The Swish Life is a fresh, new lifestyle magazine dedicated to those who love a little bit of everything.

Whether its the latest in culture, up-to-date tech debuts, or the newest cars on the market, we’re there. Regardless of your interest(s), The Swish Life strives to provide you with everything from an ongoing art exhibit to men’s beauty tips (and we know you want them).

Launched in late 2009, we’re on our way to bringing you what you need, love and want: an e-magazine that delivers you everything in one.

Whether you’re tuning in for a news update, perusing the latest sculptors, or seeing what’s the latest on the runway, we welcome you to The Swish Life. With this design we worked with the great Liam at We Function and Derek at Valen Designs.

And suggestions? They’re always welcome. Fire them at us at contact@theswishlife.com

View our latest launches

TheSwishLife.com The Swish Life Magazine
Ecoki.com The Most Active Eco Community
Applereviews.com The site for everything apple
Enviramedia.com Environmental Investment Group
Designslurp.com The home page for Vector illustrators
Tweethawk.com Nature Based Free Twitter Wallpapers

We love prowling the web for the latest trends and design inspiration. Here we have composed a list of common resources we use. The primary focus of this list is inspiration, it can come from a photograph, font, or a website. The secondary focus is improving your design skills, which can be done by keeping up to date with tutorials and reading other graphic design blogs. We hope you enjoy our personal list of great sites, and we will be adding to this list in the coming weeks and months as there are a lot of great new sites coming online every other day now.

OUR LATEST DESIGN RELATED SITES:

Free Vector Art Files

Free photoshop file downloads

Css website gallery nature based

Free website templates downloads

Free Stock Photos and Templates

Free Font Downloads

Free Fonts and Other Resources: Web Page Publicity
Huge Collection of Free Fonts: Da Font
Nice Selection of Free Fonts: Urban Fonts
Fonts and Other Freebies: Simply The Best Fonts
1001 Free Fonts for Download: 1001 Free Fonts
Over 9000 Free Fonts: Creamundo
A Small List of Free Fonts: Best Free Fonts

Paid Font Sites

A Large Selection of Fonts for Purchase: My Fonts
Quality Fonts for Purchase: Veer
Information and Fonts for Purchase: Fonts
Font Resources and Sales: Font Haus

Stock Photos and Vectors

The Best Stock Photo and Vector Website
Quality Photos for Purchase: Shutterstock
Stock Photos and Other Pay Downloads: Veer
Quality, Affordable Vectors for Purchase: Vector Stock
Stock Photos With a Great Selection: Jupiter Images
Stock Photos and Photography Network: Stock Vault
Quality Stock Photos: Corbis
Free Stock Wedding Photos Wedding Photographer Victoria Vancouver BC

Free Photos and Vectors

Submit Vectors or Download Others for Free: Free Vector Art
Tons of Great Free Vectors and Photos: Deviant Art
59 Pages of Free Vector Art: Free Vectors
Quality Vector Downloads: Vector 4 Free
Neat Collection of Free Photos From Around the World: Free Stock Photos
Great Collection of Free Vectors and Resources: You The Designer
Great Free Stock Photos: Free Foto
A List of Free Downloads: Bittbox
700 Free Stock Photos: Free Picture Click

Website Templates

A Few High Quality Wordpress Themes: Evan Eckard
Over 2000 Free Web Templates: OSWD
A Large Selection of Nice Templates: Free Website  Templates
A Large List of Free Templates: Free CSS Templates
Nice Wordpress Templates for Download: Free CSS Templates
A Combination of Free and Pay Templates: Free Templates Online
Affordable, Quality Templates: Templamatic
Free Blog Templates: Blogging Themes

CSS Galleries

The Best Nature Sites on the Web: CSS Nature Website Gallery
A Frequently Updated Gallery of Sites: CSS Mania
An Organized List of Nice Sites: Most Inspired
CSS Gallery of Quality Sites: CSS Design Yorkshire
A Selection of Only Nature Based Sites: CSS Nature
A Selective List of Well Designed Sites: Web Creme
High Quality CSS Showcase: CSS Tux
Nice CSS Websites: The Designed Tree
A CSS Collection Organized by Category: CSS Elite

Inspiration

A Great Site About Everything Type: I Love Typography
An Incredible Illustrator: Burst of Beaden
A Great Designer and Illustrator: Fully Illustrated
Customizable List of Design Resources: Cork Dump
The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada: GDC
Freelance Advice Blog and Resources: Freelance Switch
Amazing Collection of Logos: Logopond
Stunning Desktop Wallpapers: Desktopography
A Graphic Design Magazine: Computer Arts

