For Photoshop users, they have plenty of brushes that can be used in their design. Some brushes are just plain image/drawing/illustration - so they can use it without having to draw them separately. But for those who are not using Photoshop - like myself, a Fireworks user - we don't have much options, except for vectors or by creating it ourselves. Another alternative is to use fonts. Yes, font. Fonts are not just for text anymore since there are a lot of fonts consist of graphic illustrations or drawing or even scanned pictures. Fonts can be resized to be very huge or small - so it works much like vectors. Here are some useful and nice fonts that you can use as your graphic elements:

Fixed footer design can be very attractive if a website designer could pull it off correctly - especially with the help of some well-designed PNG graphics. If you are not sure on how to code for a cross-browser fixed footer, you can try this method. Examples DivVoted. User can minimize/maximize this nicely designed 'island'.