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.
Update: You can now download a free desktop wallpaper of the second illustration.
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.
A Little Bird Told Me is the home base for the work and thoughts of Samantha Armacost. This site was developed using XHTML, CSS, and PHP, all wrapped up in some WordPress. All work on the site is © 2007-2010 Samantha Armacost, Some Rights Reserved unless otherwise noted.