Tutorials

The Best Photoshop Tutorials: PSD Tuts
A Talented Photoshop Designer: Abduzeedo
Photoshop Tutorials and Web Design Resources: Web Design Library
Tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator and More: Tutorial Vault
A Few Neat Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials: Design Spice
Great Photoshop Tutorials and Downloads: PS Wish
Tutorials for Every Computer Program: Tutorialing

Free Photoshop Downloads

A Couple Free Patterns for Download: Design Spice
Free Photoshop Brushes: Design Fruit
Free Photoshop Actions: Visual Blast
Tons of Free Photoshop Brushes: Brusheezy
A Few Nice Free Photoshop Brushes: Obsidian Dawn
Great Grunge Brushes and Others: Photoshop Brushes
Free Background Patterns for Photoshop: Free BG
Over 150 Free Background Patterns: Squidfingers

Design Blogs

A Frequently Updated Design Blog: Veerle’s Blog
A Design Magazine and Blog: Smashing Magazine
A European Design Blog: Design In Europe
A Unique Nerdy Blog: Design You Trust
The Personal Blog of a Graphic Designer: Larissa Meek
A German Design Blog: David Hellmann
The Blog of a Canadian Geek/Model: Mostly Lisa
A Graphic Design Blog: Bittbox
A Blog About Freelance Graphic Design Advice: Freelance Switch
A Design Blog Full of Resources: You The Designer
A Popular Design Blog: Fazai 38

Colour Palettes

A Flash Site of User Generated Colour Palettes: Adobe Kuler
Using Colours From Photos: Colr
Colours, Palettes and Patterns: COLOURlovers
A Colour Palette Generated From Your Images: Color Palette Generator
See The Results of Your Palette on a Website: Color Spire
Create and Email Colour Palettes: Color Blender

Tips and Tricks

Vector Do’s and Dont’s: iStockphoto
The Web Design Polish: PSD Tuts
Promote Your Design Business: Freelance Switch
How To Increase Web Traffic: You The Designer

Coders

$50 per page awesome psd to xhtml DROPNCHOP.COM (We recommend them, and use them)
Quality Programming: XHTMLized
Professional Web Slicing: PSD Slicing
Affordable, Quality Coding: PSD2HTML
From Design to Code, Quick and Cheap: Front Enders

Designer Geek Merch

Great Nerdy Clothing and Accessories: Veer
Nice T-Shirt Collection: Designer T-Shirts
Graphic Design T-Shirts and Accessories: Cafepress
Geek Merchandise For Everyone: Think Geek
Graphic Design T-Shirts: Zazzle
Unique T-Shirt Designs You Can’t Find Anywhere Else: Allmightys
Web Templates

Newly added resources

A great new marketplace for stock graphic design: Inkd.com
A fantastic resource for finding information on corporate brand identity: Brands of the World
We just launched a fun eco focused site ecoki.com
Our Free Vector File Site is launched.
Free Photoshop File Downloads

AppleReviews.com is giving away $5,000 worth of Apple accessories, hardware, apps, software and more in our Hyper Giveaway!  Visit applereviews.com, and join us on twitter at twitter.com/applereviews for a chance to win.

We will be doing weekly giveaways leading up to the Hyper Giveaway in September.

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Applereviews.com provides you with up-to-date information, news, reviews, and articles about everything Mac-related.

From the latest news to the most recent obscure app, our mission is to develop a comprehensive hardware and software information destination, with daily published featured articles. We strive to bring you the best information possible, whether its in a detailed review, the newest hardware, or simply a useful tip.

Our passion and drive is based on for bringing you the best of Mac; hatched mid-2008, our goal is to swiftly grow into a top internet resource for all things Apple. Designed and Developed by Studio 7 Designs Inc, with help from wefunction on the Wordpress Design.

We welcome your opinion, ideas, and recommendation; please contact us or visit our contribution page for more information on how you can get involved!

Visit AppleReviews.com

We made the TweetHawk logo available for CandyBar as well as available as an icon pack. All the images are under the Creative Commons 3.0 licence. Basically use as you like other then for commercial use, and a link back to Studio 7 Designs is appreciated but not required if you find a good use for the icons.

We just launched Tweethawk Twitter Backgrounds, a free twitter backgrounds gallery. Since we wanted to make only the highest quality designs, it is taking us some time to make each background image. We hope to have 10 designs in total launched soon.

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DOWNLOAD ICON PACK (PNG)

DOWNLOAD CANDYBAR ICNS PACK (OSX)

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View our latest community site. Ecoki.com

We are excited to launch the first site on the Slurp Network today. Design Slurp is a site dedicated to the design community. We feature some of the top blogs, galleries, magazines, and tutorials all in one home page.

We have a ways to go with this site and will be updating the site with more sites and information in the coming months. Please feel free to send us your feedback on how we can make this design home page even better!

Visit DesignSlurp.com

The main above the fold shows the Slurp Network drop down, as well as the latest in design news today.

