[mnicole]

I might be in a different boat than many of my peers (and for this reason I wish HN had more designers), as I've started designing almost exclusively in the browser outside of some initial wireframing on paper, so my assets are CSS and not PSD. In that sense, I wouldn't mind using others' work because the ability to see the code and the output are valuable in determining if I'm going to (or can, browser-dependency pending) use it. I'm also able to change values on-the-fly to see if it looks good in different colors, dimensions, etc. With PSDs, I'm left waiting until I open the file to see how it was created, hope it was done right, and then try to tweak the Layer FX to suit my needs. I've also then got to go through and slice it up and sprite it out.

When I was using Photoshop exclusively I created everything from scratch, mostly just because I am a perfectionist and because it was another way to learn. As is the case today, the only assets I'm willing to download and pay for are icon sets and typefaces. If I see something someone else did and want to use something similar, I'll simply copy/paste the flat image into Photoshop and recreate on top of it to cater to my needs.

Emailing you now!