10 Best Video Series on the Internet for Self Education

The inter­net is an amaz­ing resource for learn­ing new things. If you want to put in the time, there are many great things you can learn. The fol­low­ing are ten great free video series that you should really check out.

These are sites and series that I reg­u­larly watch, so it is a per­sonal list. Hence the rather ran­dom, nature of the sub­jects. I am very curi­ous about pretty much every­thing from my pro­fes­sion of graphic design to sci­ence to pop cul­ture to reli­gion. You’ll have to for­give the rather scat­tered nature of the list, but I per­son­ally attest to the great­ness of each of the listed shows.

TED: Tech­nol­ogy, Edu­ca­tion and Design
The great­est col­lec­tion of experts wax­ing poetic on their fields. A must watch for anyone.

The Peri­odic Table of Videos
Video Jour­nal­ist Brady Haran cre­ates videos about chemistry.

Sixty Sym­bols
Video Jour­nal­ist Brady Haran cre­ates videos about physics.

Bibledex
Bibledex is a project by the Uni­ver­sity of Nottingham’s Depart­ment of The­ol­ogy and Reli­gious Stud­ies in con­junc­tion with video jour­nal­ist Brady Haran. The videos are by no means com­pre­hen­sive — rather they’re a curi­ous assort­ment of aca­d­e­mic insights into what is prob­a­bly the most famous col­lec­tion of books in history.

Back­stage Sci­ence
Great videos about sci­ence by Brady Haran.

Deke’s Tech­niques
Deke McCel­lan is my Pho­to­Shop hero. I find him the most enter­tain­ing and excel­lent teacher of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools ever. Here are dif­fer­ent sites to check out this great series:
blog.lynda.com/tag/dekes-techniques/
deke.com/
youtube.com/user/lynda

InDe­sign Secrets Video Cast
Quick tips on secrets from the mas­ters of InDe­sign. A must for any­one work­ing in pub­li­ca­tions design.

Global Pub­lic Square with Fareed Zakaria
My favorite liv­ing intel­lec­tual and polit­i­cal thinker has an amaz­ing show on CNN which is broad­cast on the inter­net. His show is what news should be, a thought­ful exam­i­na­tion of events and issues with the lead­ers and great thinkers.

Ontwink
A great resource for web design­ers and devlop­ers. It is a repos­i­tory for talks on the tech­ni­cal side of design.

Watch Free Doc­u­men­tary
A col­lec­tion of great non-fiction films. Though I would quib­ble the site about many of the pseudo-science and con­spir­a­to­r­ial bent of many of the doc­u­men­taries. So buyer beware on some of them.

Extra Series to check out!

After Hours on cracked.com
I had one extra one, it is more a humor­ous look at pop­u­lar cul­ture. I am not sure if it belongs with the other videos in this list, but I highly rec­om­mend it.

An Unfortunate Film By Kurtis Hough

Yikes! This is very a very sad yet funny (sort of) film by Kur­tis Hough. “how to lose $2400 in 24 sec­onds” Sorry Kurtis!

regret­tably filmed by Kur­tis Hough

KH Stu­dios, 2011

www.khstudios.com

Twit­ter: twitter.com/kurtishough

happy 40th anniver­sary North­west Film Center

How They Did It — (The Daily Monster Edition)

This week’s install­ment of How They Did It will focus on the extremely tal­ented artist Ste­fan G. Bucher. He is the artist who has cre­ated hun­dreds of mon­sters and released them on to an unsus­pect­ing world. Don’t worry his mon­sters are cre­ated with ink and cre­ativ­ity, not weapons and dis­carded body parts. This mod­ern day Dr. Franken­stein of art has cre­ated amaz­ing work. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did!

A part of the great doc­u­men­tary about his work from Lynda.com

Some other resources about Ste­fan G. Bucher:

• Stephen Bucher’s YouTube Channel
• His Blog
• His Web­site

Digital Ephemera for Wednesday, October 5, 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 (Chess Edition)

Art & Design

The Evo­lu­tion of Base­ball card Design 1887–2011
This is a fun col­lec­tion of Base­ball Cards from designer Stacy David Walling­ford. Just like the play­ers, I’d have to say that even the graph­ics seem to have beefed up dra­mat­i­cally. I’m guess­ing they’d test pos­i­tive for PhotoShop.

Case Study: The Revenger’s Tragedy Ini­tial Design
Okay a bit of a shame­less plug for my own arti­cle, but it’s a nice post that exposes my design phi­los­o­phy and method­ol­ogy. Take a look at how I came up with a design for GreenStage’s pro­duc­tion of The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Motion Graph­ics & Video

Teal and Orange — Hol­ly­wood, Please Stop the Mad­ness
A great rant on the overuse of color cor­rec­tion from film­maker Todd Miro on the desat­u­ra­tion of the palette in Hol­ly­wood films of late. I don’t totally agree, but it’s a great rant nonetheless.

