Being a designer i am following lots of designers on twitter and lots of them are following me. While following them i have seen their twitter backgrounds, lots of them were creative and inspirational. So i compiled creative backgrounds of 50 designers on twitter for you.

Please note that these are not listed in any particular order.

1. mike9r@twitter

2. randaclay@twitter

3. simplebits@twitter

4. jophillips@twitter

5. justcreative@twitter

6. imjustcreative@twitter

7. tonychester@twitter

8. larissameek@twitter

9. stillframe@twitter

10. collis@twitter

11. adii@twitter

12. chrisspooner@twitter

13. tutwow@twitter

14. cattlecreative@twitter

15. aaronmillerillz@twitter

16. dremeda@twitter

17. _enzo@twitter

18. webdude75@twitter

19. Murph2che@twitter

20. colourofair@twitter

21. bluewavemedia@twitter

22. jodyphillips@twitter

23. imageDpi@twitter

24. Firgs@twitter

25. jonfollett@twitter

26. SeraphimChris@twitter

27. rainandsprout@twitter

28. ThinkDesign@twitter

29. jwhedon@twitter

30. adesignapart@twitter

31. keylimecreative@twitter

32. artistech@twitter

33. tasarhane@twitter

34. graphicidentity@twitter

35. theleggett@twitter

36. 939design@twitter

37. NIK0_BELLIC@twitter

38. adamkayce@twitter

39. thecatat7@twitter

40. Hicksdesign@twitter

41. emilychang@twitter

42. cssgirl@twitter

43. ijustine@twitter

44. carterartist@twitter

45. alexdesigns@twitter

46. Jonathan360@twitter

47. boagworld@twitter

48. djuro@twitter

49. anousone@twitter

50. haleystar@twitter

So what’s in a starter kit? We think it varies – depending on what each designer routinely worked with. For GUI designers, keeping a copy of form elements (buttons, checkboxes, tab, drop down menus, etc) helps speed up the process of creating screens and layouts; on the other hand, browser (IE, Firefox Safari) templates with web safe area keep web designers reminded how/where they should prioritize their contents. Experienced designers will usually customize and keep a personal version of starter kit, some might have few too!

In today’s article, we attempt to show you some of the best design starter kit we’ve come to know. You can download (for free) and use them right away, or customize your own copy that will come in handy in future, your choice. Full list after jump.

GUI, Form Elements and Web Components

From form elements like checkboxes, input fields, textareas to web design components like buttons, arrows, icons, badges and more.

Yahoo’s Design Stencil Kit
Probably one of the most complete kit for designers. GUI elements include calendars, grids, menus, mobile (general and iphone), navigation and pagination, tabs, UI controls and more! Comes in several format: OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), PDF, PNG and SVG.

Web Form Elements
With all these tabs, buttons, dropdowns in one single PSD file, it’s sure going to give you a kick start in interface design. Courtesy of sniperyu.

Browser Form Elements PSD
Browser Form Elements PSD for Mac Firefox 3 and another for Vista IE7.

Flex Dark Skin
Sleek dark skin interface elements.

Famfamfam Icons
Whether you are designing for web or application, you should not miss these awesome little buttons by Famfamfam.
Shortcut to: Silk, Mini and Flag collections.

Peter’s DeivantART ID
Design ID cards made easy with this PSD template.

Deluxive Creative Pack
Distributed free by Deluxive, this creative pack PSD come inclusive of badges, grid frames, buttons, stickers and more.

Aero Avatar and SIG
Vista avatar and signature template in PSD.

Turquoise PSD
Vista elements.

Browser Screens Templates

If you are designing website in a Photoshop PSD file, it’s important to keep each browser and visible screen in consideration. These following PSD with different version of Firefox, IE and Safari web safe area will come in handy.

Browser Web Safe Area
Web safe area for Safari, IE and Firefox in different operating systems, all in downloadable PSD file.
Shortcut to: Mac OS X – Safari, Firefox. Windows Vista – IE, Firefox, Windows XP – IE, Firefox

960px Photoshop Grid Template
PSD grid template in 960px width to prevent yourself from composing with edges of the screen that may/may not actually be where you plan them to be.

(More) Browser Templates
If you are looking for even more browser templates (PSD), webdesignerstoolkit’s collection should be what you are looking for. These folks has templates for Opera, Camino and classic browsers like iCan, Netscape and Mozilla.

Web Browser Elements
Free standard HTML form elements or browser windows for Windows, and Mac OSX.
Shortcut to: Mac OS X – Safari, Firefox. Windows Vista – IE, Firefox, Windows XP – IE, Firefox

Browser Screens and Website Elements
Exclusive freebie Vector Pack from VectorTuts. It’s a useful set of vector website assets you can use to mock up your client projects, present your work, or get a quick visual while laying out websites.

Quommunication Starter Kit
If you are looking to kick of designing in PSD with a minial and basic PSD as guidance, Quommunication’s starter kit is probably what you are looking for. It comes with color templates, browser web safe area and basic form components all in one PSD.

Cursors

A typical screen capture (print screen) will not include the cursor in the output. If you depend on the cursor to help indicate and describe an image better, these following PSD packs might help.

Polished Graphite
2 sets of different mouse cursors by usedHONDA.

Photoshop Cursor Pack
Useful for those who create Photoshop Tutorials.

Product Design

iPhone GUI PSD 3.0
The image below gives you a clear idea what this PSD file consist. Utmost useful to mock any iPhone development interfaces. Created by teehanlax.

