Photojojo

Photojojo is a twice weekly newsletter all about digitial photography—and best of all, it's free! They have some really useful tips (such as the 5 minute photo fix), project ideas, and notes about gear. Another great resource (and you gotta love the name!).

GDBar Delightful!

GDBar has been added to the network of Delightful Blogs, a great directory of "select" blogs chosen by the Delightful editors. Check them out for new blog finds (and give GDBar a glowing rating while you're at it, won't you?). I've just begun exploring the directory and have already found some wonderful things. Thanks Delightful!

Adopt Art

Gothamist raves about the Fine Art Adoption Network, a new program that allows art world newbies to adopt art and bring it into their homes. Potentially interesting for artists as well, since the whole thing is a direct arrangement between artist and collector.

Clip Art in Motion

Can the plural of clip art possibly be clip arts?? Either way, this one minute loop of over 700 different clip art people in motion somehow borders on simple brilliance. For true nerd enjoyment, bring your own soundtrack to the game—I happened to have Danse Macabre cranked in the background when I watched the first time and it added a bit of fun drama... going to try Gorillaz next. [via Drawn!]

Strong Bad on Logo Redesign

Something fun for Friday: Strong Bad covers the basics of logo redesign (aka "squish it, skew it, turn it all around, make it fast n' slick n' shiny, play color wheel roulette, dip it in molten plexiglass then add fangs.") [surprisingly, via DO—they know about Strong Bad??]

Designers Confess... Anonymously

Be A Design Group encourages theraputic anonymous commenting.

Designers Are Wankers Contest

Here's a contest for you: at Designers are wankers you can enter a self-promotional video (only eligible if it's made using your cell phone!) to potentially win big money, get yourself hired all over the place, and rub noses with design stars like Karim Rashid (apparently a proud wanker). For full rules and an interview with Rashid, visit (you guessed it) www.designersarewankers.com.

The Circle Project

The internet is going crazy for Richard Sarson's Circle Project. Sarson, a recent RCA grad, has been featured on blog after blog, but my favorite gush comes from Drawn! (surprise), who appropriately reference the ever-awesome and much beloved Spirograph.

New: A-Z of Type Designers

Officially out on August 1st but available now through Amazon: An A-Z of Type Designers by Neil Macmillan. Complete with illustrations and essays, the new book is lauded as a "comprehensive account of the figures who shaped the history and evolution of typography—an essential reference for both graphic designers and students." What a great resource! [via DO]

Flickr: Kevin Meredith

The Flickr blog showcases Kevin Meredith (photographer and apparently friend to Imogen Heap), who does very cool things with those Lomo cameras we all had to play around with in art school.

Tibor Kalman Quotes

"Design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do." 37signals has dug up some great Tibor quotes, still relevant and resonating years later. The article includes links to Kalman's obituary and his AIGA Legends profile.

I.D. 2006 Annual Design Review

The results of I.D. magazine's 2006 Annual Design Review (billed as "America's largest and most prestigious juried design competition") are showcased online. For all winners, check out the July/August issue of I.D. [via DO]

"Flying octopii are the new unicorns"

When graphic design attacks: Pharyngula showcases this WWF ad, which takes an interesting idea, combines it with some mediocre Photoshopping and flawed illustration, and ends up with ridiculous airbone cephalopods. Think of how effective this could have been had the design execution been valued more. What a shame.

CARE About Design

Design Observer's Dmitri Siegel offers up a "simple four-step process for learning graphic design." CARE: Conceptualization, Articulation, Research and Execution.

Russian Constructivism on Backpack

37signals highlights a wonderful Backpack page that showcases the 1930s magazine USSR in Construction, described as "home to some of the most innovative graphic design of the past century." The always welcome dose of El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko aside, what's also valuable here is the way that Backpack is being used—an extremely efficient organizational application suddenly becomes a thing of beauty.

Karla: Beer for Women

What a strange advertising angle developed by German brewer Karlsberg: beer as a functional, healthy, peace-promoting tool for women. Packaged to appeal, "Karla" is a blend of beer, fruit juice, and balancing herbs. I'm baffled and intrigued. [via Springwise]

Eye Magazine: 60 issues

In celebration of their 60th issue, Steven Heller interviews Eye Magazine editor John Walters on the AIGA site. And if you've never checked out eyemagazine.com, you should!

Getty images: 10 ways

Getty Images has collaborated with several designers to create 10 ways: a series of interactive experiences meant to explore the power of visual language. Fun to play with.

