Think Green: Recycled Notebook

It’s a bit of a Green Week around here so far. Now that certain people have received their birthday gifts in the mail, I can finally unveil a project I am really excited about: my recycled notebook/sketchbook. If you like what you see, we’ve featured this project in our on-going Unemployment Project of the Week series on Stickers & Donuts today. Head over there for the step-by-step instructions.

I created the whole thing using salvaged scraps and recycled office paper. You might recognize the wrapping paper I used for the cover from the press kit I developed for Hallmark’s Adhesive Gift Wrap last year. Here’s a look at the inside:

I haven’t decided how I’ll use it yet—whether for notes or sketching—but it’s almost too cute to use. I just really like that robot paper and am glad I saved the left-overs.

Tags | diy, How-to

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Triple the Fun

…and late. Well that was extremely annoying last night. I’ll attempt to remember everything as I had it written. And my apologies for the absence of this column the past several weeks: hopefully this triple-stuffed edition will make up for it. (On a side note, I’m paranoid that I’ll lose the post again, so I’m not going to preview it just in case. If something doesn’t work, comment and I’ll fix it. :-[ )

For the Home:

• Design*Sponge broke the sad news that Domino Magazine has folded. But even more sadly for myself personally, Home Companion Magazine folded this month. I'm really going to miss their DIY/vintage ideas!
• Johanna Basford was featured on anything goes, and I REALLY want the plates (for some reason, I couldn't post the photo...)
• I also Love these coffee-filter garlands that Creature Comforts posted a How-To on. Who says decorating has to be expensive?
  

  Courtesy Creature Comforts

• These pillows just crack me up:
  

How-To’s:

• Drawn! posted links to Cody Walker’s technical illustration tutorials such as the one below for Advanced Isometric Illustrations:
  

  Courtesy Cody Walker

• Think Green: D*S also posted a cute project using old matchbooks to make mini-notepads. I can’t wait to use recycled paper at the office to make some…
  

  Courtesy D*S

• You can photoshop your own photographs to look like Tilt-Shift photography with this tutorial…or just plug it into the Tilt-Shift Maker
  
  

  Courtesy Tilt-Shift Maker

Illustration Inspiration:

• I loved the article over at Animation Treasures about Ludwig Richter, a 19th c. German illustrator who worked in woodcuts. Gorgeous:
  

  Courtesy of Animation Treasures

• Katie Kirk and Nathan Strandberg did an awesome job with Eli No! as posted on Grain Edit:
  

  Via Grain Edit

• Grandma’s Graphics has an excellent gallery of public domain illustrations from the likes of Harry Clarke and Sir John Tenniel (of Alice in Wonderland fame):
  

  Courtesy Grandma's Graphics

Typography:

• Who knew that Berlin has a Buchstabenmuseum?? Designistoshare has an excellent article on The Letter Museum.
  

  Courtesy designistoshare

• CR reported that the British Library hopes to acquire the Macclesfield Alphabet Book, a 16th c. type specimen: the article is complete with delicious pictures of the book’s spreads.
  

  Via CR

For Further Reading:

• ReubenMiller listed the Top 90 Design Blogs according to Alexa
• Urban Sketchers has got some great inspiration for my Sketch-More-Resolution

And finally, Polaroid Lives! and I REALLY REALLY want to see Coraline now:

Tags | animation, diy, German, pattern, stationary, sustainability

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Schmorgasborg of Design Links

I’m all mixed up on my day’s tonight. I started to write another post before it hit me that it was Wednesday already! Eep. So I scoured my shared items for some goodies to share. Once again, this week’s don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, but hopefully are fun nonetheless.

Excellent Light Doodles Animation
Tricia‘s comment on my last post lead me to the Pika Pika site: what fun!

For the Booklist:

• James Jean’s Fables Covers is hitting the shelves (image and news courtesy of ProcessRecess):
  
• Stickers and Donuts shared the news of Penguin’s new Book Series + Poster Sets
  I’ve since seen that the Shepard Fairey George Orwell sets have already sold out…bummer. But I’m loving the Roald Dahl Collection. Pictured below is the Arabian Nights edition.
  
• iLT pointed me to FontFeed’s FontBooklets: Cute, Informative, and Free!

Vote for Jesse!
I know him! (sort of…we went to the same school)
Jesse Kuhn is an illustrator living in NYC. I just saw on his blog this sweet shirt design he submitted to Threadless. Go Vote!

