Web designers are always on the lookout for resources that speeds up delivery of projects, sites and design work. Icons and brush sets are always an easy and effective way to quickly get a consistent set of graphics that can add to the look and feel of the site.

Icon Finder is a service which at the date of this post has already nearly 60,000 icons ready to be searched and used. With a new version of Icon Finder launched in April, it offers a Google like interface for easy and efficient searching. With a quick and intuitive user interface, it may become an excellent resource tool in every designers toolkit…

To use the site, simply navigate to their website at http://www.iconfinder.net.

The interface is simple and clean and you can either search for a specific item/tag or browse through the icon sets.

For example, if i was to search for Twitter (because I seriously am in need of a twitter and RSS icon set!), simply type “Twitter” in the search box and hit search.

At this point, the power of this clean system becomes apparent. The set of buttons on the top allows you to dictate how many icons you want to see on the page, the background color of the icon can be changed to show you an immediate preview of the button as well as the size of the icon.

Even more impressive in terms of user friendliness, clicking on a particular icon will take you to the set the icon came from, so you can quickly scan through and pick out other icons you may wish to grab.

Each icon/set comes with licensing information and most of free for commercial use (provided you link to the package) and you can download in either PNG or ICO format.

Browsing Icon Sets are just as easy. Simply click on Browse Icon Sets in the top right menu and you can browse through the entire collection:

Clicking on any of the tags in the tag cloud gives you a nicely filtered list for that Tag:

Icon Finder recently put up a forum on their site and it encourages users to add additional icon sets and/or tags to existing icons to help with the indexing. Its a pretty impressive site and features are being added to cater for user feedback. Seems like they care about their site and have worked hard to provide a simple interface that allows users to focus on creativity and ease of search rather than make the user go through many hoops and advertising just to get what they are looking for.

The collection is already impressive at nearly 60,000 icons and seems to be growing regularly. This may become an extremely popular site if it continues to index these icons. I found this site to be fast, intuitive and easily accessible. Its not crowded with advertising and encourages user interactions.

Relevant Links for Icon Finder:

• Home Page: http://www.iconfinder.net/
• Twitter Page: http://www.twitter.com/iconfinder
• Forum: http://www.iconfinder.net/forum/

After procrastinating for ages, I decided to give our twitter page a bit of a make-over. Following the excellent guide by Chris Spooner (Twitter Background Design How-To and Best Practices @ Blog.SpoonGraphics), I think I’ve finally come up with a look and feel that I was happy with.

  http://www.twitter.com/newbtech

Its a little on the lighter side, but I think it works for me :)

My previous attempts was a little too Web 2.0’ish… so i decided to change the colour scheme around a bit to make it look less so:

I actually wanted a darker “logobar”, but then decided against it.

Anyways, let me know what you think :) and if anyone wants any backgrounds done, I’ll looking for practice :)