Today is Halloween!

Happy Hal­loween from me and Jack Skeleton!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Hal­loween every­one! In honor of that let’s rock out with the Hal­loween House! I don’t know if I’d like being this guy’s neigh­bor, but it’s pretty cool.

2010 Thriller Light Show

2011 Party Rock Anthem Light Show

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-10-30

• When I was a kid I always wanted to live on one of these Space Colonies! http://t.co/LVFCpc7R #
• Great pop cul­ture Sil­hou­ettes by Olly Moss http://t.co/T3aAhG7y #vin­tage #
• Pho­to­Shop user inter­face design tuto­ri­als http://t.co/fwdyh2nC #
• Cool video, shot & edited on an iPhone 4 — OK Com­muter via @kurtl­rnz http://t.co/GhS705IJ # Read more »

Making the Penguin Mini Modern Classics

As a lover of lit­er­a­ture and design have quite a crush on Pen­guin Mod­ern Clas­sics. They have led the van­guard of book design and pub­lish­ing. They have a great series on their site about their new Mini Mod­ern Clas­sics Series. You can get a real behind the scenes look at all aspects of pub­lish­ing in the series. After you are done, make sure you go and read some of these great works, happy reading!

Part One: Road Test

Part Two: Ori­gins

Part Three: Copy Edit­ing

Part Four: Pic­ture Research

Part Five: Copy Writ­ing

How They Did It

For some inspi­ra­tion and relax­ation on a Fri­day, I thought I’d share some beau­ti­ful videos that show the behind the scenes process in some design and art projects. Note these are more art­ful than hands-on videos, so sit back and enjoy, because they are still worth the time.

Time Lapse Dig­i­tal Paint­ing From Unid Color
Watch this mas­ter dig­i­tal painter use Pho­to­Shop to cre­ate a beau­ti­ful world.

Mak­ing Of Cover from Paper Lux
A pretty cool video that shows how Paper Lux made a really nifty cover. Lovers of tri­an­gles includ­ing Buck­min­ster Fuller and Telly from Sesame Street would be proud. via Oh Have You Seen This

Novum 11/11 – Mak­ing Of Cover from Paper­lux on Vimeo.

Digital Ephemera for Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Another Wednes­day has rolled around, so here’s my weekly col­lec­tion of inter­est­ing dig­i­tal ephemera I’ve found pok­ing around the vast Inter­net waste­land. Think of me as your guide through the eclec­tic dig­i­tal desert…

Today’s Menu

• Art & Design
• Motion Graph­ics & Video
• Mar­ket­ing
• Social Media
• Some­thing Cool
• Some­thing Strange
• Some­thing Terrible
• Three Sites Worth Check­ing Out

Art & Design

Heather M. David’s Flickr Pho­to­stream.

If you are inter­ested in mid-century mod­ern design, Poly­ne­sian Pop or Goo­gie. Do your self a favor and check out Heather M. David’s flickr pho­to­stream. You will be treated to a cor­nu­copia of mid-century ephemera includ­ing match book cov­ers, gift wrap designs, signs and much more. It is really a treasure.

Nancy Duarte Interview

Check out this great inter­view with Pre­sen­ta­tion Designer extra­or­di­naire, Nancy Duarte. She has a lot of great insights about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, design and the pre­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion. I first learned about Ms. Duarte from read­ing the clas­sic book Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen and blog by Garr Reny­olds. If you haven’t lis­tened to Duarte’s TED talk or read Garr’s book, you sim­ply must, right now, I’m seri­ous! My favorite line from the interview:

Most design­ers aren’t strong com­mu­ni­ca­tors. The invest­ment in com­mu­ni­ca­tions would help the entire design com­mu­nity. Many time the shy design­ers have the strongest con­cepts but don’t have the skills to explain their thought process.” — Nancy Duarte.

The per­fect word when you don’t know what else to say!
Best.Graffiti. Ever. via Jux­tapoz Mag­a­zine

Motion Graph­ics & Video

Retro School Videos
This is a really great site, it col­lects var­i­ous mid-century edu­ca­tional films for your view­ing plea­sure. As they pro­mote them­selves on their web­site, “A free and fun way to sup­port your class­room or home­school cur­ricu­lum using time-proven Edu­ca­tional Films, News­reels, TV Shows,  PSAs, and Movies from the past.”

The only bum­mer about the site is it doesn’t allow you to embed the videos from their site. But since the films are in the pub­lic domain, it is easy to track them down on YouTube or Archive.org. Like I did for the fol­low­ing hilar­i­ous film, Law and Social Con­trols: Morals, Laws and Con­for­mity in Par­ent­ing The­ory Video (1949)

Bob
This is a great ani­ma­tion, very funny and clever. Make sure you watch the cred­its!

