EZ Ebook Templates

Ah yes. Is there anything better than a nice big, FREE heaping bowl of your favorite ice cream? How about with pixels on the side? What???! “Pixels and Ice Cream“? Yep. That’s the name of a terrific website that offers free photoshop brushes and patters, some of which include wonderful seamless tiling backgrounds, that you can use both personally and commercially. Plus some other cool free stuff.

And that’s something I’m always on the hunt for.

While the site doesn’t have an over abundance of free-to-use resources, it does have some pretty good ones available for download. Many of those are more geared towards the “girly” end user. But, hey, I AM a girl, so I like it. And I’ve included it here for you as yet another terrific free graphical resource to add to yours.

I’m interested to see how this site grows over time. And what other fabulous freebies they come up with next!

Visit Pixels & Ice Cream Here to peruse through their “menu” of free goodies. You may just find something delectible to enhance your tasty designs there.

Since this site discusses designing ebook templates, and I like sharing my finds with others, here’s another list of really cool “Retro” style resources you can use commercially throughout your ebook and website designs.

• MUJKA - This site has awesome patterns, cool templates, and rad retro vectors. The prices are decent and the designs are outstanding.
• Art by Andy Nortnik - Can you say “Retro Overload”?! Amazing retro royalty-free clipart packs hand crafted by Andy Nortnik. Really cool sets can be found here for a really good price.
• Free Retro Clipart Gallery - Yes, a whole collection of free retro clipart images. Not sure if these can be used commercially as I couldn’t find any terms of use, so you may want to use this resource for personal only designs. Or do a bit of further investigating. Oh, and try not to go blind with the site layout design….it’s horrid!
• My Retro Clipart.com - A nice collection of royalty free retro style colored clipart images. Not bad, not bad.
• Time Tunnel - Super cool collection of Royalty Free retro clipart collections. And, if you register on the site, which is free, you can also download a new retro clipart image every month. Not a bad deal for nothin’!
• RetroClipper.com - Sells royalty free retro images at $1.00 each. Pretty neato collection. The site says all images are downloadable after payment and come on a plain white background. Obviously, the images are not colored but simple black and white.
• NewAgeWholesale.com - Good assortment of vintage style clipart images. Most in black and white, but you can get like 400 images in a collection for $9.95. Not a bad deal. Categories of image collections include: Angels & Fairies, Goddess, Egyptian, Suns & Moons, Wiccan, Medieval, and more.
• Simply Dark Free Clipart - Not really “retro”, but hey, skeletons are always in fashion Good collection of free to download clipart images. Some are animated, and some are not. Still, a nice resource to have in your pocket.
• Civil War Clipart - Collection of civil war images found across the web, and some even scanned and uploaded from original 19th century newspapers. All images claim to be “copyright free”, and freely available for download and use in your own designs.
• Designed To A T - Good collection of free to download and use on both personal and commercial projects clip art. Various categories to choose from, even Victorian! Not great, but good enough to make the cut.

Okay, that’s all I’ll add to this list. Hopefully, that will be enough to keep you busy until I can add more resource lists in later posts.

If not, you can always try doing some “digging” of your own through Google.

Happy Downloading!

I have seen anywhere I found quite by accident doing a search through Google.

See, what happened was….

I discovered this cool new online handwritten font tool at vLetter and planned on using that for making some handwritten signatures and headlines for some upcoming web pages, but found that vLetter converted the written text over to images on a flat white background.

And that just wouldn’t do for me.

I needed something better.

Something I could edit out the rear without having to remove the backgrounds.

So, I went on the hunt for some good, free handwriting fonts.

And I hit the jackpot with FontGarden.com

While the fonts are free to use for any personal pages, you can simply “donate whatever you think commercial use is worth to you”, and then you can also use these beautiful handwritten fonts commercially.

( I’m not sure if you have to donate for every single font you want to use commercially or not, but it would be nice to throw the author a few bucks for each one. Plus, you can always contact the owner and find out. )

Pretty cool, right?

