wine or champagne a little more festive.

Download the PDF here (2.4 MB)

On a related note, I used a gift certificate from Moo.com, the printing company, to make some matching greeting cards. I'm always on the lookout for good printers in my line of work, so I was eager to give them a try. Opening the box I got in the mail was like Christmas, since it had fun stickers and graphics printed inside. I've never seen a commercial printer put so much thought and care into their packaging. The cards and envelopes were snuggled in their compartments securely, and they were flawless. Vibrant colors and thick paper stock. And the cool thing about Moo is that I could have put a different design on every single card in the pack if I'd wanted to, all included in the price. I'm impressed. Put Moo in your rolodex for future reference.

And with that, I'm signing off for now! I'll resume posting the second week of January, after a holiday break full of traveling and hosting visitors. Happy 2013!

Generate mini typographic posters

If you've got a favorite quote, you can visit recitethis.com and turn it into a graphic for display on websites and blogs. If you don't have a favorite quote, you can pick from a big library of phrases. Generated images are low resolution (about 2" wide at 300 dpi, standard print res) but they're amply sized for the web. Have fun creating and sharing!

(Thanks, Tania!)

Generate plaid backgrounds

If you're mad about plaid, you might enjoy PlaidMaker, an online tool that lets you design your own tartan. Pixels mimic threads, and you can create subtle patterns at a tiny scale, or bold prints in wild colors. Start from scratch or check out the gallery of user-generated plaids and modify any you like. Then download a .png file that will tile seamlessly. Use it for website backgrounds or wallpapers. Or, once you've got it tiled across a screen, you could take a screenshot and use it for your Facebook cover image.

Custom box template generator

Blog reader Maarten sent over this useful link: an online box template maker. Choose the box design or envelope you want, then type in your own dimensions. A PDF template will be generated for you. Download the file and print it out on decorative paper or use it as a dieline for a project. (The PDF is editable in Illustrator, too.)

Next time you've got a small gift to wrap, it's easy to make a custom-sized box for it!