Today, my friends, I present to you the long anticipated Lili’s Favorite Things post! An offering of all my favorite resources and inspirational sites that have helped me along my journey of being a designer.

Perhaps I may not be in Oprah’s position to give millions of dollars in gifts and cash prizes to you all, but what I can do with my humble means is pass along the millions of dollars worth of resources and wisdom that I have collected over the years!

There are wondrous resources for designers out there, here are my go-to favorites:

Textures:
Most designs fall flat or look bland without at least a subtle texture.  Having a good texture resource is essential for any designer.  So, when you find a lovely cache of textures that are also commercial free, you have one happy designer!  My favorite site:

lastandtaken.org

This site has massive amounts of diverse and interesting textures. It has yet to disappoint!

Next is subtlepatterns.com

They offer a wonderful source of seamless, attractive patterns.

Brushes!

The best part of having a tablet is playing around with all the great brushes out there.  Recently, an artist I follow on deviantart.com released her favorite brushes that she created.  I just had to give her a shout out to her.  Thanks Kecky!

Here’s a great pencil brush from palnk.
Colors!

Sometimes when you are lacking inspiration, a good color scheme can really get you moving again.  This website, design-seeds.com has a daily update with beautiful pictures and an accompanying color scheme. Even if you have no graphic use for these, it is worth taking a look because they’re just so pretty 🙂

Fonts!

Every good designer knows font choice can bring a design to life, or quickly kill it.  The trickiest part is finding affordable, commercial free fonts that are awesome too.  Fortunately there are lots of amazing people out there who are willing to share their talent.  You’ll notice there are quite a few from losttype.com.  This is probably one of my favorite sites on the internet!  They update pretty frequently with simply beautiful fonts.  And, they are name your own price!  While you could easily enter $0 for a free font, I always feel like I can spare some cash for a nice tip for the designer’s generosity.  But that’s a personal choice.

Here are some of my favorite fonts!  See below for links and citations.

abraham lincoln   |   airplane   |   amatic sc   |   mission script   |   avril sans   |   bebas neue   |   blanch caps   |   cubano   |   district thin   |   halo handletter   |   lavendaria   |   league gothic   |   Londrina Solid   |   Matchbook   |   Ostrich Sans   |   Static   |   Trash Hand   |   Vanilla

And there you have it, my friends!  These were just some of my favorite things, and hopefully it helps you along your own personal journey of creating great artwork or designs!