Design Janet Jackson's New CD Cover

Janet Jackson wants you to design the cover of her new CD. Or at least, move around the provided graphics. Seriously. But hey, why not—Who doesn't love Janet? [via DO]

Adobe Design Achievement Award Winners

The entries of the students who have won the 2006 Adobe Design Achievement Award are available to view on the Adobe site.

Julian Hector: Mythlandia

Congrats to Parsons alum Julian Hector for being recently featured on the Drawn! Illustration blog. His wonderful mural Mythlandia is nicely showcased—always great to see a former classmate getting well-deserved visibility! For more of his signature style, check out julianhector.com.

UPDATE: Word on the street is that Julian's rocking the children's book realm. His first book The Little Matador comes out in 2007.

The Power of a Great Infographic

Simple, straightforward, and with a political punch: The Independent shows rather than tells which countries support immediate ceasefire in the Middle East, throwing those who do not into sharp focus.
[via Kottke]

Wallconcept: Typographic Possibility

Design*sponge recently featured Wallconcept, yet another player in the weird wonderful world of wall decals (GDBar previously featured Blik). Whether you buy a pre-fashioned decal or decide to create your own typographic masterpiece using fonts and paint of your choice, I think the possibilities here are endless!

Concept: Scratchcard

London-based textile designer Linda Florence is rocking the world of interiors with her scratchcard wallpaper, which is an interesting idea with such fun potential—I'd love to see the basic functionality and hope gamble of a lottery ticket applied to high concept graphic design (and think what we could have done in the silkscreen lab with this)... [via Cool Hunting]

Design Test

Design View's Andy Rutledge has put together a multiple-choice quiz to help test your understanding of design. I dare you to take the test!

Chihuly at the NY Botanical Garden

The ever-intriguing sculptural glasswork of Dale Chihuly will be incorporated into the landscape of the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx until the end of October. There will even be special concert nights where the glass is lit—don't miss this rare New York chance to see the work of a master creative artisan. [via Gridskipper]

Sarah Trigg

A Metropolis magazine article from 2004 (recently brought back to life by Jason Kottke) showcases artist Sarah Trigg, who creates "digital paintings that explore the connection between geography and biology."

LogoPond

LogoPond looks to be an ongoing submission-and-crit resource site for logos, where you can comment on other designs, test your own, or simply browse for ideas (there is a nice feature that allows you to sort logos by color). [via Design Observer]

Free Themed Fonts

TypeNow.net has a treasure trove of fonts from movies, video games and music, ranging from the iconic to the unusual... all downloadable for free.

India Amos: Book Interior Design

India Amos has a great blog about making books—the linked post deals with what exactly goes into the art of book interior design (yes, it's more than picking fonts!).

Society of Illustrators Finalists

The wonderful work of the Society of Illustrators annual scholarship competition finalists is available as a downloadable pdf [via Drawn!]
Illustration by Andrew Hem.

Rhodia Mouse Pad Paper Pad

Ok, whether or not we all actually use the little orange-yellow Rhodia graph pads, we love them and smile every time we pass them in every art store in the universe, right? Ok, maybe that's just me. But meanwhile, they've branched out into a nice computer accessory version of themselves with the Mouse Pad Paper Pad (say that five times fast). It's a mouse pad, it's a graph pad blotter... why not? Lends a nice air of art-world legitimacy to desktop doodling.

50 Ways to Become a Better Designer

Computer Arts has an interesting list of 50 ways to become a better designer. Though the usual soundbytes are certainly represented (use a sketchbook, already!), there are some fresh ideas too (take a shower) and a lot of plain common sense (use web standards, buy more RAM).

Helvetica: The Movie

Apparently there is a documentary film being made about Helvetica. Will keep you posted... [via FontScoop]

Met Hikes Admission

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has increased it's admission price to $20. Of course, most of us know that the price is "suggested"... meaning that if you can shrug off the guilt, you can pay whatever you feel is reasonable. Gothamist discusses the issue.

Design Tape. Why Not?

Ask any of my former Parsons classmates—I take tape very seriously. Patterned tapes are on the rise, and this is my favorite so far: graphic grid tape from Fred Flare. The love tape is 80s-style fun as well. Come on, enjoy your adhesives already!

