It’s been a long time since I’ve added a freebie to the site. This wallpaper is the result of the Create a Trendy Music Style Background tutorial I wrote last week. The wallpaper is available in two sizes. 1920×1200 and 1600×1200. I hope you enjoy it!

I just wanted to give a quick shout out and thanks to Alex from That Indie Dude. Alex is a uniquely gifted freelance web and graphic designer. In his newest post, he features MyInkBlog as one of the best free design resources around the web.

I try to add a post to my blog about 4 or 5 times per week. Without doing so, I see my numbers begin to nose dive, and it drives me crazy. It’s as if by staring at my stats and contemplating what to do, I can somehow translate that energy into more visitors.

It’s quite trendy these days to use bright, vibrant colors with wavy lines and a silhouette of a person. This tutorial will aim to show you how to create this look. It’s the longest and most extensive tutorial I’ve written to date. I really hope you can learn from it; I know I did, by creating it!

I’d like to start by thanking Grant Friedman of Colorburned.com for taking time out of his day to answer these questions. Grant is the talented and creative individual behind Colorburned; a portfolio and resource site for his graphic art. On the site you can see his portfolio of work, learn from tutorials, download free textures, and much more.

I’m into the spirit of the 4th of July here in the States, and wanted to share with you how I created an awesome collage. This tutorial will focus on layers, layer styles, masks and photo manipulation.

I am excited to announce, PSD2HTML has jumped on board as a site sponsor, you can see their ad on the sidebar to the right. These guys do an amazing job of tranforming your .psd, .png, .ai file, or even existing HTML markup into well-written XHTML and CSS code.

I can’t believe I’m in my second month already. So far, so good. I’m stoked about the response and the climb in readership. June was another awesome month, stacked with quality articles, tutorials and freebies. Here’s MyInkTrail for June 2008.

If you’ve ever needed a simple content management system for one of your web clients, then you should definitely check out CushyCMS. It takes seconds to sign up for and within a couple minutes you can make portions of your site fully editable. The process is real straight forward.

The more I design, the more I love finding awesome new fonts. It’s like finding a valuable baseball card in a shoe box full of common cards. I keep collecting them in order to fill my designer’s toolbox with a tool for every job. I’ve put together a list of my favorites, that I feel every designer should put in their toolbox.

I love anything graphic design that has that vintage grunge kind of look. This tutorial will show you how to create a stunning vintage polaroid effect. It’s fairly simple to make and can be used in many different types of projects.

Depending on how much experience you have coding websites, you’ll probably already know how much of a pain Internet Explorer is to deal with. That is why most of us in the design community push browsers like Firefox. Here’s a list of my 10 favorites Firefox plugins.