ABC URL Game

I saw this great post on Brian Hoff’s site and I thought I’d play along. Here’s my ABC URL game. It’s a fun game and as Brian says,

The rules are sim­ple: Launch your favorite, most fre­quently used browser for surf­ing the web. Start by typ­ing, one let­ter at a time, the entire alpha­bet into the search bar to see what pops up first. Record the results.

a: Ama­zon

b: Blue­host — A great host­ing ser­vice, they host my site.

c: Comp­fight — For inspi­ra­tion and find­ing fun images.

d: Deke.com — I thought I’d skip my own site and pick #2, Dig­i­tal Imag­ing guru and mar­tini afi­cionado, Deke Mcclelland’s site, Any­one inter­ested in Pho­to­Shop should watch this excel­lent primer on the essen­tial approach to mask­ing. Not only is it infor­ma­tive, it’s hilarious.

e: Espn — Just to read the always enter­tain­ing Bill Sim­mons.

f: Face­book — No I don’t play Mob Wars, and no I won’t join your mob.

g: Google Reader — An unhealthy obses­sion, and my feed reader of choice.

h: How Mag­a­zine

i: Inter­net Movie Data Base — Mostly to set­tle argu­ments about who played Donatello in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles (Leif Tilden by the way)

j: Just Cre­ative Design

k: Kuler- You can see some of the palettes I cre­ated here

l: Lib­riVox - A great site of free pub­lic domain audio books read by ded­i­cated vol­un­teers. Cur­rently I’m lis­ten­ing to Mark Twain’s The Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger, I totally rec­om­mend the book.

m: morgue­File

n: Print Ser­vices North­west — An excel­lent Seat­tle based printer that I use a lot. Sue Lewis, the owner is great.

o: Good God: Faith for the Rest of US — A client’s blog I helped set up.

p: PhotoXpress.com — Great free stock images, an affil­i­ate site of  fotolia.com

q: Star Wars vs Saul Bass - I must not go to many “q” sites! A pretty funny Star Wars open­ing done in the style of Saul Bass.

r: Retro Cock­tail Hour on Kansas Pub­lic Radio — Swing­ing Lounge & Tiki Tunes.

s: Stock Exchange

t: This Amer­i­can Life — Rec­om­mended listening.

u: Uprinting.com — A great online printer.

v: Ver­ti­cal Response — An excel­lent e-newsletter man­ag­ing & mail­ing system.

w: Cracked.com- Some very funny stuff here.

x: Paul Malon’s Flickr Pho­to­stream — Won­der­ful col­lec­tion of mid-century Amer­i­can adver­tis­ing ephemera.

y: Youtube.com

z: Zazzle.com

Interesting timelapse video of choosing a typeface

I saw this inter­est­ing time­lapse video of the very tal­ented Designer Brian Hoff as he works up dif­fer­ent looks for a logo he is work­ing on.  Any­one who has ever done this can relate to this fun and frus­trat­ing (at times) chore of pick­ing just the right typeface.

Often times  I have the per­fect type­face in mind or at the very least a gen­eral style based on appro­pri­ate­ness, his­tor­i­cal con­ven­tion and client require­ments. How­ever some­times the joy is just scrolling through and find­ing a happy acci­dent of a type­face that looks good when you least expect it. One of the lit­tle joys I get in the wild world of Graphic Design.

Related Links:

• Brian Hoff’s Website
• Brian’s post about cre­at­ing the video
• Brian’s port­fo­lio
• The offi­cial site of Suit­case­fu­sion 2 by Exten­sis. One of these days I keep to pick up a copy.