Last Updated: Thu, 7th Jan 2010
Ambiance is the most important part of any website. Your articles could be top notch, your games the best in the world and your photos unique but your visitors will not stay if they’re in the wrong setting. Visitors have expectations, pre-conceived ideas, of how a website should look, behave and consequently “feel” to their mental sensors: a search engine needs to be kept simple, a forum needs to be clean and easy to navigate, and a fanzine needs to appear like any shop bought magazine. Making your site look great and even giving it a few sound effects when appropriate is all part of any webmaster’s job. Give your visitors a good experience and they’ll tell their friends about you. Give them a bad experience and, well, what did you do the last time you saw a bad website?
Here are a few resources for free online graphics, textures, icons, buttons, logos, banners, sounds and tools to create them that I’ve found useful. I think you will like them too.
I highly recommend GRSites, DeviantArt and The Archive. The former because it contains such a wide range of graphics and tools; and the latter because it contains a lot of graphics, artwork creation advice and extra components (plugins, textures, gradients…) for graphic creation tools such as GIMP and Photoshop.
An excellent free graphics editor is the GIMP; with it you can create your own logos, background images, general graphics or just edit, improve or just add your own flare to the ones provided by the sites linked here. Most of the graphics used in this site game from these resources and were edited using GIMP. A simple to follow single page user tutorial is available here at JournalXtra.
Stripe Generator is one of the easiest and quickest to use background image creators I’ve seen. It has a simple to use application interface and provides attractive tileable graphics.
BG Maker is different to the regular background image generators. It provides a grid of squares that represent screen pixels. You can adjust the size of the grid and the color of each pixel to make a custom (repeatable) background image. The page background live-updates as you create your masterpiece.
Creatr makes the glossy graphics that window dress a webpage’s body that is usually a CSS image attribute of the <body> tag although these background images can be used as a background for any other HTML element.
Spiffy Box makes 4 rounded corners for decorating HTML boxes. It’s easy to use and even provides the HTML and CSS components required to employ the images.
Cornershop is the simplest to use rounded corner generator. The interface doesn’t look so nice and it doesn’t provide so many options as Spiffy Box but it does more-or-less the same job.
My Cool Button is a collection of very nice button creation tools that add to that glossy web 2.0 effect so many webmasters aim to reach. A key feature is its iPhone icon generator.
Buttonator. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of this site’s screenshot. Buttonator provides a large selection of definable buttons and icons in both old-style and Web 2.0 formats.
Decoration and Advertisement Graphics
Quickribbon makes javascript controlled diagonal corner decorations with customizable text for webpages. Useful for attractive yet out-of-the-way advertising.
Web 2.0 Badges uses an intuitive interface to enable you to configure pre-defined badge shapes to create your own snazzy “Look at me, I’m Special” badges.
Fresh Badge is another simple to use but less artistically laid out badge creator but it does provide more control over the end product so don’t dismiss it without checking it out first.
Do you remember my opening paragraph?
Ambiance is the most important part of any website…
Well, compare the two websites above and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
Web 2.0 Logo Creator makes sleek looking website logos. I prefer to use GIMP but for quick and simple logos I use something like Logo Creator.
Web 2.0 Logo Creator is a little more configurable than Logo Creatr (above) but does essentially the same job.
Cool Text is another simple to use free logo maker. The interface style is different to the two detailed above as are the style of graphics created. Not necessarily complete with web 2.0 effect but useful non-the-less.
Tabs Generator is probably the only free tab creation product you’ll need for developing stylish webpage navigation bars. It has an intuitive design that isn’t bloated with lots of ads.
Load Info offers two loading GIF options : create your own activity indicator or use a predefined one.
Ajaxload loading GIF generator creates attractive and free loading and activity indicator graphics and produces with Ajax code required to implement them.
Web Script Lab‘s is another loading GIF generator that does the same as the two above but provides a slightly different set of predefined graphics.
De Graeve Favicon Generator allows you to create favicons by colouring in a pixelated grid. Many other tools available here too.
Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Maker is easily the easiest favicon maker of any bar none. Simply upload any graphic (photo or digitally created image) and let this tool do the hard work for you. I use this one a lot and recommend you use an image with a transparent background.
Open Clipart is the grand-daddy of them all for free and public domain clip art. Their whole collection may be downloaded as on zip file, free. If you do download their full collection remember to visit Open Clipart regularly because they update often.
Open Office provides a nice collection free, public domain clipart.
WPClipart is a fairly big collection of public domain clipart that isn’t to be sniffed at.
Cliker Clipart provides royalty free and public domain vector clipart. Nice big collection.
Vectorish is another good source for free, public domain vector graphics and clipart.
CGTextures provides thousands of well categorized free textures. If GRSites doesn’t have what you need then CGTextures probably will.
Also see GRSites.com in Sound Effects, General Graphics and Image Tools.
These 4 sites provide a good collection of (generally) free to use icons:
These sites provide free and public domain stock images.
Create basic ad banners using these free online tools. Personally, I use Gimp and KolourPaint but I have used these ones before and do recommend them.
Banner Creator is much more than a simple banner creator. This site also gives hints and tips for banner placement and offers banner rotation scripts and basic website promotion advice.
Banner Sketch is much easier to use than Banner Creator but offers less customization.
The Archive is a massive resource of Creative Commons sound effects, clips and loops that are stored in various formats and can be either downloaded or embedded into webpages .
Free Loops provides free to use sound loops. Primarily aimed at the music industry, this collection is veritable enough for use in other projects too.
The Free Sound Project has thousands of freely downloadable and reproducible sounds and sound effects.
General Graphics and Image Tools
GRSites is the Swiss Army Knife of web graphics, a brilliant collection of textures, graphics, sound effects and tools for creating buttons and logos. I’ve used this one a lot in the past and will continue to use it in the future. It always has something to offer.
Wigflip is a small collection of useful web graphic tools.
Accessify is a small collection of very impressive tools. Create styled lists, check-boxes, forms, jQuery functions etc…
At the time of writing, all of the above services are free to use and offer items that are Public Domain and Open Source. Check licenses of stock images and icons to ensure commercial usage is permitted without cost and/or attribution.
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