Brightwash

Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.

Daily Drop Cap: A beautiful dropcap, free to use, everyday. I haven’t figured out if she has the whole alphabet on there yet.

My Parents were Awesome: Funny pictures of parents. The hairy 70s/80s parents are the best.

Typekit: Finally launched! I played around a bit while it was in beta, very solid solution for nice type on the web.

Gregory Wood is designing for each and every blog post. Each is different, kind of like a magazine spread. What a good way to try out ideas and keep your head fresh visually. Very impressive and a reminder of what the internet is lacking (and could look like).

Winston Interview: NOT OF THIS WORLD. Winston Winston Winston

Other kitty blog: Chase No Face – Be warned, Chase is very scary looking but it’s a really nice story.

Maggie at the Hot Lava show on Thursday

Here are some nice design/web making websites:

Well Medicated - Very pretty design resource blog. Lots of vintage art/poster/ad archives. See his post on Criterion Covers!

Nice Web Type - A combination of screenshots and article links all having to do with good web typography.

Lightbox Clones Matrix – A breakdown of all the javascript lightbox options available to you and which libraries they work with. Very helpful!

Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement

ALSO, having nothing to do with design:
I am Throwing your Life Away! - Stories of a garbage man and his finds (good and bad).

Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists – musicians, writers, poets, painters – are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

Taken from “The Creative Personality” via The New Shelton Wet/Dry

Image by Wang Qingsong

This month at work we created the promotional materials for the American Music Festival. This is the big labor day event so we got to do not just a poster, but a ton of ads, a billboard, brochure, even 20ft high banners for the actual event. It was really fun to work on and we got to see Billy Idol! I had hoped to meet him and get an awesome photo, that didn’t happen – he was awesome though, wouldn’t have believed he was 52. Also, his hair was not blonde.

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Billy Idol Dancing With Myself

Bathtime Planetarium – I preface with this is Japanese and I can’t have it, you can’t have it either. Can be aimed up or down into the water, doubles as a sealife/aquarium projector. Via a new favorite blog.

TV on the Internet – Mighty Boosh + Weeds! (Via Dan)

Remi Thornton – These night stills feel like summer to me… maybe because I’m only willing to stand outside when it’s warm out.

J.Richel – Portrait prints, these seem like something Susan would like!

Read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Beautifully typeset in PDF format.

The Lovely Light Pool – Self explanatory flickr pool.

Rediscovering Rasterbation – This is the best use of a laser printer, period. My personal preference is to leave the white margins.

This new newsreader from MSN (wtf, innovation?) is a major visual upgrade on all other feed readers out there. Drawback is I think it only gathers real news, not the stuff I read.

The golden ratio and it’s occurrences in nature, math, geometry and art is interesting stuff. As far as math goes, the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are so easy to wrap your head around:

In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.
A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden spiral.

It’s said that aesthetically people prefer shapes that employ the golden ratio for proportion. I’ve never tried using this number in design, but last week I came across the Phiculator, it’s a simple flash application that does the math for you. You enter in a dimension and it will calculate the corresponding dimension based on the golden ratio. I know it’s not hard math to do (divide your larger side by 1.618), but the calculator makes it funner.

GOOD STUFF:

• Matteo Ferrari – Photos of people with their cars way back when and now.
• Gorgeous – Hello Gorgeous!

TRAILERS:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Brad Pitt is born an old man and ages backwards
• The Go-Getter – Zooey Deschanel!, this film’s soundtrack is the origin of She & Him
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona – New Woody Allen, looks saucy?

Poster I created for Hot Lava’s show this weekend. It was not animated when I gave it to them. Allison loves to animate and I love her animated gifs.

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Hot Lava Brainex