Introducing Luvly, A Digital Design Marketplace

How do you make your blog, website, flyer, newsletter, or other online or printed piece stand out from the crowd? One way is to shop at Luvly, where you can find unique graphics, images, and vectors to use on your website--or to use for other projects such as making invitations, designing a one of a kind scrapbook, or basically any project you can think of which would benefit from some graphics to give it the perfect look.

The idea of Luvly is to function as both a marketplace where people can buy and sell designs, and as a community where people can share tutorials, DIY ideas, and more. The site is meant to appeal to everyone from the part-time crafter to the full-time designer. There is a moderation process, too, where the Luvly admins approve every design submitted to the site, so you are getting a curated experience, not a free-for-all.

Categories for designs on the site include clip art, fonts, icons, Facebook banners, and printable templates. There's a nice-looking selection of Blogger templates. As you know, I'm a fan of the easy-to-use Blogger interface, and I like how these templates let you run a Blogger site while tweaking the design to make it look like something totally new. I'm tempted to buy one for this blog! Here's an example:

I think Luvly is a site to watch, and I imagine it will just keep growing as more designers start selling their work on the site--and more customers come to browse the affordable and classy offerings.

Meet Michael, Owner of SnapMarket, a Marketplace for Royalty Free Photos

SnapMarket is the marketplace for some of the cheapest, most flexibly licensed royalty free photos. SnapMarket has the highest quality photos, images, and illustrations, all from as little as $1. SnapMarket also pays their contributors some of the highest commissions in the micro-stock world. Check out this link to learn more about how to sell your photos on SnapMarket.

1. What gave you the idea to start SnapMarket?

As a web and graphic designer myself, I found that I was always purchasing royalty free stock photos and usually spending a fortune. The idea came about when I spent over $600 worth on photos for a client's website and it got me thinking: there must be a cheaper way to purchase good quality images. I had a good look around and could not find any stock photo websites that were offering high quality photos at a cheap price with flexible licensing terms, so this is when I decided to start SnapMarket.

2. What are the benefits your site offers for webmasters, designers, and other people who need to buy royalty free photos?

The benefits that SnapMarket offers are much cheaper images (from as little as $1), very flexible license terms, and no minimum spend. A lot of the other stock photo websites I have dealt with require that you sign up with them for a subscription or buy copious amounts of credits, even if you only needed just one single image.

3. How do you keep your prices so affordable?

We can keep our prices affordable simply because of repeat business. Our photos are high quality yet very affordable; this is what keeps our users returning and gets new users on board every single day. A website like SnapMarket is quite expensive to run, but we felt we needed to offer something different from all of the other overpriced, tightly licensed micro-stock photo websites.

4. Why do contributors like sharing their work through SnapMarket?

Contributors love sharing their work through SnapMarket because we pay some of the highest commissions in the micro-stock world, our website is user friendly, and we get our contributors' photos sold day in, day out.

5. What are some qualities that make a great photo for the web, in your opinion?

I feel that any photo can make a great photo for the web; it really just depends on what people are looking for. Obviously these photos must be high quality and convey the correct message to the target audience. The image size should also be scaled for fast loading times yet still be of reasonable quality for viewer enjoyment.

Thanks, Michael!

Wallpapers Chest: Free HD Wallpapers

I do like a freebie, so I was glad to find out about a new source for free HD wallpapers. Wallpapers Chest is free to use, and you can log in with your Facebook account. You'll find wallpapers in such categories as nature, travel, sports, and motorcycles.

The site recently topped 20,000 user uploaded wallpapers. The developers at Wallpapers Chest are continuing to work on their site; they're currently adding a team of moderators to review content uploaded by users. Each user can set up his or her own "favorites" page, so it's easy to keep track of images you like as you browse the site.

I was interested to find that people have uploaded a variety of vintage advertisements to the site, many from Russia, France, and other countries all over the world. Here's a sample...

For more information, follow Wallpapers Chest on Facebook.

Make Free Logos at FreeLogoWizard.com

I always like a good freebie, and as someone who isn't a graphic designer, I love free tools that help me with graphics I can use online. Enter Free Logo Wizard, a website that lets users create customized logos with thousands of logo templates.

To make a logo, you can click on a tag for a subject of your choice to find relevant templates. Tags include a wide variety of topics from "animals" to "industrial" to "technology" to "wedding." Once you select a template, you use the on-screen editor to change colors, add text, etc. In order to download your image without a watermark, you need to register at the site, but registration is free and just takes a few seconds.

Here's a little logo I created when I tried out the site. Cheers to Free Logo Wizard!