DreamStar Studios » Design

Fancybox Alternate Button Images – Gold

Brian — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:52:59 +0000

While working on a project I found that the Fancybox buttons used to “navigate left”, “navigate right”, and “close” the Fancybox overlay, while beautiful, just weren’t right for the theme of the site. So I created my own navigation buttons and I felt that they fit seamlessly with the existing theme of Fancybox yet were appropriate for a completely different style of site. If you’re project has gold or gold would be a nice accent for it, you will love these buttons. They’re free to use for commercial and non-commercial projects, I ask only that you not post them for download yourself but link back to this page if you want to share them with friends and fellow web designers and developers.

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Fair Web Design Rates for Clients & Designers

Brian — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:48:52 +0000

I would say that in my experience as a web designer and developer, deciding on what is a “fair rate” to charge for my work ranks as one of the most difficult aspects that has taken me a long time to get a handle on.

I wanted to post a little discussion on the topic of “fair rates” for web design. It is my hope that this video is a help to web designers who are just starting out and also people who are currently shopping for a web designer and are unsure of what to look for and what to expect in terms of skill, price, and a number of other factors. Hope it helps!

A discussion of fair rates for web design and what to expect as both a client looking to a hire a web designer, and also a web designer just starting out and trying to figure out what a fair going rate is.

FREE Magento Dark Icon Set for e-Commerce

Brian — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:50:44 +0000

This Magento DARK (black) Icon Set is free for personal and commercial projects. You may also use them without attribution, though linking back to http://dreamstarstudios.net is very much appreciated where possible, but I understand how that can go on commercial projects.

The following stipulations apply: the Magento Dark Icon Set may not be resold, sub-licensed, shared, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. If you love them, please show some love and link back to them if you want to share them with someone else.

If I had known when I started designing this site that the result would be hours and hours of re-creating .GIF images with ugly white fringe pixels I just might have done something different. I searched high and low for a nice freebie dark icon set that was licensed for commercial use. Fortunately for you, there was none to be had!

The file is a zipped Photoshop Document (.PSD file) which contains large (approximately 400 px on a side), 32px, 24px, and 16px size images for your convenience. You will still need to save them as .gif files, but I’ve left them for you to create, because in my case (and many others I imagine), I opted for .PNG icons over the Magento .GIF icons installed by default.

Hope you enjoy them, let me know what you think and if they come in handy for ya!

Download MagentoDARK Icon Set Now

Free “Fiery Fairy” Icon Set

Brian — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:46:37 +0000

In the process of designing this blog I wound up with a number of thematic elements, and because I’m all about making the web a more magical place, I figured I’d share them. One theme that I ended up using only sparingly is what I would call a “Fiery Fairy Glossy Button Theme”. The idea was the same glowing trails that are found elsewhere on the site except they are “contained” inside of a glossy button. They’re kind of “Web 2.0″ and kind of “Disney”. The design for this site was most certainly inspired in part by Disney, and as much as I often have a love / hate relationship with Disney, I believe they tapped into something which is far greater than any single company could ever contain – the desire to experience magic. I love magic myself, but I think what we’re all really after is something supernatural which goes beyond our capacity to explain logically. Not sure if the icons themselves are capable of living up to the buildup I just gave them, but what the heck… they’re free! Not only that… they’re bursting with magic!

For your pleasure, I have enclosed 64px, 32px, 24px, and 16px .PNG images of each icon. This way you can adapt them easily to their environment, though they work best on very dark backgrounds.

Fiery Fairy Icon Set by DreamStar Studios is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.