I was browsing through The Iconfactory website to see what was new, and came across their StockIcon royalty-free icon collections. Cool!

As much as I like designing screens, I tend to get bogged down in the icon design side of things. Now I can purchase an icon set of a number of common iconic elements–available in several visual styles–and save buckets and buckets of time. If there’s a downside, it’s that your screen design has to look as good as the icons; each one is lovingly crafted and buffed to gleaming graphics perfection, so this would be no small feat. Each set is $350, which–as the mighty Jeffrey Zeldman notes–is less than two hours of a (good) graphic designer’s time.

In the graphics utility department, I have been searching fruitlessly for a decent screen ruler package for Windows; One that didn’t look like ass, that is. To my great delight, I discovered that The Iconfactory has xScope, which is a collection of on-screen measuring tools…great for figuring out things like coordinates and checking browser sizes! Though it’s only available for the Macintosh, it’s nice to see that there is a decent screen utility available, period. More incentive to make The Switch!