The newest addition to the Envato network is GraphicRiver, a marketplace for graphics, vectors, icons, Photoshop files, and add-ons such as brushes. GraphicRiver should be an excellent resource for those who are looking to buy, as well as a great income-generating opportunity for anyone who wants to sell some of their work.

Vandelay Design is getting involved in the GraphicRiver launch by giving 100 readers $20 in credits (thanks Envato for the generous offer!). In order to get the $20 in credits you’ll need to leave your FlashDen/GraphicRiver username (if you have an account at any of the Envato networks it will work for all of them) in a comment on this post. The first 100 valid usernames that are left will be award with the credits. So if you don’t already have an account, go create one and come back to this post to comment. (Full terms and conditions are below.) In order to avoid having a comment get caught in a spam filter, I advise that you do not place any links the comment, just leave your username, and maybe a nice comment for the folks at Envato.

For the past few weeks I’ve had access to the beta site, and I’ve been able to download several files that are for sale. There are a few that I’d like to point out that I think may be of use to some of you.

Texture Brush Pack from Scott Wills

This is a set of 12 high-res brushes for creating textures. The set sells for only $3.

Water Colour Brushes from thomasfedb

There are 30 watercolor brushes in this pack, plus 3 splatter brushes. They are high-res and excellent quality, and they sell for $5.

Folder Brochure Mockup from ranfirefly

These folders could be excellent for the right project. The price is just $2.

Cube Box Mockup from ranfirefly

If you need a cube or a box for one of your designs, it may be quicker and easier to customize this than to make your own. The price is $3.

Why Buy from GraphicRiver?

Personally, I’m excited about the launch of GraphicRiver because of the opportunity to buy some great brushes and graphics at very reasonable prices. I buy a decent amount of photos from sites like iStockphoto, but finding the right graphics can be difficult. With the prices and the quality that’s available at GraphicRiver, it’s often more time efficient to purchase a file than it is to work from scratch in Photoshop or Illustrator.

In the case of brushes, you may be hesitant to buy something when there are so many free brushes available online, but a majority of the free brushes are only for personal use, not commercial. Finding the right brushes that you can use on client projects is usually not easy, so you’re probably better off to spend a few dolllars and save that time, plus these brushes are higher quality than most that you will get for free. The same thing goes for icons and background images.

Why Sell at GraphicRiver?

Many of you talented designers may be interested in GraphicRiver as a source of income. Something worth pointing out is that the Envato marketplaces recently gave a big pay raise to their sellers. You can now make between 40% – 70% on files that you sell at GraphicRiver, or their other sites.

Based on what Envato has done with their other marketplaces, I think it’s safe to assume that they’ll be doing some advertising and plenty of promotion to make it easier to sell your files. Their existing network makes it very likely that you could start making some real money very quickly by selling at GraphicRiver.

Terms & Conditions for Giveaway

1. Entrants must comment a valid FlashDen / GraphicRiver username.
2. Entrants may only enter once, usernames will be cross referenced with IP addresses, emails and other parameters to ensure fairness.
3. Credits are not exchangeable for cash and will be made within 10 days of the posting regardless of whether the quota of 100 valid entries has been met.
4. Entrants who receive the credit will receive an email informing them of the credit to their account.  No other notice of “winners” will be made.
5. The first 100 valid individual usernames will receive a credit of US$20 to their accounts to spend on GraphicRiver.

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

Here is Theme Galaxy’s description of Lyra:

All you would expect from a blog. On the homepage there are featured blog posts, RSS subscriptions, a bit about the author, recent headlines, comments and category listings, your twitter and flickr feeds and a large tag cloud. Lyra also offers you the opportunity to change/rotate the header image between 4 different options.

If you’re not familiar with Theme Galaxy, they currently have five different premium themes to offer, and developer’s licenses are available. Lyra normally sells for $80, so this is a nice prize for the winners (At the time of this publication, all themes are on sale for $60. I’m not sure how long this promotion will last).

