The Smashing Editorial

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The Smashing Editorial The Smashing team loves high-quality content and cares about the little details. Through our online articles, Smashing Books, eBooks as well as Smashing Conferences, we are committed to stimulating creativity and strengthening the web design community’s creative forces.

Grunge Photoshop Brushes Set

In our previous releases we focused on icons and Wordpress-themes; however, there is a variety of further tools graphic designers need on a regular basis. For instance, Photoshop brushes. We have mentioned already that grunge is becoming a trend, so a set of grungy Photoshop brushes sounded like a good idea. You can find dozens of our further releases in our section Freebies. Today we are...

In our previous releases we focused on icons and Wordpress-themes; however, there is a variety of further tools graphic designers need on a regular basis. For instance, Photoshop brushes. We have mentioned already that grunge is becoming a trend, so a set of grungy Photoshop brushes sounded like a good idea. You can find dozens of our further releases in our section Freebies.

Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

Grunge Photoshop Brushes

Today we are glad to release Smashing Photoshop Brushes — a free set of 74 grungy Photoshop brushes in resolution 69 — 2463px. The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET too). The brushes were designed by Silvia Bukovac Gasevic, the creative mind behind graphics-illustrations.com, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the set for free!

You can use the set for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell them — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

Motivation behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designer herself:

“Originally conceived to be nothing but a fine retouching tool, Photoshop brushes evolved to be “point and click shape placing tool” which became increasingly popular among professionals and Photoshop enthusiast alike.

There are many categories of Photoshop users who use Photoshop brushes in their projects. Scrapbookers or professional photographers who use them to decorate photo albums. Many designers amateurs use them to design their own stuff whether it be T-Shirts, mugs, badges or web designs. Professional designers buy commercially licensed Photoshop brushes and use them regularly for they projects.

I like to play with different styles when creating Photoshop brushes. Inspiration for new shapes can be found just about anywhere. Once, with a little help from my scanner, I made brushes out of the items that were laying on my working desk, including my mobile phone. Today, we live in the era of grunge shapes and swirls which, somehow, suits me fine and as a professional designer I always wanted to have some kind of "swiss knife" brushes set. One set to serve them all. (Kind of resembles "One ring to rule them all" but that's just me being a Tolkien fan.) So, making a free brush set for Smashing Magazine readers turned out to be a great chance to do it.

What I had in mind was to create a brushes set that would fully cover the needs for one standard blog (or other graphic design projects) with grunge-swirls look.

So here they are, 74 brushes of 69 — 2463 px resolution, feel free to use them in all your commercial or non-commercial projects with no restrictions at all. Set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET too).

More of my work can be seen on my blog at graphics-illustrations.com.

Last but not least…

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, Photoshop brushes, a Drupal theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).


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