We love PSDTUTS and had to add their latest tutorials to the main page..

Our favorite quality CSS design site Best Web Gallery was chosen for the latest sites.

If you would like to send us feedback, or inquire about advertising rates. Please email contact@enviramedia.com

View our latest launches

Ecoki.com The Eco Community
Applereviews.com The site for everything apple
Enviramedia.com Environmental Investment Group
Designslurp.com The home page for designers and illustrators
Tweethawk.com Nature Based Twitter Backgrounds

We have been very busy working on quite a few projects in the last year and finally are ready to roll them out one at a time over the next couple of months. Here is a preview of some of the projects and what we have been up to!

We will have individual posts about the new projects and what we have planned for them, but quickly here are some of the latest launches. Some of them are live and some are about to launch in the next week or two.

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Twitter

Follow us on Twitter at EnviraMedia and Ecoki … We look forward to hearing from you!

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Ecoki.com The Sustainable Lifestyle Community

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TweetHawk Twitter Backgrounds

We just launched Tweethawk Twitter Backgrounds, a free twitter backgrounds gallery. Since we wanted to make only the highest quality designs, it is taking us some time to make each background image. We hope to have 10 designs in total by the end of this month.

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Envira Media Inc Environmental Idea Lab

We are about a week away from launching our Environmental Media Company. (Yes we wish we could have gotten the domain EnviroMedia, but Envira has a nice ring to it and is close enough to Enviro) EnviraMedia Inc is our idea incubator and start up funding company. We are funding, and starting around 30 different online and offline initiatives that are focused on sustainable business models and environmental awareness.

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Team Ecoki at Kiva.org

We are happy to announce our Kiva.org Team Ecoki. We have managed to collectively raise enough funds as a business to be the 7th most donated business at Kiva.org with over $7,000US total raised within the first week. We hope you can join our team and help donate micro loans to hard working entrepreneurs around the world. We are only $6,500 away from beating out Microsoft in the amount of money raised! Our main goal is to beat Microsoft in donations by the end of 2009.

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Slurp Network Preview

We have been working on niche news and content network of aggregates. Called the Slurp Network. Here is a brief preview of what we hope to launch in the next few weeks. The first of the sites will be DesignSlurp.com.

We are excited about these launches coming up and will continue to update on these and more as they become ready to launch. Thanks to all the supporters on each project.

The EnviraMedia Team

TREEHUGGER is an amazing site that one could spend hours browsing through. The articles are very well written and cover a broad range of environmental topics. All of which, are easy to find, due to their well-designed navigation.

Along with Treehugger’s large quantity of articles, the site allows the user to interact by chatting on the forums, commenting on articles, taking quizzes and much more. The site also deserves recognition of one of the only Job Boards that focuses on green jobs.

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View our latest community site. Ecoki.com

ZEROFOOTPRINT (zerofootprint.net)

Zerofootprint focuses mainly on Carbon Offset topics. They have an interactive Personal Carbon Manager that allows you to calculate your carbon footprint and purchase carbon offsets (for home and/or business). As well as downloadable information sheets regarding managing your carbon output.Another feature of the Zerofootprint site is a database of articles, events and initiatives.

Zerofootprint also offers Enterprise Carbon Management (ECM), a method for helping  companies measure, monitor, and reduce carbon emissions. It’s an end-to-end, customizable solution that allows companies to measure and track the environmental impact of their business.

BREATHING EARTH (breathingearth.net)

Breathing Earth is an AWESOME site! It is a real-time simulation of what is currently happening in our world.  The site features statistics on every country in the world, including their population, CO2 emissions, births and deaths.Along with the individual country statistics, the site also tracks the current world population, and various statistics happening since you arrived at the site.

Once you get past the amazing real-time world, there is an entire information section on topics like CO2 emissions, climate change and recommended resources.

BLOGACTIONDAY  (blogactionday.org)

Blog Action Day has been going on for a few years now, you may have heard of it. Every October, bloggers world wide band together to discuss poverty to raise awareness of this issue that effects everyone. This website is the “home-base” for promoting Blog Action Day, and focuses on getting people involved year round through other outlets such as micro loaning through Kiva.org and Twittering about the issues.

EARTHEASY (eartheasy.com)

Eartheasy is a site designed to teach you ways to ‘green’ the different aspects of your life. It is basically a database of articles divided up by topic; Live, Grow, Eat, Play, Wear, Give. A bonus feature of the site is the Eartheasy Store that sells products for sustainable living.What makes the site extremely effective is the ease at which you can find articles, and the relaxed writing style that makes it easy to relate to.

ECORAZZI   (ecorazzi.com)

Ecorazzi is a fun site for those inclined to check out the daily gossip sites. This one follows the same premise, but with a green focus. Articles include: Celebrities Attending the National Biodiesel Conference, The show The Office features a Prius Driver, Sheryl Crow Designs an Eco Grocery Bag. The site is a lot of fun and allows you to easily navigate a variety of topics.