BOB from Jacob Frey on Vimeo.

Mar­ket­ing

Guer­rilla Mar­ket­ing for the Dig­i­tal Age: I Want To Draw A Cat For You
I read this great arti­cle on about the site “I Want to Draw a Cat for You” and  am amazed. Basi­cally, for $9 Chicago-based come­dian Steve Gadlin will draw a stick fig­ure cat for you. Seri­ously, that’s it. Sur­pris­ingly it’s been fairly suc­cess­ful, recently Gadlin part­nered with Groupon and sold 1,000 draw­ings in a sin­gle day.

The marke­ing video is clever for sure but, more impor­tantly there is an inter­est­ing les­son to be learned in this case study. This exam­ple shows that non-traditional mar­ket­ing chan­nels can be used to launch a suc­cess­ful project, even if it is of dubi­ous artis­tic merit. If you have a pow­er­ful and clever video or web­site that peo­ple will share with their social media net­works and you can com­bine it with the ris­ing power of coupon sites like Groupon then you have a great low-cost strat­egy for success.

via freelanceswitch.com

Social Media

Vir­tual Vandalism!

A new app that allows you to take a pic­ture of a build­ing, vir­tu­ally van­dal­ize it then share it! Pretty clever and prop­erty own­ers every­where thank you!

Some­thing Cool

Behind the Scenes: The Life and Death of Stars with Sean Austin and Sandeep Parikh.
Pretty funny video from the Spitzer Sci­ence Tele­scope.

Some­thing Strange

Turkey Chases News Pro­ducer.
I am sure this has to have been fea­tured on some “fail” type of site at one point or another.

Some­thing Terrible

Splash Moun­tain Rap
In the late 80’s and early 90’s Rap Music hit the main­stream, so nat­u­rally mar­keters tried to cap­ture the lat­est youth craze to pro­mote their prod­ucts to the youth of Amer­ica. Just as nat­u­rally their ham-fisted approach cre­ated some­thing very, very bad. So in that vein, I present to you, the Splash Moun­tain Rap.

Three Sites Worth Check­ing Out

• Lynda.com The best inter­net based video train­ing site for learn­ing graphic design software.
• bufferapp.com A handy site that let’s you set up a sched­ule for send­ing out tweets.
• shorpy.com Cool his­tor­i­cal photo archive (though the actual images orig­i­nally came from the US National Archives)

15 Great Free Handwritten Fonts

Ah, it’s Tues­day and that means it is typog­ra­phy time! This week, here are 15 fonts that can come in handy when you need that faux-handmade qual­ity. If your pen­man­ship is less than art­ful or you are run­ning out of time, one of these hand­writ­ten script fonts can really come in handy.

As always, please note that even though they are free to down­load and use, make sure you read the license before use them for com­mer­cial pur­poses. It is impor­tant for these great artists to get the com­pen­sa­tion they deserve; Typog­ra­phers can’t live on Bézier curves alone!

Honey Script by Dieter Steffmann

Jel­lyka Estya Hand­writ­ing by Jel­lyka Nerevan

Jour­nal by Fontourist

Halo Han­dlet­ter by Mario Arturo

The Only Excep­tion by Kim­berly Geswein

Ma Sexy by Mar­garete Antonio

FP Sec­ond Hand by Pia Hed Aspell

Shark in the Water by Kim­berly Geswein

Claire Hand by Team Scope

Mawns Hand­writ­ing by Måns Grebäck

Never Let Go by Kim­berly Geswein

Beau­ti­ful Every Time by Kim­berly Geswein

Soul Hand­writ­ing by fonts-lab.com

James Fajardo by James Paul Fajardo

What Do We Do All Day by Heather T.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-10-23

• Bul­let­proof Pret­zel Co. @dribb­ble: http://t.co/oirCaw6p #
• Nice #font F25 Bank Printer Font | http://t.co/0lw0vx9x http://t.co/aeAucIAe #
• Cute Incred­i­bles inspired #illus­tra­tion Father­hood @dribb­ble: http://t.co/nGe2AsBD # Read more »

Check Out My Daily Design Experiments…

I’ve been cre­at­ing daily designs made in 15 min­utes or so and putting them up on spe­cial flickr set. I am using this as a way to exper­i­ment and hone my craft.  Check them out…

Online Checkout… In the Real World

Any­one who works with web­site devel­op­ment or in cus­tomer ser­vice needs to watch this hilar­i­ous video from Google. It is impor­tant to remem­ber that cus­tomers are look­ing for sim­plic­ity. You want them to buy your prod­uct, use your ser­vice or attend your event. Don’t get in their way!

Don’t for­get to read Clancy Childs’ great post on how you can use Google Ana­lyt­ics to improve cus­tomer reten­tion and avoid the poor fate of “Nick4ever.”