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Free stuff always comes in handy. Particularly if it offers a high quality one would usually expect from a quite costly commercial product. The latter holds particularly when it comes to typefaces and icon packs. On the other hand, when you are looking for some excellent desktop wallpapers to spark your creativity, it’s just damn hard to find the good ones. Well, not any longer.

Below you’ll find some excellent friday freebies — a high-quality font, high-resolution wallpapers and icons as well as a free WordPress admin theme. If you have any further suggestions please don’t hesitate to share them in the comments.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

Friday Freebies

Free Font: Museo (official site, semi-slab serif font, OpenType)
This OpenType font family comes in five weights and offers supports CE languages and even Esperanto. Apart from ligatures, contextual alternatives, stylistic alternates, fractions and proportional/tabular figures, MUSEO also has a ‘case’ feature for case-sensitive forms.

MUSEO font family has five weights (100 300 500 700 900). 3 weights are absolutely free (300 500 700) and 2 are commercial (100 900). To download the free weights you need to register. Designed by Jos Buivenga, the designer of Anivers, Diavlo and Delicious which can be downloaded from his site as well.

Dragon Soft Icons
A set of 6 free business icons, including the themes user, toolbox, printer, disk, column chart and briefcase. Free for non-commercial use.

SocksOff Wallpapers
A high-quality collection of high-resolution wallpapers which are free for personal use only.

Free High Resolution Wallpapers
Crestock offers a selection of sexy, abstract, nature and photographic wallpapers, both widescreen 16:10 (1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1600) and full screen 4:3 (1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1600×1200).

Vlad Studio Wallpapers
Vlad Studio presents a growing collection of artistic wallpapers in a variety of resolutions. The ones listed below are the new ones.

The Desktop Wallpaper Project
“Here’s the plan: I’ll be releasing one desktop wallpaper every Wednesday morning (California time) until I run out of wallpapers. They’ll be free to download, and come in a multitude of monitor sizes, as well as iPhone and PSP versions just for the fun of it. As of writing this, there are 60 artists involved with the project, some of them providing multiple wallpapers.”

Fluency WordPress Admin Theme
An extended and more user-friendly WordPress admin interface, designed by Dean Robinson. The menus are rearranged; main menus are down left and sub menus are placed across the top.

To install the theme download the zip file, extract the contents and upload the whole ‘wp-admin-fluency’ folder to your web server. Then go into your WordPress admin and go to the ‘plugins’ page, activate ‘Fluency Admin’ and you will instantly be using the theme. A nice alternative to the Admin Drop Down Menu plugin.

Further Resources

You might want to check out the following articles we’ve published earlier:

• (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
  Stunning desktop wallpapers related to typography, art, technology, photography and abstract themes.
• 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
  Amazing free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop.
• 100 Excellent Free WordPress themes
  Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested. They all can be used for free in personal and commercial projects.
• 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
  An overview of over 40 excellent free fonts you might use for your professional designs in 2008.

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