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