INHABITAT  (inhabitat.com)

Inhabitat is an environmental blog focused on home and lifestyle topics such as: Architecture, Home, Products, Gadgets, Fashion, Packaging, Transportation and Energy. The site contains lots of cool articles and the authors make sure to include lots of visual references and images. The site also features an online shop with a ton of products not available in retail stores. All environmentally friendly of course.

WE CAN SOLVE IT (wecansolveit.org)

We Can Solve It is a community of people petitioning to switch 100% of America’s electricity to clean energy sources – within 10 years. The Campaign was founded by Al Gore’s non-profit The Alliance for Climate Protection. The site features videos, success stories, articles and more. You can even sign up to their green newsletter.

GREEN LIVING (greenlivingonline.com)

Green living is a wonderful site with tons of articles on a variety of lifestyle topics. The site is a joy to browse through due to the well-designed navigation and all of the articles are really interesting. The site also features product reviews, slideshows and  links to related green blogs.

LIGHTER FOOTSTEP (lighterfootstep.com)

Lighter Footstep is a great site with articles on a variety of lifestyle topics. The site is full of really interesting articles and is easy browse through due to the well-designed navigation. Some of the topics include: Family, Garden, Health, Living, News and Recycling.

Ecoki The Eco Community! (ecoki.com)

Ecoki.com is a collaboration between Studio 7 Designs Inc and Envira Media. With well over 200 articles already written on a wide range of subjects, as well as hands on product reviews from some of the best eco focused companies around the world. Subscribe to the ecoki.com RSS feed for updated eco news and product reviews from around the world.

Green Globe Ideas (greenblobeideas.com)

Thank you to Navdeep for the recommendation.

We find it very helpful to build on our current design skill sets on a daily basis. An excellent resource site we have found (and check daily) is a site called PsdTuts. They offer Photoshop tutorials, inspiration, articles and an entire community of design related people. Another great design resource if you have time to check it out is the Flickr stream of user submitted artwork and completed tutorials.

Here we have composed a list of a few tutorials from PsdTuts that you might find useful when doing web and logo design.

How to construct a 3D shelf element in Photoshop

Our first recommendation is Creating a 3D Shelf Element, which is useful when designing a unique website. Even if your aren’t interested in creating a shelf element, this tutorial provides some neat tips on creating dimension.

How to create a brushed metal serface in Photoshop

The next tutorial we think you might find useful is Creating a Brushed Metal Surface. This tutorial is fantastic when creating a modern metallic logo for a client, or adding details to existing elements in web design.

How to create a slick web 2.0 footer in Photoshop

This next tutorial Creating a Web 2.0 Footer is a must read for any web designer. Not only does it have a link to a fantastic Web 2.0 Gradients package, but it provides inspiration for creating professional website footers.

How to create a textured tag element in Photoshop

This tutorial, Creating a Textured Tag, is fantastic when you need to come up with a different way of displaying a logo in a client’s website. It will also show you how to create details that give your designs a polished look.

How to create a wood texture in Photoshop

This Creating a Wood Texture tutorial is a great addition to your toolkit. With the growing trend of environmentalism and creating a natural, organic feel for websites, this is a valuable skill to understand.

Final thoughts
We hope you enjoy the site as much as we do. Doing tutorials can greatly improve your Photoshop skills and going to PsdTuts as part of your daily routine is a great way to accomplish that.

We wanted to create a list of nature based desktop wallpapers that would inspire. We have composed a selection of environmental inspired desktop wallpapers. Some are relaxing, others have stunning colour schemes, the one thing they all have in common is that they are all incredible examples of the amazing world around us.

We will be adding to this list as we find more amazing naturally inspired desktop wallpapers.
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View our latest community site. Ecoki.com

.Rain Cloud (1024×768)

Fruit Tree (1024×768)

Plum Blossoming (1024×768)

Zen Attitude (800×600)

Buzzards Roost (800×600) (1024×768)

Waterfall (2000×1333)

Hilltop Mountain Skys (1280×800) (1440×900) (1680×1050)

Leaf Dip (2000×1333)

Balloons Over Hills (1280×800)

Lake In The Highlands (800×600) (1024×768) (1280×1024)

Twilight Lines (1024×768)

Morning Light (800×600) (1024×768) (1152×864) (1280×1024)

Mountain Walls (1024×768)

Fall Leaves (800×600) (1024×768) (1152×864) (1280×1024) (1920×1200)

A Storm Is Coming (800×600) (1024×768)

August – Month Of Life (1680×1050)

Flower In The Morning Sun (1024×768)

Magic Tree (1024×768) (1280×1024)