I was amazed at the quality and variety of handwritten fonts. Frankly, I hadn’t seen anything like these anywhere else on the web. To boot, they were all free, right there for the taking, and installing!

Of course, when I found FontGarden.com’s selection, I just had to hop right on here and share it with everyone.

So, if you’ve been looking for some beautiful handwritten fonts, then I highly recommend you visit FontGarden.com and see what’s there.

It’s one resource you will want to bookmark and go back to again and again.

Now that I’ve got your undivided attention…..

I recently saw Kung Fu Panda and it was a fantastically fun movie for the whole family. Which we all thoroughly enjoyed to the max!!

So, being inspired by the movie, I designed a new free ebook template with the “Kung Fu Panda” feel.

There’s actually 2 different colors right now — red and blue

But I will add a few more colors soon — like green and pink, etc.

The templates are the last 2 to be added, so they’re numbers #13 and #14

Go and download ‘em now!

They wreak of awesomeness….

I got mine yesterday.

And it was created by one of my favorite authors…..Max of www.maxcovers.com

Max has a great talent for making some of the best cover designs I’ve seen.

But he also has a terrific knack for knowing what types of products to release to the designing community that are beau coup profitable.

While his concepts of picking a profitable product may seem strangely simple, I think that’s what makes them work so well.

They are simple.

And that’s outstanding!

Sometimes with the never ending clutter of our world, especially online, we need simple solutions to our designing headaches. And Max certainly delivers on that.

“Enough a** kissing already! Tell me about this ’simple yet incredibly time saving’ product you speak of…”

Okay, okay.

It’s called ‘Easy Striped Backgrounds‘ , and as I mentioned earlier it was created by Max of www.maxcovers.com.

The package consists of 100 web 2.0 styled backgrounds that will tile seamlessly no matter what size page you’re using.

The colors are nice, and there’s a good variety of them to select from to get the perfect match for your next project.

Now, why do I believe this particular product is a ‘time saver’?

Because instead of going over to www.stripegenerator.com and creating your own stripe-y backgrounds, you can just load up one from the package and be done with it.

It only takes a couple of seconds if you’re using an HTML editor like Dreamweaver. So why not cut down on your design time?

But, that’s not the only thing you’ll find inside here.

Normally, when you create your own web 2.0 seamlessly tiling background image, in order to use it with an image editor like Photoshop, you’d first need to convert the image over to a pattern to fill in an entire background of a project you were working on.

Max has taken care of that too.

He’s included a .pat file that you can simply load up inside of Photoshop and make use of all 100 of the backgrounds with just a couple of mouse clicks.

So, there’s yet another ‘time saver’ with this well rounded ‘designers friend‘ package.

Not only those 2 things, but Max also gives you a Master Resale Rights license to the whole thing so you can resell it to other ‘needy’ designers out there.

Here’s What’s Inside:

• 100 .png Files For Every Web 2.0 Stripe-y Background
• 1 .pat File For Use Inside of Photoshop Helping You Create Background Areas Within Your Designs
• A Master Resale Rights License For The Whole Package
• 1 Saleskit For Super Easy Reselling
• And 1 .txt File of Simple Instructions on How to Use The Backgrounds

It’s a wonderful package that Max has priced low at just $17.

And I’m sure you’re curious to see examples of the backgrounds themselves, so you can check those out:

See Max’s Easy Striped Backgrounds Package Here

(be sure you order from the main index.htm page ONLY
or you'll pay the regular price!!)

And, if you decide you want to add Max’s newest package to your designing arsenal, you can do so and save $7 off the original price from the same link above ^^^^^^^.

I highly recommend this package for those looking to shave some time off their designing projects and still stay ‘up-to-snuff’ with the latest web 2.0 styles.

Way to go Max. And keep those packages comin’!

I, for one, can’t get enough of them

Took a while, but I’ve managed to add 3 all new free OpenOffice Writer ebook templates to the Free Templates page.

I’ll try to get a few more up in the next week for you to download as well.

But, for now, enjoy the new templates!