There are so many wonderful resources online, whether you are looking for design inspiration, you are running a blog or you are starting a new business venture! Here are some of my favorite resources, that I hope will help you in your journey.
*Anywhere you see an asterisk referenced on this page, it means that the item is using an affiliate link, meaning that Dandelion Dust Designs receives a commission or a benefit if you choose to use the service or make a purchase through the link. I only make recommendations of companies I have or am currently using and are resources that I trust.
Favorite Go-To Resources
Business Tools
We’ve been asked many times over the years, what are some of the services we use in our business, and we are more than happy to share them with you.
Name Hero* – This is an amazing web hosting company and is who we use to host this website. They are very responsive to any request we’ve ever made, from PHP updates and custom Emails, to WordPress updates, migrating websites and so much more.
Creative Market* – An amazing website, filled with all things creative.
MailChimp* – MailChimp is wonderful to build your email list. It is who we use to send out our newsletter emails and it is free for up to 2,000 subscribers. They have lots of pre-built templates you can customize, or you can begin from scratch and build your own newsletter exactly how you want it be.
Trello* – We use Trello for all of our project management for each Dandelion Dust Designs’ collection we create, from concept creation to product launch. You create boards, and then cards for each board. Think of it like a bulletin board on the wall, with index cards in a row. When creating collections for Dandelion Dust Designs, we have three main boards for each year: Design Board, Marketing Board, and Launch Day Board. We can of course access Trello from our computers, however they also have an app which we have installed on our iPhones and iPads, so our project management schedule is with us no matter where we are.
Color Inspiration
As a graphic designer, every collection that we design or project that we begin, always starts with a color palette. Here are the top resources that we use to come up with colors for designs and projects.
Adobe Color CC – Since we mainly work in Photoshop CC, we love Adobe Color CC. It lets you upload an image and in seconds, it creates a color palette for you. It even lets you change the color mood for a variety of color combinations from one photo.
Colour Lovers – We especially spend a great deal of time in the palettes section of this website.
Design Seeds – Another website where we find lots of color inspiration and can spend hours perusing the Collections Section.
For The Love Of Color – Color palettes all ready to go, based upon stunning photos.
Pinterest – We have built some pretty terrific boards on Pinterest that we look at everyday for colors, textures, patterns, etc.
Stylify Me – We could spend hours on this website. Have you ever run across a website you just love. With Stylify Me, you simply put in the website address, and it pulls the colors being used on that website for an instant color palette.
Free Stock Photography
If you are a blogger, creative team member, scrapbook guru, social media marketer or website designer, you are likely always in search of high quality and outstanding photos to use in your projects. If you are looking for a specific style or theme of photo, here are some of our very favorite free stock photography websites. Please be sure to check their licensing terms, in case they have changed since this list was compiled.
Free Range Stock – If you are running a blog or a business website, you will really love this resource. Gorgeous photos to use for blogs, websites, advertising, etc.
Gratisography – If you are looking for some fun, whimsical and a little outside the box photos, Gratisography likely has what you are looking for.
ISO Republic – If you are a blogger or social media marketer, this is a wonderful website for you to visit.
Kaboompics – This is one of our favorite websites. We can and have spent hours there.
Life Of Pix – Amazing photos are available here with more added all the time.
Negative Space – Pages and pages of beautiful photos and all categorized, so it is very easy to find what you are looking for.
Pexels – A great website that we frequent at least weekly.
PicJumbo – Another favorite of ours that we visit all the time.
Pixabay – This is one of our go-to resources almost daily.
Stock Snap – You will find a wide variety of photos to choose from as well as lots of themes.
Unsplash – They have thousands of wonderful photos to choose from.
Scrapbook Resources
A couple of the most asked questions that we receive, we’ve added to this section to help you as a digital scrapbooker. We will continue to add more cool tools here for you.
Adobe Photoshop CC – When we first started we used Photoshop Elements for several years. As the business grew, we transitioned to Adobe Photoshop CC and we never looked back. We subscribe to their Photography Package which is $9.99 per month and it is really all that we need for this business, and it has taken things to a whole new level in digital design work. It is so worth the investment to create the best looking digital scrapbook pages.
Adobe Photoshop CC Free Online Training – Even though we’ve been working in Adobe Photoshop CC for many years, we recently ran across this amazing training that they offer for free. You will find both Beginner and Experienced User tutorials. We can’t begin to tell you all the things we have learned so far in these tutorials. We highly recommend you take time to go through them, as most are less than 20 minutes, so imagine how your skills will grow if you do just one per day.
FontBase – If you are looking for your first or even a new Font Manager and Organizer, look no further than FontBase. Super easy to use, automatically tracks any font folders you wish, allows you to activate fonts you use all the time and keep less used fonts deactivated, but available with just the click of your mouse and it has a version for both PC and MAC.
Resize For Web Action by Paislee Press – This is our very favorite action of all time! Since we create all of the collection previews and scrapbook pages in 12″ x 12″ or 3600 pixels x 3600 pixels, that size is much too large for the web. With just a few clicks of this magic action, the kit previews and scrapbook pages, are resized and ready for the web.
Shadow Like Me by One Little Bird – This is our go-to set of Shadowing Styles that you see being used on all the collection previews, as well as the pages that the designer scraps. We have the CU (Commercial Use) version, however a PU (Personal Use) version is also available.