As we gear up for the 4th season of Mad Men on AMC let’s revisit the previous 3 seasons through an illustrated flicker album by the truly artistic and comedic Dyna Moe. Check out her website no body’s sweetheart (you’re our sweetheart, love) and check out her Flicker Mad Men Illustrated photo-stream.
Plethora is a great source of personally curated design and art work spanning a series of disciplines. Although the best inspiration comes from the real world, this iPhone app is a great free place to see aggregated work for: web & interactive, graphic design, branding, art, illustration, photography, product and industrial design, interior design, and architecture.
Learn more from the Plethora website or download from itunes.
We usually have to rapidly prototype website UI all the time. We’re asked all the time, what’s the best program to wireframe within. Yes, we use OmniGraffle, Adobe InDesign, as well as Microsoft Visio to properly document UI screens and flows, but that’s usually not where we start.
Working with programs are usually slow and cumbersome; not only that, but they force us to think within their own limited set of constructs.
We start with a pencil, eraser, and paper. It not only helps us to produce screens quickly, it helps us to push ourselves to create multiple variations of screens to fully explore different interaction models.
“But Pinaki, I can’t draw?!?!”, you say. After I give you a mocking laugh, I’ll tell you that anyone can draw. Go ahead, pick up a pencil and paper. Draw a line. Now, draw a rectangle. Next, draw a circle. How about a star? If the objects on your paper can be identified by someone else, then you can sketch UI and wireframes.
Geekchix.org‘s Ivana Jurcic posted a lovely collection of printable paper-based wireframe templates and sketch books. Perfect for printing and prototyping.
Thank you Ivana, for the great post and photo for our homepage.
I just caught the trailer for Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet a video game by Michel Gagné’ and his shadow puppet illustration style. The game follows a UFO type ship as it battles through an insane system of arenas with various objectives.
The game looks mouth watering with all sorts of visual rides. Its only for PC (possibly for mac), but take a look!
This is from InformationisBeutiful.net a gem blog that I happened to come across not too long ago.
Its by the very talented David McCandless visual & data journalist from London.
Great place for data junkies and data geeks like me.
If you like the the Twitter one, you’ll love everything else on the blog.
Love the Shift Happens series. Always combine 3 things I like to see on my computer: good design, cool transitions, and impactful statistics.
Scott Dadich who is Wired’s Creative Director talks about 3 of the magazine covers that have come out recently. We love hearing about the design process and how the concepts and thoughts turn into great design.
I love the open credits of movies. I get alot of animation and design inspiration from watching well design credit sequences. Many movies have amazing animation and graphic design. Almost every Pixar movie is a case study in creative title typography and animation, check out the creativity in The Incredibles. The opening for HBO’s Carnivale is friggin amazing, its too bad it was canceled at the end of the second season. Catch me if you can open credits are more memorable than the movie for me. Fight Club?! fantastic movie and amazing credit/animation intro…
Well consider my mind blown when I discovered there was a site that has a large collection of movie title typography from the 1920′s to today. It might not be the full animations, but its fascinating to browse the time line of typography of cinema.
I love knowing how things are made. That pretty much goes for anything, cars, life, alarm clocks, whatever. Although, I’m especially interested in the process and tools artists and designers use to get their end results. If you have any interest in reading about the process of illustration from a wide range of illustrators take a look at The Tools Artists Use.
Another good read is http://drawn.ca/ which generally has some great content on illustration.