For three months, I lived on an island. A retirement island, with marshy sweetgrass vistas and bike trails dominated by socially-appropriate metaphors for poo (PLEASE REMOVE ANY DOG LEAVINGS AND DISPOSE OF HORSE EXCRETIONS).

Oh, and Papyrus, the web designer‘s nightmare. Papyrus in every coffee table bookshop window, on every photo gallery awning, and on the logo of every locally-grown bag of backwater pecans. We turned it into a snarky scavenger hunt. “Look, honey – pralines. From ancient Egypt.”

This set contains vintage Christmas-themed brushes pulled from uncopywrited Project Gutenberg books dating from 1800-1920. The majority of the brushes show scenes from a Victorian Christmas, and this set includes brushes from popular holiday books.

Brush sizes range from 200px – 2500px, but mostly weight in at 400px-700px.

Happy Holidays.

I was just mucking around with a few ideas, and ended up with a set of 1950′s icons that aren’t really cohesive enough to sell as a set, but which I figure someone probably has a use for.

The set includes: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry milkshake icons, roller skates, jukebox icon, and a martini icon.

The roller skate icon was based on a picture by pro photographer Jon Helgason.

18 64x64px .png format marketing themed icons.

For your open source graphic design delight, I give you 21 high-res Chinese calligraphy GIMP brushes. This set includes 20 Mandarin (modern Chinese) character brushes and one extra-large scroll brush that can be used as a background. Each brush file is named with an English translation of the symbol’s meaning.

If you’re going for authenticity, these can’t really double as Japanese brushes, as they use the modern post-Mao character set, but if you’re audience is English-speaking and can’t tell the difference, they’re close enough.

Includes one of each: love, peace, longevity, prosperity, father, mother, house, friendship, earth, wind, fire, water, Buddhism, deity, dream, courage, dragon, tiger, patience and trust.

These brushes were created in GIMP 2.6.7. To use them, go to your GIMP directory, and find the Share > gimp > 2.0 > Brushes file, then paste all of the .gbr files included in my brush set into that directory. Then either re-start GIMP, or refresh the GIMP brushes palette to see and begin using the brushes.