Every Sunday, assuming I have found the time to find anything particularly interesting in the week, I’ll post new loves and lusts and the occasional hate letter. Kicking off this Sunday in totally classy style, I reveal myself to be a cheap whore. (On the plus side, most clients appreciate this. No, not those kinds of clients.)

I’ll happily admit to being an iStock buyer of long standing, but honestly, it’s getting a little spendy. Virtually nothing there these days is a single $1 credit, and I don’t want to spend just over €3 for a single vector button, thanks. Also, the search is contaminated to the point of serious suckitude. Luckily, I have new resources so I can continue churning out blog fodder on the cheap!

• Lucky Oliver brought you the man himself in yesterday’s Jesus composite. It’s a very, very nice royalty free stock photography and illustration site, where images really are just a buck. It is also charmingly designed, and I have to say that from a UI point of view, the image search options are extremely user friendly. I’m running all searches at Lucky Oliver first now, and using iStock as a backup whilst Oliver’s inventory grows.
• Far fewer images, but totally gratis, are the vector art illustrations at Vecteezy. There are some really nice illustrations, objects, icons and buttons here.
• Wear Pallets joined my sidebar this week courtesy of nouns at One More Hour. WP is nicking daily photos from street fashion blog The Sartorialist and using them to create web design colour pallets. There are some decent results there, and the colour combinations are very trendy for all you bleeding edge designers.
• Even better, though, is COLOURlovers. My God, all I do is drool. I pretty much want to make websites in every single one of those colour schemes. Forever. The Trends section has the best combos.

If you only check out one of these sites, go with Lucky Oliver. It’s new, it’s growing, it’s indie, and it has an active, supportive user base. These people are going to do great things.