Happy Halloween from GDBar!

Happy Halloween! Jason Santa Maria's got some great Halloween links up—don't miss the fun Halloween icons from the IconFactory and the popular M&M 50 Dark Movies game from last year. Guaranteed to get you craving candy and provide hours of distraction. Enjoy!

Faces in Places

Something fun: check out the Faces in Places photo pool, a collection of photographic faces found in everyday places and on ordinary objects (or vegetables). [via Cool Hunting]

HOW Webinar: What Should I Charge?

If you've ever struggled to define how and what to charge clients, consider signing up for HOW magazine's new webinar What Should I Charge? Smart Pricing Strategies for Designers". The online seminar is November 15th at 4pm EST and costs a mere $69.

Vonnegut Dollhouse CD Packaging

The Serif blog spotlights the imaginative CD packaging for Vonnegut's Dollhouse, done by Jeff Harrison of Vancouver firm Rethink. As a bonus, Harrison has some details of presentation and design up on Flickr. [via swissmiss]

Coudal Layer Tennis

The ever-ingenious Coudal Partners have started hosted "live design events" on Fridays—they're calling these extravaganzas Layer Tennis. Two artists (or small teams of artists) swap design files back and forth, adding to and embellishing each other's work as a writer provides commentary on the action. The match lasts for ten 15-minute volleys of Adobe files. Last week, Jason Santa Maria and Brian Taylor went head to head in Photoshop using Halloween themes as Matthew Baldwin commentated (the evil fawn, above, popped up several times during the match). This Friday, Marian Bantjes takes on Armin Vit in Illustrator, with commentary by Heather Armstrong.

GDBar SPAM

Someone has recently highjacked the GDBar domain and used it to generate boatloads of spam. If you've received spam from a graphicdesignbar.com email, please know that those emails are not coming from me—I've been the victim of an email-spoofing campaign. I apologize for this and am working with my site host to amend the problem. As always, thanks for reading!

Axl Box

Fun for Friday: take a break with the texturally-rich output of creative wunderkind Axl Box. [via Drawn!]

Book By Its Cover

Brooklyn illustrator and pattern designer Julia Rothman has created Book By Its Cover, a blog that showcases the books and sketchbooks of artists both known and new, including Egon Schiele and Geoff McFetridge. Lots to inspire on this site. [Thanks Alex!]

NY Magazine Design Revolutionaries

This week's New York Magazine spotlights six "design revolutionaries", including the Vignellis, Fabien Baron and Eva Zeisel. If you miss the issue on the newsstands, check things out online. For those familiar with these icons, the showcase feels a bit shallow (though the whole thing is almost worth it for the glimpse of the Vignelli's amazing apartment). And if you just can't get enough Vignelli, Massimo, with Wim Crouwel, recently spoke at the AIGA—their conversation is available here.

Kostas Kiriakakis

The website of illustrator Kostas Kiriakakis is worth a look for several reasons. His art is imaginative, rich and Halloween-appropriate (often in a Brian Froud-ish way). His website involves a great creative structure and layout concept. His site is also incredibly hard to navigate, making it an excellent example of what NOT to do online. It's a real shame that the site, which doesn't actually seem to reflect his illustration style, proves itself such an impediment to his portfolio. [via Drawn!, where the spirited comment session basically sums it up.]

Kara Walker at the Whitney

A new exhibition at the Whitney, on until February, presents more than 200 paintings, drawings, collages, shadow-puppetry, light projections, and video animations by Kara Walker. Walker, one of my favorite contemporary artists, explores power racial and gender issues via intense, intricate narratives created from simple silhouettes.

Cereal Killers

Fun for Friday: Halloween comes a bit early this year with Cereal Killers, illustrated warpings of familiar childhood breakfast favorites and classic illustration styles. My favorite is the morbidly adorable Rice Kreepies box. [via Drawn!]

Excedrin Package Redesign

Today is one of those days where everyone seems to have a headache or is convinced they're coming down with the first cold of the season. Anticipating the needs of our germ- and virus-filled lives, Excedrin has redesigned their packaging—Brand New takes a look. Some interesting points in the comments (designing for senior citizens, ideas about what makes for "visual relief", etc.).

Coudal: Booking Bands

Another fun project from Coudal Partners: Booking Bands mashes up book titles and band names/artists. Beyond the inevitable grin that comes when you read wordplay like "Tom Petty and the Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", "Of Mice and Men At Work" or "Anne of Al Green Gables", wouldn't visually depicting these (as someone has done, above) be a great design or illustration project? I know my imagination just jumpstarted a little...

Country Codes of the World Map

"At the end of every URL and email address is a top-level domain (TLD). Although .com is the world’s most popular TLD, there are more than 260 TLDs in use around the world." 245 of those codes are represented and geographically positioned on ByteLevel's Country Codes of the World Map. A fun and oddball info graphic to brighten your day. [via Strange Maps]

Field Notes Now Available

Aaron Draplin's Field Notes were a huge hit this summer at the Coudal Swap Meat, where they sold out with lightening speed and even developed a Flickr following. Now Coudal and Draplin have teamed up to produce the awesome little notebooks on a regular basis.

