Digital Ephemera

It’s Wednesday, so that means ladies and germs it’s time for another installment of digital ephemera. Which is a collection of interesting bits and bytes I’ve run across on the information super highway in the past week.

Mid-century Modern & Tiki

• Retro Cocktail Hour: A great weekly radio program from Kansas Public Radio. Host Darrell Brogdon spins Ultra-Lounge, Exotica and cool mid-century tunes. Simply amazing! Mr. Brogdon has an encyclopedic knowledge of the topic and his digressions are almost as good as the tunes.
• Monsters Attack! 26 Epic Retro Horror Movie Posters

Good Design resources, tips and tricks

• 50 Powerful Timesavers for Webdesigners. A great collection of tips, graphics and other digital goodies from the lads and lasses at Smashing Magazine.
• Have designer’s block? Check out this helpful article on how to have an idea from the ever useful How Magazine blog.

Freebies

• Shameless Plug… my tree bark textures.
• Humpback Whales PhotoShop Brushes… insert Star Trek IV or Moby Dick joke here.

Illustration

• Vintage Children’s Books my Kid Loves… a fabulous blog from Burgin Streetman

Great sites worth exploring

• Harvard’s Michael Sandel’s amazing course in Moral Philosophy can be watched for free. Not  design related, but well worth checking out and investing time in this thought provoking work.

Finally something really cool: the video for the song “Cardboard Houses” by IG88 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo

. I love the archival imagery juxtaposed with the cutting edge music.

“Cardboard Houses” by IG88 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

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

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