Straw Dog Design is a hub for designer and blue sky day-dreamer Josiah DePaoli. It contains a blog, and a link to a portfolio and resume (you can find those above under "My Stuff"). It will change your life.
For b3ta.com’s latest image challenge they chose to center it around the theme of Steampunk and Victorian-era sci-fi. The Dance Dance Industrial Revolution image was easily one of my favorites and was submitted by user dunk3d. It’s easily one of my favorites, I also think the Alien throwback poster by Bela Lugosi’s Dad is a work of Victorian-era genius. Pop on over an check out the rest of the entries for plenty of Star Wars, original vehicle concepts, pop culture puns, and more.
I wrote about the newly-established Time Travel Mart a couple days back. Well, according to io9, it looks like 826LA has gotten their hands on some rather awesome posters, one of which you see above. Check out the other three, order some for your walls, and help some kids learn creative writing skills in the process. The poster set sports robots, fire, dinosaurs, and frogs and is the work of artist Amy Kate Martin. The posters are 1 for $19.99 or $69.99 for the whole collection. Have a good weekend everyone!
Ran across two great posts this week detailing important parts of the process. And no, “process” doesn’t involve ripping off some clip art and using it to win $200 in a crowd-sourcing contest.
1. The first up is Smashing Mag’s Vital Tips for Effective Logo Design, which includes the awesome graph to the left from Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design. If your logo design process looks nothing like that flow there, you’re doing it wrong. The post also includes some great case studies, presents 5 principles of good logo design, and links to a lot of other great resources. It’s really enough to make a crowd-sourcing addict’s face bleed…and I’m OK with that.
2. The next great find comes from Graham Smith who details the importance of studying the competition before starting on a logo. He also discusses how/when to implement this in to your design process.
Back in March I linked to a post on SmashingMag about redesigning Craig’s List. Although it presented some good ideas, I found it to be light on actual good design. Well now Wired Magazine has entered the fray and convinced some top designers to give Craig’s List a bit of a UI facelift (the example above is from Studio8’s Matt Willey). It’s a great, quick read and all of of the designers have included a short blurb about the changes they aimed to make.
I love it when I stumble across multiple goodies for my Type Tuesday posts because it allows me to have a good excuse for posting a type-only post. LET US BEGIN:
Union Room has a selection of 10 Free Calligraphic Fonts to download. Some of them are hideous, but some might be worth tucking away in your font folder.
And finally, Web Design Ledger has posted a collection of a surprisingly solid 28 Free High Quality Fonts. Also, there are links at the bottom to other collections they’ve assembled of san serif, serif, grunge, and hand drawn fonts.
In what might be one of the most awesome moves ever, cartoonist Nina Paley has decided to make the source files for her film Sita Sings the Blues freely available:
I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.
Pretty awesome if you’re an aspiring animator as it will allow you to essentially “pop the hood” of this film and look at how it was all put together. Paley notes that because of the new license you do not need her permission to “copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues.” Pretty awesome idea, it will be interesting to see what evolves from this.
Sometimes it’s good just to see awesome stuff as inspiration. With that in mind, check out these videos I dug up on Vimeo. (Hit the jump for the rest).
Subprime
The first is Subprime from beeple which reminds me of an infographic, just without all the usual information.
Pixelactic has compiled a collection of the logo design process through the eyes of of 16 top logo designers. THIS is a good place to get inspiration for your logo design process, unlike posts which merely present you with 50 different logos. It is also a great testament to why crowd sourcing a logo is a ridiculous and dangerous option for businesses: without a solid process behind your branding, there’s a good chance your branding is not original, and therefore completely worthless.
Mashable put up a list of incredible (and slightly creepy) augmented reality apps for either the iPhone or Android phones. These apps overlay information ontop of a video feed of the real world around you. They can identify underground subway tunnels, points of interest on a travel excursion, or–in the somewhat creepy example above–the social network of a person.Check out their list for all six.
I believe @pdxSchroeder and I share a similar disdain to the current trend of motion-type vids on the internet. Some of them were/are quite good, but it quickly evolved into a “me too” flock of rotating san serif typefaces that would sometimes hide/reveal themselves and if we got really lucky might squash/stretch. That is why this piece from Jackie Lay is so awesome. The type actually adds something to the look and feel of the song and works together to create a piece that no single part of it could have created on its own.
Straw Dog Design is a hub for designer and blue sky day-dreamer Josiah DePaoli. It contains a blog, and a link to a portfolio and resume (you can find those above under "My Stuff"). It will change your life. For more info about this site, check out my About page.
For b3ta.com’s latest image challenge they chose to center it around the theme of Steampunk and Victorian-era sci-fi. The Dance Dance Industrial Revolution image was easily one of my favorites and was submitted by user dunk3d. It’s easily one of my favorites, I also think the Alien throwback poster by Bela Lugosi’s Dad is a work of Victorian-era genius. Pop on over an check out the rest of the entries for plenty of Star Wars, original vehicle concepts, pop culture puns, and more.
