ED Awards 2008

The European Design Awards is the comprehensive annual awards organization celebrating the best of graphic design, illustration and digital design in Europe. Being a joint effort by 14 communication design magazines from across Europe...

The ED-Awards is one of the industry's key schemes, and a brilliant way to publicize your work on an international level.

The deadline for submissions is February 14, 2009. Reasons to submit your work : ed-awards.com

Sponge Vector Textures

A free Adobe Illustrator texture resource from peacefreak99. The textures in the pack can be used for creating grungy backgrounds, applying a grunge effect to vector elements in your composition or vector masking.

You can try exploring possibilities with different Pathfinders and Shape Modes in Adobe Illustrator (Window>Pathfinder).

Note: To use, open the PDF file with Adobe Illustrator (File>Open>Choose File; Do not use click and drag). Download

Background Design with Adobe Illustrator

A useful tutorial for Adobe Illustrator that shows a step by step process of composing an abstract background in vector format using the gradients and blends. Full tutorial by NDesign Studio

Free Rising Sun Vector Brushes

This set contains 28 high resolution brushes for Adobe Photoshop CS, CS2, CS3 and CS4. The size of each shapes is 1280x1024 pixels. If you want to convert them to vector you can easily do so by following the steps in this tutorial.

You can use them for create abstract / minimalistic vector backgrounds. Download

For more Adobe Photoshop brushes of that kind, you can have a look at the Author's DA Profile.