Stunning vector images at Designious

In a previous post I linked to sites where you can buy and sell vector images. Those sites have big collections of vector images made by many different artists, but this means that the quality of the illustrations are not always the best. But there are also sites dedicated exclusively to vector images made by one person, team, or company. Designious is one such site, and they have a huge selection of beautiful vectors to choose from.

Designious sells dozens of $15 themed packs with many vector images in each one. The categories include Floral, People, Nature, Buildings, Skulls, Scrolls, Halftones & Grunges, Wings, and more. These packs are also available in Mega Packs and Giga Packs, which are great if you want to buy multiple normal packs, because you can get them for half price! They also have dozens of striking T-shirt designs for $10 each.

If you want to try before you buy, you can go to their free downloads page, where you can find free vector packs, T-shirt designs, icons, and some stunning illustrations.

My favorite floral design is "Floral vector pack 19", which is filled with beautiful vines and flowers! Most of them are meant to be used as abstract silhouettes, but you can still color the vines and flowers separately with a little more work. Just copy and paste your image, and remove the part of the drawing you don't need (for example everything except a flower). Repeat until you have separate images for each part you want to give a separate color to.

I have also tried the "Cartoon girls vector pack", which contains 17 vector images of women in different poses, with different hair and clothes, and of different nationalities. My first thought when I saw them was that they would be perfect to use in personal websites and blog designs! I really love using vectors instead of bitmap images, because it's so much easier to change the colors to my liking. I had great fun changing the colors of their hair, skin, clothes, and even their make-up! Try doing that so easily in Photoshop :P

Users who don't have Illustrator might have some problems with the parts of the images that are colored with gradients - I use VectorDesigner, and some of the girls from this pack were missing clothing or hair! :P Luckily I also have ZeusDraw, and was able to get around this problem by importing the EPS file as a PDF, and then converting the PDF to objects. But if you're lucky enough to have Illustrator, you shouldn't have any problems ;)

Browsing through the Designious vector packs has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration for new designs, and I can't wait to get started! :D

Earn $50 for writing just one post!

Did that title get your attention? :P It's true, but there are more reasons to sign up with RevResponse than just the $50. Read on as I tell you about my experience with them.

The offer
I had signed up with RevResponse a long time ago, but I've been so busy lately that I hadn't gotten around to setting up my page (or mini-site) yet. I finally logged into my RevResponse account yesterday to set up my page, and saw that they're offering users $50 in the month of July just to write a post about them! For those of you who don't know what RevResponse is, it's a company that has a wide range of ebooks, whitepapers, software downloads, etc. to offer for free on your site, and you get paid every time someone downloads something.

Bits and Pixels accepted at PayPerPost!

Bits and Pixels has been accepted at PayPerPost, a paid blog reviews site! I've been hearing about all these people who earn a ton of money from their blogs, and I really wanted to start earning some money too so I could help my parents pay the bills.

So I signed up with a few paid-to-post sites, but my blog has not been accepted yet because it either doesn't get enough traffic or it's page rank is too low (Google hasn't assigned me a page rank yet). I also signed up on Social Spark, but my blog wasn't accepted because apparently I had too many sponsored posts, when in fact this post is actually my first sponsored post! I have resubmitted my blog, but they take a while to answer, and so I thought I'd sign up with PayPerPost in the meantime.

PayPerPost is owned by the same company as Social Spark, so I thought I'd have to wait a while for a response from them too, but they actually answered me the very next day! Granted, it was to reject my blog, but it was still an answer :P This time the reason was because my posts are truncated, and advertisers want their posts fully visible on the front page.

Now, I had decided to truncate my posts for three good reasons:

1. To make my blog faster to load. This helps especially when there are images in my posts.
2. So my readers could find posts that interest them faster and more easily.
3. To keep accurate statistics of which posts are the most read. This is also needed for the "Popular Posts" plugin I'm using.

I wrote back to them explaining why I truncate my posts, and asking if it would be okay if I left just the advertisers' posts full-length, and they sent me an email the next day agreeing. So far PayPerPost is the paid-to-post site with the most prompt customer service!

Something else I like about PayPerPost is that advertisers can also specify the tone in which the post must be written (positive, neutral, etc.), so bloggers can choose whether they agree or not. I have often wondered if certain posts I read on other blogs are sponsored, because they sound fake and positive, with no objective comments. This makes me trust the blogger less, so I'm glad I won't have to do that to earn from my blog. If that was the only way then I don't think I'd do it.

However, there aren't many opportunities I can take, because my blog hasn't been assigned a page rank yet. I would also prefer to only take opportunities that my readers would be interested in reading about. Hopefully I will get a page rank soon, and then I can take more offers!

With my first payment, I think I will buy a new domain name so I can start a personal blog - I often have things to post about, but I can't because they have nothing to do with Bits and Pixels! :P

So stick around or subscribe to my RSS feed, and I'll let you know when my new blog is up and running! ;)

ZeusDraw review

ZeusDraw is a vector application that I found a few days ago on MacZot. At first glance it didn't seem interesting, but I took the time to watch the demonstration videos and was blown away by the simplicity and intuitiveness of it's brush and color controls. I'm no expert with graphic applications, but brush capabilities are something even I have found sorely lacking in the cheaper (i.e. not made by Adobe) graphic applications for Mac. They all allow you to paint with a brush, but usually the only things you can customize are the size, color, and softness. With ZeusDraw, on the other hand, it's a different story entirely.