How it Works:

To enter to win one of the free themes, please leave a comment on this post with a valid email address where you can be reached (only one entry per person, please). Tomorrow (Friday) I’ll choose the winners randomly and they will be contacted to claim their prize.

Good luck!

UPDATE: The contest has ended. Our randomly selected winners are Frederick and Mario. Enjoy the theme!

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

With BannerSnack anyone can easily and quickly create banners and flash animations online with no software required. To learn more about BannerSnack you can view some of their tutorial videos.

The Rules:

In order to win one of the five licenses, all you need to do is leave a comment on this post (comments are held in moderation, so if it doesn’t show up right away, don’t worry). Please, only one comments per person.

Be sure to leave a valid email address where you can be reached in case you win. On Monday December 29th I’ll use a random number generator to select the five winners. Good luck!

Update: The contest is now over and we have the five winners. Thanks to everyone for participating. Here are the lucky winners:

• Dan Long
• Paburmester
• Brandon Sheats
• Johnny C
• Sonali Agrawal

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

If you’re not familiar with Templatica, there are two options for using/buying the templates. A one-year membership costs $24, or you can buy individual templates for $5 a piece. All of the templates use valid XHTML and CSS coding, and have been tested in all major browsers. Alen is a skilled designer and all of the templates will give a website an attractive and professional appearance.

Many of you may know Alen as the man behind CSS Globe. I have been subscribed to CSS Globe for well over a year, so I’m excited to participate in this giveaway with Alen.

The Rules:

If you’ve participated in other giveaways from this blog recently this one will be very similar. All you need to do to enter is leave a comment on this post (make sure you leave a valid email address where you can be reached in case you win).

On Saturday, December 20 I will use a random number generator to select the three winners based on the comment number (chronologically). At that time I’ll email the winners and I’ll update this post.

Here are a couple of screen shots from some of the templates from Templatica.

Update:

The contest is now closed. Thanks to everyone who left a comment and participated, the response was very strong. And of course, thanks to Alen and Templatica for the freebies. Keep your eyes open for more contests and giveaways, there are a few planned for the next month.

Here are the winners (they have all been emailed):

• Lonnie
• Mike H.
• Nibbo

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

The people at FlashEff and Jumpeye Components are giving away 3 FlashEff Premium Unlimited licenses to readers of Vandelay Design! If you’re not familiar with FlashEff, it’s a great resource for quickly and easily creating Flash animation without coding.

FlashEff Premium is the first flash 3rd party AS3.0 component that is 100% compatible with both Flash CS3 and Flash CS4! FlashEff can be used by anyone who knows a little Flash from a total beginner to a Flash guru.

FlashEff comes with over 140 included patterns, including button patterns, text patterns, and symbol patterns. There is also an admin panel to make FlashEff easy to use. The Premium Unlimited License sells for $149, so this is a great prize to win! Besides the unlimited license, a one-month license and a six-month license sell for $39 and $99 respectively.

The Rules:

To enter the contest all you need to do is leave a comment on this post. If you have a particular project or purpose that you would use FlashEff for, feel free to mention it in your comment. On Sunday, December 7th I’ll choose three random winners and I’ll update this post and email the winners.

Be sure to leave a valid email address where you can be reached in case you win. The winners will then need to create an account with Jumpeye (unless you already have one), and they’ll add the Premium Unlimited license to your account so it can be downloaded.

Also, please note that you will need Adobe Flash CS3 or CS4 to use FlashEff.

Visit FlashEff to learn more. Good luck!

UPDATE: The contest is now closed. Here are the winners:

• Greg Givan
• Christian
• Chaitanya VRK

Congratulations to the winners (I’ll be contacting you by email shortly)! Keep your eyes open for upcoming contests and giveaways.

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

The winners of the With Style theme are:

• Ben’s Choice – IcyOne2 (chosen because theme theme will be used to support recycling, which is also an interest of Ben’s, and because the theme style will go well with that type of site).
• My Choice – Mel Ndiweni (chosen because the theme will be used to document a trip to South Africa and show people how to get involved. My wife was born in South Africa so this one stood out to me).
• Random Winner – Nouman Saleem, comment #19.

