1. It’s a Dumb Idea to Set up your Blog as a Sub Directory

This one should be pretty obvious, but when I started this website I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was a totally stupid idea to host the site as a sub directory of our main site (i.e. www.libertiny.com/brushportfolio). I do now!

2. You Can’t Make Money Offering Free Photoshop Brushes Online

Sure, there are people making cash from their Photoshop brush galleries. It is pretty amazing how much traffic Brusheezy gets for example. Brusheezy was one of the first to organize the free Photoshop brushes online into a single website. It was a great idea and the site does a wonderful job.  But now hundreds of people have copied the same model and post the same content. Unless you are attracting Brusheezy-like traffic, it is going to be difficult to make money through advertisements.

3. People are Going to Steal Your Free Stuff

This one I totally don’t understand. All the brushes offered here are free for people to use for commercial or personal use. That is pretty straight forward stuff. The only stipulation I have in my terms is that if people want to host my brushes on their websites, they need to link back to my site. Seems easy enough to do.   Well, apparently not.

4. The Design/Blogging Community Online Rocks

I have met a lot of talented people since starting my BrushPortfolio experiment. I think the greatest thing is how willing people are to help others learn and succeed. Some of the people I admire most are Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks (the first webcast I saw that taught me how to code my WordPress site), Eric from Photoshop Support (always full of great suggestions and encouragement), Nathan Brown from Room122 (I was lucky enough to get this great designer to develop my logo), and all the writers at CopyBlogger (I don’t have enough room to mention all the great lessons offered through this site).

5. You Need to Keep Learning and Trying New Things

The great thing about having a blog is the ability to try new things and see what works. I am working on a new project. It’s a website about Garden History and Design. It is going to be a membership site offering articles, garden plans, and a video cast of my personal garden redesign scheduled to begin Spring 2010. It’s going to be fun to apply all my lessons learned into the new project.

P.S. The image I’m using for this post was taken from the MorgueFile.

1. Design Shard

Design Shard offers a lot of valuable resources for designers including design tips, inspiration and free resources like Photoshop brushes and textures.

2. Texture King

Texture King has an amazing selection of high quality textures for download. Each texture is filed by category so it is very easy to find what you need.

3. Morgue File

Free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work, be it commercial or not! This is one of my all time favorite sites.

4. MyPhotoshopBrushes.com

Great collection of free Photoshop resources: brushes, shapes, patterns, styles and gradients. This is one of my favorite Photoshop brush sites. It is easy to navigate and always has a fresh selection of brushes, shapes and patterns.

5. Bitt Box

I love this blog and find myself reading it all the time. I always find very helpful tutorials and inspiration. There are great freebies offered on this site including Adobe Illustrator brushes, textures and Photoshop brushes.

6. Go Media

This site just rocks! They have some super interesting vectors and Photoshop brushes for purchase. They also have a blog section where the designers share all kinds of great tips. And best of all, these guys are cool enough to share some freebies.

7. Pixels and Ice Cream

The artist behind this blog is Jen Furlotte. Her blog features a great mixture of vectors, Photoshop brushes and patterns. There are items you can purchase and the blog also features great design freebies. This is a Design blog you’ll love to visit again and again.

8. Dezignus.com

Design Freebies Heaven. Dezignus is a friendly, growing community of people interested in graphic design. Their mission is to improve the professional skills of designers by providing useful freebies including vectors, Photoshop brushes, shapes, textures, backgrounds, and icons.

9. Ben Blogged

This is a great design blog that shares freebies, tutorials and helpful hints. Ben Blogged just added a video tutorial section to the site that you should definitely check out.

10. Uber Piglet

Uberpiglet is a vector showcase site with a great name. All vector images on this site are licensed under the Creative Commons license with an attribution term that any reuse of the images must acknowledge their source with a link back to the site.

11. Think Design Blog

Think Design Blog is another great blog that offers design freebies for designers. I think the header and footer designs on this blog are also very cool.

12. Fuel Your Creativity

This site is a great destination for inspiration and design freebies. You will end up spending a lot of time browsing this site.

13. Smashing Magazine

This site is amazing. There is always great tutorials, inspiration, and of course, lots of freebies.

14. Vecteezy

There are a lot of great free vectors available on Vecteezy. Artists from around the web provide vectors for the site. Vecteezy is super easy to navigate and always has lots of great content.

15. Spoon Graphics

This blog has interesting articles, links and inspiration. The content on the site is excellent and you can also get some great design freebies.

16. Six Revisions

This site offers freebies and excellent articles. There is always something cool to check out on this site.

17. Pattern Head

Design freebies, resources and inspiration can be found on this site. They have some great repeating patterns that are perfect for your Twitter page.

18. Pattern 8

This site offers a great selection of repeating patterns. The coolest feature is the ability to search for patterns by color. That makes it very easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

19. Createsk8

This is a fun design blog that offers free Illustrator stuff.

20. Brush King

Great source for free Photoshop brushes. The site is well designed and the brush selection is top notch.

1.  Fresh Foliage by Jason Gaylor of Designfruit

2. Damned in Black Swirl Brushes — you need to scroll down to Swirls almost at bottom of page

3. Janita’s Itsumo Brushes on MediaSlap.com

4. Hand Drawn Florals by Room122.com

5. Obsidian Dawn’s Swirls II

6. Web Design Blog’s Floral Frames

7. GValkyrie’s Suddenly Spring

8. Graphic Mania’s Flourish Brushes

9. Graphic Identity’s Floral Brushes 5

10. Smashing Magazine’s Grunge Brush Set

There are also some cool brushes from a couple new artists that I learned about from the magazine. Appendix Squared provided some doodles, dashes and spills. Lord Andre contributed a series of fractal images. You will definitely want to check out their work.

Thank you to the kind people at Photoshop Creative for including my work.