What you get is 6 large Adobe Photoshop brushes for the famous design software. The brushes are up to 2048 pixels in size, so for any of you using a version other than Photoshop CS3 (CS2 also still works), you can ask the Vibr8 Bros. to scale them down or release the PNG version on their site. That’s because for versions before CS2, the maximum Photoshop brush size is 999 pixels (or even below that for earlier versions). For CS2+ users though, these brushes are perfect! You can jump to the free download below.

These are the free Photoshop brushes included in the 4.3 MB download…

…and you can go download the free high res Photoshop brushes right here. Enjoy!

You can use these beautiful, free Photoshop brushes with versions CS2 and CS3. For those of you who have an older version of Adobe Photoshop – you can still check them out, because some of the brushes are 999px large. As you might know, larger brushes than that are only supported from Adobe Photoshop CS2.

The Photoshop brushes come as .ABR files, which you have to place in the Presets/Brushes folder on your hard drive. Here is a more detailed installation guide for Photoshop brushes on Beeex.net.

So let’s cut to the chase. This is what you get:

…and you can download these Photoshop brushes right here. Enjoy!

The free Photoshop brushes are all about 2500 pixels large, that’s the maximum in Photoshop CS2 and CS3. The free brush set is perfect for modern, grungy, and a “destroyed” graphic design. Paint splats on walls, or use them for your blog header – they are free to download from Spoongraphics! We find them very useful. This is what you get:

You can get these free Photoshop brushes right here.

Also featured: a set of hi-res Photoshop brushes (they are light strangs) and this collection of free Photoshop brushes on Beeex.net that you might not have seen yet. Enjoy!

These are great! The brand new design blog Vibr8bros.com shows us they are worthy of this title – design blog. They just released a free vector pack full of glossy and shiny, colorful Web 2.0 badges (or stickers). If you use Adobe Illustrator, you should check these out: you get the source AI and EPS files to change, alter and use them with your own text!

For those who don’t want to customize this free vector pack, the Virb8 Bros. included 20 seperate transparent PNG files. These you can use directly and put them on your blog or elsewhere with no hassle.

You can download this free vector pack right here.

This great tutorial by the photographer Steve Paxton shows you how to destroy, scratch, and distress a photograph in Adobe Photoshop. If you want to create a worn and ‘old’ look to your images, this is a very good way to do it, and you should read on.

Steve Paxton is a professional photographer from Seattle. He focuses mainly on portrait work, landscapes and crime scene photography.

In his tutorial, you learn how to apply an grungy pattern to an image and make it blend in naturally – creating a worn look like below. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll also find a ZIP file of high-resolution textures (walls, paper, stains, etc.) for free download – size: 47 megs!

This is what you learn to do in the tutorial – before and after.

You can view this tutorial right here.

This resource was submitted to Beeex.net by one of our readers. Submit your own stuff and get featured!

In this post, we collected 8 very good, yet not so widely spread WordPress plugins for you; as well as one plugin which is required for another one (that’s the ‘half’ one). All of them are great, simply because they add valuable functionality to your WordPress blog. The reason why you may not have come across them yet is that they, despite their benefits, haven’t been promoted too much. But we know of a whole lot of other bloggers out there who use them. Only they don’t talk about it. We do!
To install a plugin, you have to upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it in your Plugins menu.

• All 8 and a half plugins run on WP 2.3.2 without a problem. You can find more information about each plugin by clicking on the source link. If you’re in a hurry though and you’re eager to start, you can use the direct download link provided with each plugin. They all come with a Readme file.

So, here goes: The 8 and 1/2 excellent WordPress plugins you probably didn’t know about… until now!

1. WP-Sticky (direct download link)

This WordPress plugin lets you set any post as “sticky”. That means that it will always be displayed as the first post on your blog. It’s very useful if you, for example, want to create a “month’s best” or such, which you want to have displayed on top of all other posts at all times. Whatever you write and post after that, will be listed under your sticky post as usual.

To download WP-Sticky, you can click on the above link. Alternatively, you can download it directly using the direct download link on the right.

2. Fancy Pull-Quotes (direct download link)

Have you ever seen these in-text pull quotes? A short sentence or quote written in bold letters in a bigger font, with the post body wrapping aroung it? Here’s the plugin to do it. You simply put your desired text in a ‘pull’ tag. You can define its appearance easily in the options menu. Worth a try!