L.A. Time­lapse
This is beau­ti­ful, and as John Nack says: “Colin Rich has done the nearly impos­si­ble: He’s made me find Los Ange­les beau­ti­ful.“

LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

Table 7
A very cute, clever and well exe­cuted short film. –via Neatorama

John Dies at the End
Okay, I don’t know what this is about even after read­ing this arti­cle. But I sure want to see it!

Mar­ket­ing

Seth Godin’s Blog

Many peo­ple have heard of Seth Godin, if you haven’t you should! His daily mis­sives on mar­ket­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and human­ity are not to me missed. A truly invalu­able inspi­ra­tion for those nav­i­gat­ing the murky waters of mod­ern marketing.

Social Media

What Was There?

This site is an exper­i­ment in col­lec­tive his­tory. Using google maps and user sub­mit­ted pho­tographs they aim to cre­ate build a visual his­tory of the world. A wor­thy goal!

Some­thing Cool

Dig­i­tal Dead Sea Scrolls

After over 24 cen­turies, the work of archae­ol­o­gists, schol­ars and his­to­ri­ans the Dead Sea Scrolls will be acces­si­ble to every­one thanks to Google’s tech­nol­ogy. Google and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem have teamed up and are cel­e­brat­ing the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online. As reported on Google’s Blog:

Now, any­one around the world can view, read and inter­act with five dig­i­tized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapix­els, almost 200 times more than the aver­age con­sumer cam­era, so view­ers can see even the most minute details in the parch­ment. For exam­ple, zoom in on the Tem­ple Scroll to get a feel for the ani­mal skin it’s writ­ten on—only one-tenth of a mil­lime­ter thick.”

Some­thing Strange

Cthulhu vs. the Sith (or the Car­rot Mon­ster Revenge)
A cute, if strange stop motion ani­ma­tion involv­ing veg­eta­bles, legos and the unmen­tion­able hor­ror from beyond the stars.

Some­thing Terrible

Worst Band Ever Butch­ers Pink Floyd
So bad, it’s almost good… almost!

Three Sites Worth Check­ing Out (Chess Edition)

• It’s Your Turn. My favorite online chess (and other board game) site. If you want to chal­lenge me at chess chal­lenge Ulysses 2004.
• The Chess Web­site YouTube Chan­nel. Great video chess lessons and lectures.
• US Chess. The US Chess Fed­er­a­tion offi­cial site.

Funny Graphic Design Videos

Some­times it seems that graphic design­ers are a seri­ous lot. After all, it is not the nor­mal per­son who becomes enraged at the use of papyrus as the sub­ti­tle font in Avatar. But to prove that design­ers and design can be funny I present these fol­low­ing clips deal­ing with design, advert­ing and worst of all Comic Sans.

101 Pho­to­shop Tips in 5 min­utes by Deke McClel­land. Funny, yet helpful.

You Suck at Pho­to­shop: Very crass, but very, very funny! You must watch both sea­sons of it, well worth it. As a bonus it has some decent tips for Pho­to­shop. Linked below is the first episode, and for poor Danny Boyle, it all goes down hill from here.

John Stos­sel from 20/20 dis­cussing graphic design, his advice on one par­tic­u­lar type­face is illuminating:

Movie Poster Designer: As some one who worked with film posters for sev­eral years, this isn’t that far off the mark. From the humor site, Funny or Die.

Font Con­fer­ence: A clas­sic from the humor site Col­lege Humor.

Font Fight: A sequel of sorts of Font Con­fer­ence. I love it when Hel­vetica goes after it’s rip off, Arial:

Life of a graphic designer, everything’s bet­ter with a lit­tle cute kid. From Cana­dian Designer “yosh­box” of Q Graphique.

Design­ing the Stop Sign by Com­mit­tee. I think every designer’s felt this way at one time or another.

How NOT to use Pow­er­Point. A hilar­i­ous, and true video on poor slide prepa­ra­tion. Life After Death Pow­er­Point from EMT Media on Vimeo.

Life After Death Pow­er­Point from EMT Media on Vimeo.

OGD: Orig­i­nal Design Gangsta

Focus Test­ing the Apple “Big Brother Ad” Open­ing video to the Hatch Award 2007 (an ad agency award), This is an actual focus group test­ing of the 1984 ad. This is the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor ladies & gen­tle­men.

A Few Good Cre­ative Men: A design related mash up of the clas­sic court­room scene from A Few Good Men.

Only the Best Ideas Win What hap­pens to all those ideas after the are born… lit­er­ally born in this case.

Ven­dor Client Rela­tion­ships in the Real World Pretty funny take on this sen­si­tive topic.

Last, but not least… What Hap­pens When your Father is a Graphic Designer A clas­sic old video, though why Comic Sans at the begin­ning? A bit sus­pect for the premise I’d say.

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.