Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

For a lot of programmers, no matter what language or technology you’re working with the hardest part of developing an application isn’t just writing code, but making the end result look nice as well. Those of us who prefer an IDE to Photoshop are pretty much reliant on what we can find on the internet, and a lot of what’s out there is only available for a fee, or includes restrictive licenses. Good design work is worth paying for, but for those independent developers without any real budgets, there are a few free alternatives. Here are a few I’ve used in the past.

FAMFAMFAM Icons
Over 1,000 very nice looking 16×16 px icons. They work great for websites, but are just as good for menu and toolbar icons in .NET programs. Cocoa applications use 32×32 px toolbar icons (or even higher, with resolution independence on its way), but you can still use them to spruce up a boring NSTableView.

Squidfingers Patterns
Dozens of simple, elegant looking patterns that make a great backgrounds for any website or application. I’ve noticed one or two other OSX software websites using them in the past.

Matt Ball’s Royalty Free Icons
I don’t know much about this designer, other than the fact that he posted some really nice 32×32 px OSX-ish toolbar icons on CocoaDev last year. The icon set includes many generic icons common to OSX applications, so you can quickly prototype a nice looking UI without resorting to stealing from someone else’s Contents/Resources directory.

Take some really complex random mathematical algorithms, throw in some subtle colors, and you get the Gallery of Computation by J. Tarbell. As a computer science major this kind of stuff is very interesting to me, especially since the generated patterns look, well, really nice; enough that I might buy a print once they’re available.

My favorite is Substrate, pictured above. If it interests you, the source code is also available.