Night Watch: Designed Subtitles

Night Watch, the Russian horror film that outgrossed Spider-Man 2 and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King at the Russian box office, is now available to US audiences in a sleek DVD version that includes graphically designed subtitles. I'd heard about this and seen this clip, but actually experiencing the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that these subtitles enhance and interact with the film was great. The Horror Channel's review says it nicely, describing the treatment as "the most startling set of subtitles ever to grace a foreign film. Indeed, they are so artful and stylized, one wonders why no one ever thought to make subtitles part of the movie experience as a whole, rather than just slap standard white text throughout. (Co-writer/director Timur Bekmambetov has said that as soon as he realized he would have to subtitle the film, he immediately set about designing them.)" Perhaps this is a burgeoning new industry—imagine the typographic possibilities! Lots of fun to be had. [Thanks to Jason for the recommendation]

Portfolio Advice

Irene Gallo, the Art Director for Tor Books, delivers some straight-shooting portfolio advice aimed at illustrators interested in breaking into sci-fi book covers. If you're in that niche, great, but even if you aren't there are some excellent pointers here that can apply towards any artist/designer showing a portfolio. [via BoingBoing]

McDonald's Sundial Billboard

Interesting, though flawed, idea: McDonald's has set up a billboard that functions as a sundial in Chicago. The sun creeps through the breakfast menu towards a burger n' fries. Kind of cool... except for the fact that the earth's orbit around the sun will render the whole thing useless in just a few weeks. Pesky earth, can't stay in one place, interfering with advertising and global McDomination... [via Gizmodo]

Conceptualist vs. Experimentalist

Wired spotlights a new theory suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types—quick, dramatic and early (conceptualist), or careful, quiet and later in life (experimentalist). Interesting... not to mention inspiring for those of us who have yet to make a conceptualist-style sensation (we've got time to mature into rock stars). Heh.

Canada Celebrates Design With... A Beaver

Canada has a new postage stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC). Designed by Vancouver's Ion Design, the stamp features a typographic beaver made from the GDC logo and the typeface Cartier. If you didn't know it was a beaver...

"A symbolic protest to a symbolic event..."

Five graphic designers, including Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister, are boycotting a breakfast at the White House for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. A "principled stand or an empty gesture?" asks Michael Bierut (and subsequent commenters) at Design Observer.

MacWorld article: Removing Fonts

MacWorld features a useful article about how to remove fonts, and which ones you absolutely shouldn't get rid of. The article is an excerpt from a larger book by Sharon Zardetto Aker.

Gautam Rao: Mac Paintings

Some Monday fun for all of us Mac nerds: Indianapolis based Guatam Rao paints "Macintosh OS X inspired" oil paintings. [via Josh Spear]

Movie Poster Design 101

I found this interesting: the unnamed site author of onesheetdesign.com offers his portfolio of movie posters, complete with comps, commentary, and advice on how to break into the movie poster business. Required, according to OneSheet, is a strong background in graphic design. It's intruiging to see the evolution and choices made with some of these...

UPDATE: Additionally, for a completely different take on the one sheet, check out these movie posters from Poland [via kottke]

Andy Rutledge: Logo Misapplication

On Design View, Andy Rutledge makes some excellent points about logos: I believe that the logo is the most abused, misapplied, misconceived, wrongfully distracting element of design and business today." [via Design Observer]

Photo Book Pileup

Several great photo book recommendations piled in today. First, Peter Granser: Coney Island—normally I wouldn't tout yet another book about the place, but Granser has a fresh take, infusing his colorful snaps of Coney Island ("an American place that is almost mythical in European eyes") with an outsider's view (he's Austrian) and interest in themes of aging, illness, decline, and leisure. Second, the new William Christenberry monograph (the release of which coincides with a Christenberry show at Aperture on 27th St, through August 17th) has people raving. Christenberry, considered a pioneer of color photography, documents regional identity and the visual evidence of time. Finally, the editor-in-chief of American Photo magazine calls Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art an "essential primer on photography's essential artists... the kind of book you'd want if you were stranded on a desert island and could have only one guide to the art of photography."

Happy 4th of July from GDBar!

Here's to a day off and the general concept of independence. Slate has a slideshow of July 4th photos, complete with several by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Meanwhile, trusty Gothamist has a rundown of the best viewing spots for fireworks.

Apple Imagination Contest Winners

Apple-Discounts.com recently held a contest to come up with new Apple products (via Photoshop). The winners are in, and some are pretty interesting. My favorite: the iPhone, an iPod that flips open into a mobile—the Artbook, a digital sketchbook, is a close second. The contest is also an interesting exercise in design mimicry, copywriting, and plain old Photoshopping (some are better at it than others).

Propaganda Posters on Flickr

The Flickr stream of bpx is a treasure trove of propaganda posters and advertisements (Russian and Soviet) dating between 1917-1991. He's also got a gallery of stencil graffiti.

July FontShop Calendar

The July FontShop calendar is available for free download. This month features the typeface FF Sanuk, designed by Xavier Dupré.

A Conversation with Michael Bierut

Adaptive Path blog has an interesting interview with designer Michael Bierut: part one and part two. [via kottke]