Here’s another one for the older version of iPhone.

iPhone PSD
High resolution iPhone interface.

Here’s for those who are looking for first gen iPhone interface.

Magazine PSD
If you are presenting something in magazine style, you will want to start with this PSD.

Paperbag

T-Shirt

DVD Plastic Case
Our collection of beautiful CD and DVD cases PSD templates.

Documents and Letters

In this post, we want to bring to your attention some of the really great search engines that will come in handy when it comes to image and icon search. Full list after jump!

Image Search Engines

• EveryStockPhoto

  A search engine for free photos come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos.

  

• Xcavator

  Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal for the creative community. You can quickly browse the way you think – visually – through millions of stock images.

  

• Ginipic

  Ginipic takes image search to a whole new level. Now you can search image search engines, photo sharing websites or your own local picture collections simultaneously.

  

• GazoPa

  GazoPa is a next generation similar image search engine in private beta. Users can search images from the web based on user’s own photo, drawings, images found on the web and keywords.

  

• FreeFoto

  FreeFoto.com is the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet. FreeFoto.com features exclusive images found nowhere else on the web with new pictures being added every week.

  

• TurboPhoto – Free Stock Images

  Browse and download 2,000 (3.4 GB) free stock images from 10 categories (view all thumbnails below). Stock images are in the public domain.

  

• Feelimage

  Feelimage is not only key words search. It is also equipped phrase search, that is images search engine ‘FeelPhrase®‘.
  It’s corresponding 127 colors, and has a technology that quantifies colors like ‘red’ ‘ blue’ in images.

  

• oSkope

  oSkope is a visual search assistant that lets you browse and organize items from Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo!Image Search and YouTube in an intuitive way.

  

• Incogna

  Incogna process the shape in every image and use this to build a large scale searchable visual index.

  

• Imagery

  Imagery search executes an keyword search and rollover results to get photo dimensions and options to open the source page or the image itself.

  

• ImageBase

  The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

  

• Pixolu

  An image search engine which lets you go deeper into the mechanism of image search and lets you find more relevant images using the image results it displays the first time you search.

  

• Picsearch

  Search the web for images. An image search service with more than 3,000,000,000 pictures.

  

• Picitup

  Picitup is a leading web 3.0 developer and provider of content based image search services.

  

• PicFog

  PicFog provides a real time image search.

  

• PicFindr

  PicFindr is a rich internet application (RIA) that helps you search several stock image and photo community sites simultaneously.

  

• Pixsy

  Pixsy powers video and image search experiences for some of the Internet’s leading brands including Pearson, Lycos, National Lampoon, Cooliris, BuddyTV, Infospace, and many others.

  

• Biomed-Search

  Search for images from biomedical articles. Currently over 1 Million images have been indexed. BioMed Seach indexes image captions along with the citations to these images.

  

• Bing Image Search

  An image search engine on Bing.

  

• Compfight

  A Flickr image search tool.

  

• Tiltomo

  Tiltomo, where you can play with our Visual Search code using two sample databases from flickr.

  

• Altavista Image Search

  Altavista image search tool.

  

• Photogen

  The source for quality, high-res FREE stock photos and images.

  

• Yahoo! Image Search

  Image search engine on Yahoo!

  

• Google Image Search

  A very powerful image search engine provided by Google.

  

• facesaerch

  Enter a name and search for faces!

  

• Multicolr

  With the Multicolr Search Lab, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images, and find ones that share the same colours.

  

• PicBrk

  A real time image search.

  

• PD Photo

  PDPhoto.org is a repository for public domain photos.

  

• Stock.XCHNG

  Stock.XCHNG lets you browse through the categories of our huge gallery containing over 350.000 quality stock photos by more than 30.000 photographers!

  

Icon Search Engines

• Challenger IconDB

  Challenger IconDB (Icon Database) is a database that contains icons of various sizes and keywords attached to them.

  

• ICONLOOK

  ICONlook.com is a place where to find your icons and offers a pretty handy interface for searching and downloading icon files.

  

• Icons-Search

  The Icons-Search is an Icon Search Engine that helps you to find quality icons available on the Internet. You can find icons for Windows Vista and XP, Macintosh, Linux, icons for Desktop, Software, Website, Mobile, Presentation, in sizes from 16×16 to 256×256 in PNG format and sizes from 16×16 to 128×128 in ICO format.

  

• Iconlet

  Iconlet is simple search engine for free icons, images. For every image user get information about author, image resolution, graphics format and license type.

  

• IconFinder

  Iconfinder provides high quality icons for webdesigners and developers in an easy and efficient way.

  

• IconSeeker

  The IconSeeker.com is an icon search engine on web, it contents about 50,000+ high quaility icons and each icon has PNG, ICO and ICNS formats for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• Icon Library

  

• EasyIconFinder

  EasyIconFinder is a new Icon Search Engine that helps you find quality icons now available simple by filling in a keyword !

  

• Free Icons Web

  Free Icons Web is where you can browse and download Over 15,000 high quality Free Icons for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• Very Icon

  The VeryIcom.com is a icon search engine, it contents over 20000 high quaility web icons in more than 1000 icon packs. Each Icon has serval file formats such as PNG, ICO, you can free browse and download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• IconsPedia

  Search and download free icons in PNG format. Arranged by categories, that include animals, food and phones.

  

• I Hope YOU LOVE IT ! ENJOY IT WIHT US