Happy Labor Day, here’s a hand full of goodies found this week while surfing the web:

Coroflot tells you how to build your creative skill set.

Beautiful cut paper designs.

Awesome exhibit of Otl Aicher’s work for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Another site to help you fine tune your photoshop skillz: psdtuts. Be sure to check out how to make a shiny new pencil.

Awesome search engine for finding specific colored photos on flickr: Multicolr.

Nice http://www.vimeo.com/1556032?pg=embed&sec=1556032 for Austin TV by Alberto Cerriteño.

De Beers uses roses to make its point that Diamonds are Forever.

Just as much as we like to make posters at EMU we also like making collages. So check out the work of Sophie Kern.

Some great videos made with Legos. Go Mini Man, GO!

Graphics gone wild, or when you can’t tell the building apart from the signage. Check out some of the construction photos and design models.

History of graphic design, the website.

Since school is about to start this week, how about a nice video about PROCRASTINATION.

The editor/writer of the blog Grain Edit opens the doors to his home.

Awesome band-aid and ibuprofen packaging.

I’ve always been a fan of Haruki Murakami’s writing and the book cover designs of his books, check them out here, complete with an interview with designer John Gall. You can also here more stories about book and cover design over at the Cover Story Barnes and Noble site.

Instead of buildings as signage, try buildings as instruments.

All about Open Type.

A nicely executed video quickly demonstrating the history of communications.

Nice ads for Try Life in Another Language.

Some sweet typography from Alex Trochut.

Lastly, you can never grow too old to play with toys (or at least use them to create an art installation).

Oh and because it is a holiday why not have a little fun. Here’s some ninjas on rollerskates.

As I sit here today spending most of my time rotoscoping footage for a project I am working on, I find that music is often the only thing that keeps me from losing my mind. My iTunes plays an assortment of indie rock, indie/underground hip-hop, old school rap, and some classic alternative/punk music. Not much of it is considered mainstream, or at least at one point in time it was under the pop culture radar. There’s no Brittany Spears or Fabulous or much of what would be on MTV today (long ago it would have been on 120 Minutes or Subterranean). There is the exception of a few bands, like Silversun Pickups, whose videos don’t air, but were featured on air through a series of commerical like spots as an artist of the week.

As I sit and listen, I realize this: I, like many of my friends and colleagues embody a certain stereotype of designer. The kind of individual that avoids the mainstream seeking out the unknown (or little known), soon to blow-up, etc. Designer/critic Matt Soar, in his article “Graphic Design is Immaterial: Contexts, Criticism, and Continuities”, writes:

As designers we depend, in a very real sense, on exposing ourselves to the very latest styles, movies, books, gadgets (say hello to iPod), music – the very freshest morsels that the cultural zeitgeist can deliver. Only then can we produce design work that isn’t stale. The problem, though, is that once everyone else gets their hands on it, it ain’t fresh no more; so off we move again…So, we have to keep ahead; the further ahead the better. Where once we read Wired or RayGun, we now read Res or ThisIsAMagazine – at least until the hoards catch up and clue in; we bought Radiohead’s (or HoneyBarbara’s) first album when it came out and played it all day long in the studio, but now they’re just too popular. I’m sure some of you have rather more hip examples to offer – which is precisely my point.

His words describe all too well the hodge podge of music in my iTunes library: things that were were edgy years ago, things that still skirt the mainstream, things that may be in now but weren’t a year ago, things that may be in or out next week.

So I am curious, where does the Eastern Student (past and present) fall into this category? Are you surfing the edge of culture? Are you riding the wave of pop culture? Or are you watching from the beach? In other words what is your current playlist?
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Designers can help educate people on important issues, and this is an excellent example. I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that we’re often bombarded with propaganda, and often designers and television producers are responsible. We all need to make money to survive, but it’s easy to forget that most of the stuff we purchase is stuff we don’t need.

Don’t know how many of you know of this comic book. It was a comic in the 90s by Rob Schrab, which recently made a comeback to finish the story he left hanging. Anyhow, I was on the Deviant Art page of a guy named MC Griffin, and he had a link to a video he made for a contest of making an animated Scud short. Here is the comic creator reviewing the videos:

[Link]
The puppet ones are really cool, but I liked MC Griffins most.

So he announces another contest due November 12, and I think I’m going to try and put something together for that. I’ve been looking for an idea for an animation project. Posting this here in case other fans of the comic wanted to make their own.

Nearly a century ago this week, the famous design icon of New York city streets was released in 1915. Also found this week on the internets:

A fun series of anatomical charts by artist Tom Giesler.

Danny Yount titles for Guy Ritchie’s upcoming film, RockNRolla, are pretty slick.

If you are young and talented, the YCN is now auctioning off your services.

Great typography and letterpress work by Stan Van Steedman.

Check out this video of illustrator Julia Potts talking about her process and short film My First Crush.

The Sundance Channel premiers its new reality TV series Architecture School. Is a graphic design reality show on the way soon?

A bar I would definitely stop in and have a drink at: the progress bar.

A new website showcasing illustration promos.

Typography on dark backgrounds (yeah!).

Nice video looking at the history of olympic sports.

Great flickr set of signage.

Xscriptorium, a site chocked full of expression scripts for AfterEffects.

ELA in Love at First Byte = awesome.

desingfeedr breaks down online social networking and community sites for designers, and lists which one is for you.

Nice video of the world’s largest record collection.

How to easily install apache, mysql and php in OSX

If you click there, you can install apache, mysql and php really easily on your computer. So, for those of you who use php, you wouldn’t have to get a server with php in order to test a website. This is especially useful with blog software like Wordpress. Basically, with php, you have to use a web server that has this thing called mysql, which basically holds certain pages for you as database pages. If you were to create a website traditionally, you’d have to create one HTML page for each page on the site, but with php, you can create template pages, and certain other features that can appear frequently on the site without re-coding them.

It’s useful for updating, because, if you make a change on something that appears on every page in your site, if you did it the old fashioned way, you’d have to update ALL the pages one by one. For those of you that have used Dreamweaver, you can create template pages in that program, but every time you change a template page, you have to upload the entire site.

Anyway, this free program makes all this stuff easier, so you can spend more time designing!

Just found out about this slick little app called ‘coolIris’ that integrates into Firefox 3. Essentially a new way to browse/find images online, super smooth and beautiful. Check it out here.

One of the biggest complaints I often hear students mention is that they aren’t trained enough on the software. It is a valid complaint. Admittedly striking the balance in the classroom between teaching how to design and teaching how to use software is a difficult task, if we only taught the software (and there is an enormous amount to cover there), there would be no design taught. I often tell students that they need to just spend the time on their own trying every filter in photoshop, see what it does, and just play around with it, many don’t. Thankfully we have the internet. Tutorials We Heart is a great resource full of photoshop tutorials explaining everything from how to make a meteor shower to making type glow. It is a wonderful resource for those who want to brush up on their photoshop chops.

OK, I only know of one person working on this stuff out here in the small world of the EMU blogosphere… so, check it out Jenna!

I posted this here a long time ago, so I thought I’d post to the finished (or at least published) site.