Friday Freebie: Retro Mic Vector Graphic

For today’s Fri­day Free­bie, an old school retro mic vec­tor graphic. Lov­ingly crafted from an old mag­a­zine ad with Adobe Illus­tra­tor.
You know what to do, go rock the mic!

Click to down­load the file. Free to use for what ever…

Speak­ing of mics… take a page from the Beastie Boys and pass the mic!

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)

Frances Draws Her Rabbit (1961)

This is too fun not to share, Frances and Her Rab­bit (1961). Learn to draw in this great retro edu­ca­tional film I found on the cool site TV School­house.

“Our Fonts, Our Friends”

If you love typog­ra­phy or the mid-century mod­ern esthetic, you will love:  “Our Fonts, Our Friends.” It is a fan­tas­ti­cally done, faux retro edu­ca­tional film about fonts from the stock image and font seller Veer. Nat­u­rally, it’s an ad, but it’s very clever and very well done. It looks like these videos will be a series and in this episode, the focus is on dis­cusses font styles, choos­ing a font, and where to find an end­less sup­ply of afford­able fonts, which just turns out to be Veer!

I find Veer a bit pricey for my taste, but they do have great stuff on their site, so I guess some­times you get what you pay for. Also for some decent tips and tuto­ri­als Veer has a pretty good set of videos on their YouTube Chan­nel.

God Speed… An Ode to the Golden Age of Space Exploration…

This is totally amaz­ing. Céline Desru­maux, a fan­tas­tic artist has cre­ated the stun­ning Count­down. It is a mas­ter­piece that took her two years design­ing, direct­ing, and ani­mat­ing it. The best and most inspi­ra­tional part for me is that she did it all in her spare time. The short ani­ma­tion has great visual ref­er­ences to one of my favorite mid-century tele­vi­sion pro­grams, Man in Space on The Won­der­ful World of Dis­ney. That film set up many of our expec­ta­tions and hopes for the future, and Count­down cap­tures that feel­ing per­fectly, with a dash of Kubrick’s 2001 for fun.

Even though this is an ode to mid-century design and esthetic, I do feel a bit sad call­ing this the “golden age,” because our golden age of space explo­ration should really be now or in the future as we branch out to explore and col­o­nize the stars.

Count­down — HD from Desru­maux Celine on Vimeo.

Friday Freebie: Vintage Hawaiian Map Wallpaper

Feel­ing the Aloha Spirit today, so I thought I’d pass along a lit­tle desk­top wall­pa­per I cre­ated. I made it by mash­ing up a cou­ple of images from a 1950’s United Air­lines pro­mo­tional brochure of Hawaii. Very mid-century mod­ern. Mahalo!

• Large Wall­pa­per »
• Small Wall­pa­per »

Speak­ing of the Islands, I saw this again today, the late great Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’ole  per­form­ing “Some­where Over the Rain­bow.” Chokes me up every time. Rest in Peace IZ.

Mondo SHAG Interview

A nice lit­tle inter­view with my favorite liv­ing artist Josh Agle, a.k.a. SHAG dis­cusses a once up and com­ing show back in the heady pre-Obama days of 2006, a time in the dis­tant past, when the Seat­tle Super­Son­ics still existed.

Survivors get ready to RUMBLE!

Design Some­thing Every­day 16/365

After read­ing the amaz­ing tuto­r­ial “How to Creat a Retro Box­ing Poster in Pho­to­shop” from James Davies I was inspired to give it a whirl. I didn’t get quite as faux-vintage as James did, but went in my own direc­tion. Turn­ing it into a pre­view of some upcom­ing clashes in Sur­vivor. If you’re a fan of the show you’ll get the gags.

Design Something Everyday: Retro Stephenie

Day 7 and still design­ing, though 2 days behind sched­ule in post­ing. Be that as it may, in honor of tonight’s pre­miere of Sur­vivor Heroes vs Vil­lains my design of the day is a lit­tle WPA inspired retro-esque poster in honor of one of my favorite play­ers, Stephe­nie LaGrossa. Star of two pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions of the show.

She was a con­tes­tant dur­ing sea­sons set in Guatemala and Palau. In Palau she was the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of her ini­tal “tribe,” a first for Sur­vivor. On Sur­vivor: Guatemala she placed sec­ond and was robbed of vic­tory by a petty and annoy­ing jury. Hope­fully, as in my dig­i­tal doo­dle, Pal­las Athena will be her aegis and like she did for clever Odysseus, guide her to vic­tory. Sur­vivors ready…

Sur­vivors ready?

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Links: Pal­las Athena Clip Art via Arthur’s Cli­part

Design Something Everyday Day 2: Retro Rupert

Day two and here is  a retro styled poster for Rupert Bone­ham, a con­tes­tant on the CBS real­ity show Sur­vivor: Pearl Islands, Sur­vivor All Stars & the upcom­ing Sur­vivor Heroes vs Villains.

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Pho­to­Shop, Wacom Tablet.

Link: Rupert’s Kids, Sur­vivor Con­tes­tant Rupert Boneham’s non-profit group to help at risk youth. A wor­thy cause.