Much to the aggravation of my travel companions, when I visit a new area I often am fascinated with the signs and textures of the locale. I usually document the visual and store it away for future motivation and use. A simple search on Flickr demonstrates that clearly, I am not alone in this obsession, but The Journal of Urban Typography brings inspiration without the journey to a new level, be it hand lettered or manufactured signage, each image is an inspirational gem.

Usually it is because I have found some amazing product online such as these typographic blocks which can be configured to spell an animal word, such as rabbit, in English, and Chinese (why not Japanese?), while also being able to form a stylized representation of the animal.

After my recent re-discovery of tutorials, I have taken to briefly reading through the articles on Vectortuts or PSDtuts in order to gather the general ideas behind the tools and concepts behind the final result while keeping in mind the potential use in my professional output. However, an article posted by Katie Marcus on a developing a sketchy camera illustration caught my fancy. Was it the style, or the fact that I’m obsessive about my Holga? Whatever the reason, I kept it flagged as unread in my Google Reader until I had time to work through it.

Combining my love of photography, and my love of Illustrator (and, of course, the information provided by the tutorial), I have embarked on a personal project illustrating vintage cameras.

Giant type advises the driver on how to proceed in this Melbourne parking garage designed by Axel Peemöller. I can’t imagine the sensation of driving through seeing messages form and self destruct before your eyes in the process.

 

I’m an avid photographer of textures since I never know when I am going to have a project and think, “I should have snapped a photo of that interesting crumbling wall I saw on my drive the other day.”
So I happened upon a lovely little resource for designers like myself, bitbox.com.
The focus of the site is more on texture brushes for Photoshop, but what I found most useful is Jay’s textures and texture resources. I know where I’m going next time I need to devise some look involving antiqued paper, which happens more often than one would think.

Last summer I was able to see Gary Hustwit’s informative and entertaining Helvetica documentary and apparently he didn’t take much of a break.  His latest work, Objectified, focuses on industrial design, not something that I have much background in formally, but I certainly can appreciate the value of form and function.

It has been a while since I have posted, but I think I am focusing a bit too much on coming up with responses “worthy” of the blog.

So starting now, I am going to attempt to post things that I find that I would want other people to read or see, with out as much commentary as I keep intending to divulge to the world.

Without further ado:

 Pentagram’s post on the reworking of Starbucks

So sometimes I think it is rough keeping up with this blogging business, but I often am shooting emails off to people that are filled with little notes on design related things that I could easily blog about. I still have to collect my thoughts on Thailand, so that is forthcoming, but for now I want to express my gratitude for several tutorial websites.

I never really thought  much about tutorials, well actually I despised them. Why would I want to have a final product identical to the 20 other kids in my class where the professor already worked out the kinks?  Where was the exploration and serendipitous discovery?  Thanks to Google Reader, I’ve been rabidly devouring feeds from what will soon be 100+ blogs some of which have mentioned tutorials at other sites, which held only a passing interest.  

However, today while I was brainstorming how to add some visual interest to a website for work, I had a vague recollection of a post at PSDTUTS that could be useful for visualizing the abstract concept of communication. By using the tutorial as a general guide, I was able to avoid the cookie cutter syndrome I so loathed in the past.  So with this new discovery of the world of online design tutorials my summer evenings will be a bit more educational.

The result of my first tutorial use:

Other useful sites worth a note:

NETTUTS - Almost exactly like PSDTUTS, except for web development

Veerle’s Blog - Recommended to me by my friend Jon Bolden for her web tips, but also quite useful when it comes to doing more with Adobe programs

Every Stock Photo - Mentioned in one of the PSDTUTS tutorials, it is essentially a search engine of free stock images from Stock.XCHNG, Flickr Creative Commons, MorgueFile and other similar imaging sites

 

I just returned from a two week course held in Bangkok.  Images from my trip can be seen on Flickr, and thoughts should be arriving shortly at Tumblr.

 On the Rather Difficult Font Game.

28 out of 34 is not too bad considering I have been working mostly with web type of late.