Congratulations to the winners! I’ll be emailing you shortly with instructions. If you didn’t win this time, keep an eye on DesignM.ag where a different premium theme will be given away next week!

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

If you’re not familiar with Templamatic, it is a marketplace for a variety of premium themes and templates. Currently the site includes WordPress themes as well as HTML and CSS templates, with some other additions possibly on the way in the near future.

Designers and developers can upload and sell their themes at Templamatic for 65% commission on the sale. Buyers have a number of options as there are almost 30 templates/themes currently for sale.

The theme that is up for grabs, With Style, is designed by Maleika Attawel and it features an artistic and textured look. It normally sells for $50. You can get a preview of the theme at Templamatic.

If you want to be one of the lucky winners, simply leave a comment on this post stating why you would like the theme or what you would use it for. Be sure to leave a valid email address where I can contact you. The winners will be chosen Thursday evening (in the U.S.), so get your comments in before then.

The three winners will be chosen as follows:

• 1 winner will be drawn randomly.
• 1 winner will be selected by me.
• 1 winner will be selected by Ben Harper of Templamatic.

Ben and I will base our choices on the comments. Good luck!

Thanks to Ben for this giveaway. If you’re not familiar with Templamatic please take a moment to visit the site.

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

Chances are you’ve heard about WooThemes in the past few weeks or seen their advertisements on design-related sites and blogs that you visit. Well, here is your chance to grab one of their high-quality premium themes for free. They have kindly offered to give away a free theme to one of our readers.

Here’s how it’s going to work. If you would like to get your hands on a single-user license to your choice of three popular themes (ProudFolio, Vibrant CMS, or Fresh News) leave a comment on this post stating why you would like to win the theme or what you would do with it (please, something more than “I want it.”). On Sunday (August 3rd) I’ll use Random.org to choose a random comment number as the winner. Please leave a valid email address where you can be reached so I can get in touch with you if you win.

The Themes that are Up for Grabs:

ProudFolio

This theme was created especially for aspiring designers and anyone else needing to display a portfolio. It has plenty of cool features, including the separation of your portfolio and your blog.

Vibrant CMS

If you’re looking for a theme for a full website rather than a blog, Vibrant CMS may be just the right option. It has 20 different color schemes to choose from and it’s created specifically for small business owners.

Fresh News

Fresh News is the most popular theme at WooThemes. It has three different home page layouts to choose from and the ability to display it as a traditional blog rather than a magazine-style.

What is WooThemes?

If you’re not familiar with WooThemes, it is a recently launched premium theme marketplace that sells themes from four excellent designers: Adii, Magnus Jepson, Mark Forrester and Elliot Jay Stocks. They sell themes in a few different ways. Each theme can be purchased individually with a single-user license or a developers license to use the theme on multiple client sites. Additionally, they have a theme club that you can join for 3 or 6 months at a time, either for an individual user license or a developers license. As a club member you get access to all of the current themes and any future themes that are realized (they commit to releasing at least one new theme per month).

My Opinion of WooThemes:

To start with, the designers behind WooThemes are well-know and respected designers that you can count on for excellent work. I feel that the look of their themes is on par with the higher end of premium themes available today, and the price is very comparable as well. All of the current themes are available for $70 (for a single-user license).

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what separates a premium theme from a free theme, and I think you’ll see when you look at WooThemes. Each one has a number of options and features that you won’t find on free themes that can make life easier for the user and make the site/blog more customizable. Many of them offer different choices for layouts and color schemes as well as some other options.

Ok, leave your comment – good luck! Thanks to Adii and the guys for the giveaway.

Update:

The contest has just ended. The winner is Adam from Devjargon.  Congratulations Adam! Enjoy the new theme!

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to participate be casting a vote. I hope you enjoyed the tournament and seeing all of these great designs. I would consider doing this tournament again next year, so if you have an opinion one way or another please leave a comment. Also, feel free to make suggestions about how the competition could be improved if it is done again in the future.

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

Note: This competition ended a while ago and the poll has been removed.

N. Design Studio

Elliot Jay Stocks

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.