This Week at 20x200

Some interesting and unusual stuff over at 20x200 this week. Tuesdays's illustrated entry is Optical-01 by Brooklyn-based designer Michael Perry, who is quite the artistic Renaissance Man. Wednesday's photo entry is Plattsmouth, Nebraska, Carts #1 by Kate Bingaman-Burt, who gets more buzz than a hive of bees. Project guru Jen Bekman pointed out that Kate's photo was something that many people responded to during Bingaman-Burt's recent gallery show, but that few could afford—the beauty of the 20x200 project is that now you too can own a version for as little as $20 (for more info about 20x200, see the original post).

A List Apart Web Design Survey Results

The A List Apart Web Design Survey Results are in! Back in April, ALA set out to survey people who work on the web, aiming to "increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession". 30,000 responses later and they've got the first public research about industry. Whether you design full-time for the web or just dabble, this is worth a look. Originally mentioned here.

ILoveCopperplateGothicBold.com

There are type-obsessed websites out there, but surely one of the most ridiculous is ilovecopperplategothicbold.com. If you're looking for a good laugh or actually want to share in the Copperplate love, be sure to check things out. [Thanks Derreck!]

The Spinning Dancer

More Fun for Friday: Though artists are generally supposed to be right-brained, I've always felt that most designers have a lot of left-brain action going on also—indeed, graphic design is often about bringing practicality and structure to the abstract. So this left-brain vs. right-brain test is pretty interesting. The direction you see her spin determines which side of your brain is more dominant. I can get her to spin in both directions, though, like most people, I saw her going counter-clockwise first. [via kottke]

Christian Sparrow

Fun for Friday: Check out the great website of San Francisco-based new media designer Christian Sparrow, which manages to be simple, rich, fun, professional, inspiring, modern, classic, illustrative, sleek and... well, just awesome all around. One of the most jealousy-inducing portfolio sites I've seen in a while. [Thanks Ashley!]

"If you could design anything..."

"If you could design anything to improve the way we live – what would it be?" Twelve designers and illustrators headed to Flickr and posted their responses. [via swissmiss]

Veer: Backgrounds Abound

Veer's got a new gallery of oddball retro background patterns that specializes in "grandma psychedelia, tiki-lounge tacky, and polyester print chic" (not to mention food and animals)—all good for a bit of funky inspiration.

Whimsy Press

Whimsy Press has a nice range of oh-so-witty cards that use deceptively innocent design to say things like "Seriously?" and "Build a bridge. Get over it." Clearly I'm a sucker for snarky and/or irreverent messages delivered in expressive typography. Check out the rest of the Whimsy site for interesting gift wrap, lovely wall art, and cool stickers. [via JS]

Look

The design word for October over at Speak up is look.

Michael Bierut's Old Portfolio

Over at DO, Michael Bierut cracks open his old art school portfolio. "It's easy to assume that one grows in self-confidence over the course of a life in design, and in many ways I have. But looking back to 1979, I'm struck by how much nerve I had back then."

BRAVIA Colour Ad: Bunnies

BRAVIA's third TV ad has arrived, and features plasticine bunnies invading lower Manhattan! Director Frank Budgen has created a fun successor to the megahit previous BRAVIA ads: the bouncing balls and the paint. Watch the bunnies in hi-res on the Bravia site (Flash, takes a moment to load) or get instant lo-res gratification via You Tube. The ad was filmed over three weeks this summer, and trusty New Yorkers have tons of behind-the-scenes photos of the bunnies up on Flickr. [via Gothamist with a bonus tip from Eva]

Jennifer Daniel: Single Page Portfolio

More fun for Friday: Check out the single-page portfolio of Jennifer Daniel (and, while you're at it, get a load of her crazy url!). The viewer gets an immediate sense of her style, interests, strengths and sense of humor from seeing all her design and illustration work shown together—one of the better examples of the single-page presentation that I've seen in a while. [via Kottke]

Annie Vought

Fun for Friday: Annie Vought cuts words out of paper and then pins them to the wall to create intricate and unusual handwriting-based typographic art. [via Coudal Partners]

Elsworth Kelly at MoMA

On now at MoMA: an installation of paintings and drawings by Elsworth Kelly. The gallery has thirteen works total, several of which are on view for the very first time. "Over the past five decades, Kelly has redefined abstraction by examining the shapes and colors found in natural and man-made forms."

Font Garden: Handwriting Scripts

Ever needed a good handwriting script font and found yourself coming up short? Font Garden is a small foundry specializing in handwriting scripts (and selling them at crazy affordable prices!). Font Garden designer Ellinor Rapp admits to being obsessed with handwriting and aims to achieve a "truly hand-written look" with her script fonts, which are used in web design, digital scrapbooking, children's books, greeting cards, advertising and more.

24fps: The End

The 24fps Flickr set has a collection of closing frames from classic movies—"THE END" over and over in varying typefaces. Beautiful old typography and an interesting take on film. Liberated from the baggage of the film that preceeded it, the closing shot takes on an entirely new identity when viewed in this way. [via Subtraction]

Veer: Typo Negative

It is October, after all, and Veer gears up for Halloween with Typo Negative, a gallery of spooky typefaces (or "a devilish selection of terrifying type"). Hey, how many times a year can you get away with rampant use of Ironwood? Check it out, have some fun—I recommend the slideshow view.

FontShop October Calendar

The latest in FontShop's free monthly calendar is available. Each month features a different typeface (or two!)—October showcases Neutraliser and Phlex, designed by the twin brothers of Identikal.