Out Box

Wed 7 Aug 200211:25 AM

Miscellaneous links: Get your fill of Kid 606 and plenty other beeps’n’blips artists at Tigerbeat6 Records, whose site is an oddly charming mix of DIY and Web design savvy. Marcus Ericsson has a notably elegant portfolio at Subdisc.com, which is a rare case of an overbearing visual metaphor that doesn’t veer into the obnoxious. The much-anticipated, massively multiplayer video game “Star Wars Galaxies” looks amazing and beautifully rendered, judging from this hand-shot demo footage. It could be the video game that makes me buy a video game.

Bollywood or Bust

Wed 31 Jul 200203:48 PM

The design industry could stand to appreciate more than just its American, Western European and Japanese roots. John Manschot brings us a little closer to the Indian sub-continent in his book, “The Art of Bollywood Blockbusters.” The Web site includes some so-so scans that barely do justice to the plethora of exquisitely illustrated posters and videocovers from the world’s largest film industry. Last year I got my hands on a copy of “Thai Graphic Design” by Anake Nawigamune, which is also big, bold and beautiful — impossible to find domestically, but now you have an excuse to visit Thailand.

Mmm, Skyscraper…

Mon 29 Jul 200212:41 PM

If you’re looking to compare the relative heights of the world’s skyscrapers, then pay a visit to the impressively detailed resource The Skyscraper Page. It’s meticulously organized by geography and cross-referenced by architect, building type and other key facts — and also beautifully illustrated. Just take a look at the diagrams for New York and Bangkok.

Not Just Pixels Anymore

Thu 25 Jul 200205:13 PM

The days when the design of software icons revolved around whatever aesthetics that designers could squeeze out of a single pixel are rapidly receding. The icons to be found in Mac OS X, and to a lesser extent in Windows XP, are like little digital paintings, and it takes a different kind of savvy to design them. Pixeljerk is a great practitioner of this new craft, and he had a terrific tutorial up there but it’s now gone. There’s also some decent help at Robouk Designs.

Hyperlinks

Wed 24 Jul 200202:21 AM

Before & After puts out some decent design tutorials, though they are geared more towards the Fortune 500 set than the design proletariat. Still, there’s something to learn from their ligatures primer, which demonstrates the ways in which linking letterforms can create unique corporate marks.

Design Amuck

Tue 23 Jul 200202:21 AM

This heat has me thrown for a loop. All I want to do is chill out with a glass of lemonade and a stack of DVDs, which is my excuse for not posting for the past few days. Anyhow, here’s some more design stuff: Styleboost has relaunched and their cover image is really great. Reservocation has a new issue out; their layouts are still quite decent, though, like lots of other amateur journalists, they could stand to brush up on their interviewing technique. And finally, design-clique It-boys WeWorkForThem have launched their souvenir division, YouWorkForThem.com, where you can buy tees, fonts and EPS art.

Flash’s Fonts Fussiness

Fri 19 Jul 200212:28 AM

Flash drives me crazy sometimes. For a project we’re working on at Behavior, we need to use a clean, pixelated font, like Verdana, behind a mask, but for some reason Flash loves to anti-alias — and thus blur — any typefaces that deign to appear within a mask. Ugh.

Comp Shoot Comp

Wed 17 Jul 200201:20 AM

For five days I’ve been struggling with some look and feel comps for a new Web site that Behavior is working on. This is one of the toughest assignments I’ve had in a while — it’s taken me six full-fledged comps to get to a state where I have three that I like. Sometimes, I guess, it’s necessary to work through a lot of bad work before getting to a satisfactory design.

Organism

Fri 12 Jul 200212:30 AM

Congratulations to Gicheol Lee of StudioTIMO. He won today in the Experimental category of the Flash Film Festival at Flashforward 2002 for his amazing Typorganism project.