Twilight of the Idols

Design Some­thing Every Day 30/365

Very sad news. The cus­to­dian at my work was dust­ing and “acci­den­tally” knocked over on of my many Tikis. Trau­matic to say the least. Hope he doesn’t plan any surf­ing any time soon or he’ll find out, just like Greg Brady (see Sea­son 4 Episode 1), what hap­pens when you mess with might Ku. Or watch below:

Funny Graphic Design Videos

Some­times it seems that graphic design­ers are a seri­ous lot. After all, it is not the nor­mal per­son who becomes enraged at the use of papyrus as the sub­ti­tle font in Avatar. But to prove that design­ers and design can be funny I present these fol­low­ing clips deal­ing with design, advert­ing and worst of all Comic Sans.

101 Pho­to­shop Tips in 5 min­utes by Deke McClel­land. Funny, yet helpful.

You Suck at Pho­to­shop: Very crass, but very, very funny! You must watch both sea­sons of it, well worth it. As a bonus it has some decent tips for Pho­to­shop. Linked below is the first episode, and for poor Danny Boyle, it all goes down hill from here.

John Stos­sel from 20/20 dis­cussing graphic design, his advice on one par­tic­u­lar type­face is illuminating:

Movie Poster Designer: As some one who worked with film posters for sev­eral years, this isn’t that far off the mark. From the humor site, Funny or Die.

Font Con­fer­ence: A clas­sic from the humor site Col­lege Humor.

Font Fight: A sequel of sorts of Font Con­fer­ence. I love it when Hel­vetica goes after it’s rip off, Arial:

Life of a graphic designer, everything’s bet­ter with a lit­tle cute kid. From Cana­dian Designer “yosh­box” of Q Graphique.

Design­ing the Stop Sign by Com­mit­tee. I think every designer’s felt this way at one time or another.

How NOT to use Pow­er­Point. A hilar­i­ous, and true video on poor slide prepa­ra­tion. Life After Death Pow­er­Point from EMT Media on Vimeo.

Life After Death Pow­er­Point from EMT Media on Vimeo.

OGD: Orig­i­nal Design Gangsta

Focus Test­ing the Apple “Big Brother Ad” Open­ing video to the Hatch Award 2007 (an ad agency award), This is an actual focus group test­ing of the 1984 ad. This is the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor ladies & gen­tle­men.

A Few Good Cre­ative Men: A design related mash up of the clas­sic court­room scene from A Few Good Men.

Only the Best Ideas Win What hap­pens to all those ideas after the are born… lit­er­ally born in this case.

Ven­dor Client Rela­tion­ships in the Real World Pretty funny take on this sen­si­tive topic.

Last, but not least… What Hap­pens When your Father is a Graphic Designer A clas­sic old video, though why Comic Sans at the begin­ning? A bit sus­pect for the premise I’d say.

Digital Ephemera

A few inter­est­ing bits of dig­i­tal ephemera I’ve found on the infor­ma­tion super high­way in the last week.

Mid-century Mod­ern & Tiki

• Paul Malon’s Flickr Stream, an amaz­ing col­lec­tion of mid-century ephemera, you sim­ply MUST check this flickr pho­to­stream if you have any inter­est in the 1950’s.
• Summer’s offi­cially over, how­ever this is good advice on Tiki Torch Safety.
• Great posters from the 1950’s. Good inspi­ra­tion for design­ers or fans of the 1950’s from the great design inspi­ra­tion site Daily Inspi­ra­tion. Posters: Part 1 Posters: Part 2

Good Design resources, tips and tricks

• Lift­ing a logo from a PDF via David Airey’s other great blog Logo Design Love.
• HTML 5: What Design­ers need to know
• An impor­tant read, Typog­ra­phy Field Guide. Also from logo mak­ing mas­ter David Airey.

Design con­tests

• Pan­tone and Behance have a com­pe­ti­tion find­ing the best use of color in a design project.
• 125 video short­list announced today for YouTube Play

Info­graph­ics

• A cool poster: Grand Tax­on­omy of Rap Names

Free­bies

• Some great retro-inspired labels from Designer Cathe Holden’s great blog Just Some­thing I Made.
• Cool 70’s inspired vec­tor graphic from Allonzo Inc.
• Just in time for Hal­loween, a great col­lec­tion of blood splat­ter brushes for Photoshop

Illus­tra­tion

• One of my favorite illus­tra­tion blogs Urban Sketch­ers. Loads of inspi­ra­tions and great sketches from artists around the world.
• Ire­land based artist and designer Jen­nifer Farley’s illus­tra­tions are sim­ply amaz­ing. I can’t wait to read her (hope­fully) forth­com­ing children’s  book. Some pub­lisher needs to jump on her book.

If you have any cool design, art, tiki or mid-century links or thoughts let me know. Leave a com­ment or shoot me an email.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-19

• Sadly no Tia­mat from the D&D car­toon. Uh oh, I just outed myself as a D&D geek! RT @aextnet: Art­works of Drag­ons — http://bit.ly/dhxyNy #
• Cool post, oddly it makes me want to see #TRON Legacy! RT @PsDeluxe: Cool glow in the dark videos. http://bit.ly/d5B2Tq #
• RT @ebertchicago: Werner Her­zog and Errol Mor­ris have a TIFF con­ver­sa­tion. Com­plete video in my new blog, just posted. http://j.mp/9r0RnJ #
• An extremely use­ful post via @css­rex: Top 10 Effec­tive Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) Tech­niques | CSS­ReX http://goo.gl/jnes #
• 25 Best/Beautiful Flash Web­sites | CSS­ReX http://goo.gl/NSOS #
• Funny idea, but do they HAVE to use comic sans? Wel­come to JesusToasters.com http://jesustoasters.com/ #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-05

• Great Brand­ing! Wright Broth­ers Oys­ter & Fish Bar | Iden­tity Designed http://goo.gl/oxIa #
• Great tunes! omg best album ever: http://kurtlorenz.bandcamp.com/album/the-general-analysis-of-nature-ep #
• The Chart of Fan­tasy Art, 2009 | Orbit Books | Sci­ence Fic­tion, Fan­tasy, Urban Fan­tasy http://goo.gl/bJai #
• Get­ting my geek on… New #TRON Legacy Bill­board | The Dis­ney Blog http://goo.gl/AcXm #

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