3. JAW Popular Posts Widget (direct download)

This is an excellent plugin that we use here on Beeex.net as well that unfortunately, doesn’t work for WordPress 2.6 anymore (we’re hoping for an update and will update you on that as soon as it is released!). You can see the widget to the right under our sponsors. It displays the most popular (most viewed) posts. The benefits for your site are that it adds credibility, as your readers can see what others liked most.

1/2. Popularity Contest Plugin (direct download link)

The JAW Popular Posts Plugin requires this plugin to work, as it pulls the stats from the data gathered by it. Popularity Contest is a neat plugin itself: it adds a tab to your WordPress Dashboard and shows you a detailed list of which post has been accessed how many times, and a lot more.

4. DoFollow (direct download link, unzipped PHP file; right-click and Save As!)

DoFollow disables the automatic rel=”nofollow” attribute added to external links in WordPress. This attribute is important for search engines such as Google – they don’t count a nofollow link as an inbound link. With this link, you enable backlinks (and also trackbacks) to be counted as inbound links. This is a good thing for anybody who will comment on your site.

5. WP 2.3 Related Posts (direct download link)

This nice plugin displays articles on your blog related to a post the viewer is reading. It uses the newly introduced WordPress Tags for that. That’s why it only works with WordPress 2.3 or higher! (You should keep your WordPress updated anyway. Here’s the link to the newest version) (Update: This plugin is outdated. We featured a replacement in this new post: 10 excellent & promising WordPress Plugins!)
Installation is easy, but requires that you open up your single post script (usually single.php) to insert a single line of code. You might want to put it directly under the php the_content tag (that’s where we put it. Right, we use this plugin as well!)

6. No Self Pings (direct download link)

If you’re annoyed with WordPress’ automatic self-pinging, you can download and install this little goodie. It prevents your WordPress blog from pinging itself. That means that when you link back to an older post on your own blog, there won’t be a trackback entry placed in that post’s comment section. Trackbacks from sites other than your own blog are not affected.

7. WP Relative Date (direct download link)

This plugin adds a relative date to your posts and comments next to the date, such as Today, Yesterday, 2 Days ago, 2 Weeks ago, 2 Seconds ago, 2 Minutes ago, 2 Hours ago. Giving your readers this information adds to the overall style of your blog and creates a sort of relevancy!

8. Subscribe To Comments (direct download link)

Our last excellent plugin in the list of 8 and 1/2 plugins you probably didn’t know about is this goodie: It adds a small checkbox under the comment box, asking if you’d like to subscribe to this comment thread. If activated, an email is sent to the reader’s email address automatically when someone posts a new comment in that thread. It’s a great plugin, adding a lot of ‘personality’ to your blog: it encourages users to return to your site and keeps them in the discussion.

There you have ‘em, the 8 and a half excellent plugins you probably didn’t know about – until today. We hope you liked them and you can put them to good use!

One last note: You might want to check back in the next few days, as we’re already working on the next giveaway for WordPress bloggers. Stay tuned, subscribe to Beeex.net!

Beeex.net – Strictly-Free Quality Resources for Designers and Web Developers

It’s still January, but you know what, we don’t care! Neither does Bittbox: after a 2-day server downtime due to a senescent hard drive (honestly!), they reward us with three very ’summerish’ vector sunflowers for Adobe Illustrator!

As you may have noticed……Beeex.net featured quite a few things from Bittbox in the past. Now, to be honest, this kit isn’t one of their best ones, but we still decided to feature it. Although it only contains three sunflowers, they are not bad at all, and they can be quite useful indeed.

These sunflowers come as EPS vector files, you can use them with either Illustrator 10 and up or with another vector graphics editor like Inkscape. Alternatively, you can also download the SVG version of the sunflowers.

You can download this .zip file right here. Enjoy!

Free Photoshop brushes

Butterflies are cute, and so are these butterfly Photoshop brushes that you can download to your computer. They will work with most newer versions of Photoshop (CS, CS2, CS3), because they are from 1000 pixels to about 2000 pixels large. Photoshop 7.0 (in fact, anything under Photoshop CS) will unfortunately not work with this brush size.

You can download these free butterfly Photoshop brushes below. Here’s how they look:

The 23 butterfly Photoshop brushes can be downloaded at Snap2Objects, right here.

Enjoy!