And Finally
Steven Heller sheds some light on the studio behind Obama’s O logo. Regardless of your political allegiance, you have to admit that was some Excellent branding…especially for a political campaign.

Tags | NaBloPoMo 2008

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Typography

Welcome to blog post 1 of NaBloPoMo! (Yesterday’s doesn’t really count.) So as I combed through my feed-reader, from the past couple of weeks a lot of really great posts stood out. But since I need to narrow things down and generally like to group them into a theme, I’ve picked all of the great type related posts that stood out to me. I should preface this with just a general recommendation to head over to Johno’s iLoveTypography and check out his Sunday Type posts: always quality stuff so check it out!

For the home and closet:

• Show your love for type/design with these awesome shirts from Von Roxy (seen on Pica + Pixel):
  
• Script “blah blah blah” Pillow seen on Shop Friends:
  
• Awesome Letter R Pillow by Bonjour Mon Coussin seen on Creature Comforts:
  

For the love of Fraktur:

• I’m fairly certain that I posted about Fraktur Mon Amour in my Booklist posts, but Book By It’s Cover has some sweet eye-candy-photos of the inside:
  

Braille is typography too:

• And quite beautiful when used in product design such as on these wine labels spotted on SwissMiss:
  

Type on the Web:

• I just Stumbled upon WriteSomething today:
  
  Looks like a cool project and has a certain appeal as far as being a site totally composed of large type…
• Jon Tan has an excellent article on using @font-face for embedding fonts on the web…just wish I had an opportunity to use it…
• design:related reports that Hulu has posted a collection of Sesame Street’s animated shorts on counting. Awesome typography in a lot of them, but where is 12??
• Coudal recently linked to a scanned in book of Hand-lettering from 1927: beautiful! (and not the first of these I’ve seen floating around recently…and I’m not complaining!)
  

Tags | NaBloPoMo 2008

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Fall Booklist Part 2

I’ve been overwhelmed with the number of great books that just keep popping up…that, and I realized I’d forgotten a few on last week’s list. Hence the continuation. But before I get going, an important announcement: It Came!

This past weekend, I got the book I won from Johno over at iLT: Designing Books. It’s marvelous! And the first book on the Fall Booklist I can cross off for reading. So now, without further ado: part 2.

More Books:

• I can’t believe I forgot to post this one last week: Animation Podcast announced that Eric Goldberg has come out with a great book, Character Animation Crash Course!, detailing how to animate for character animation. Complete with sample reels on an included disc, it sounds like it’ll be a great resource for any artist: animator or otherwise.
• Spatium profiled a book chronicling the work of Hermann Zapf: Alphabet Stories is published in English and German and is available from Linotype.
• The NY Times reported on two inspiring book cover designs this past week: Harper Perennial’s Olive Editions and The Good Thief. I haven’t added either to my list yet, but want them on my shelf for eye-candy.
  
• Finally Chronicle Books’ blog profiled the children’s books designed and illustrated by Paul Rand. Might make a good baby gift for your designer friends (or Christmas gift for myself ).

On a related note:

• This animation (seen on Drawn!) promoting the Belgian Book Fair is stunning (and delightfully Cartoon Modern-esque):
  
  Boekenbeurs 2008 – Mark Borgions from Darren Di Lieto on Vimeo.

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Fall Booklist

It seems that with fall around the corner, everyone is wanting to turn over a new “leaf.” (get it? ha! erm…) Anyways, this past week I found my Reader full of great books to add to my reading list. But first a fun little site found via Johno’s Found Type this past week:

Spell With Flickr lets you do just that.

Fall Booklist (for those blustery days inside):

• Design Observer posted their Fall booklist – making it onto my list are Boyce’s Sizes May Vary, Helfand’s Scrapbooks: An American History, Heller/Talarico’s The Design Entrepreneur, Die Gestalten’s Data Flow and Fully Booked, Lupton’s Indie Publishing, Armin (of Under Consideration) and Gomez-Palacio’s Women of Design, and finally, Woodham’s A Dictionary of Modern Design
• Not sure how I’ll get my hands on this one, but Spatium has a short write-up on Coultre and Purvis’ Jan Tschichold: Plakate der Avantgarde which looks really good.
• Inkheart, a great book by German author, Cornelia Funke, is being made into a movie and the full trailor was just released (seen on Coudal Blend). If you’re like me, you’ll want to read the books first: the third and final book, Inkdeath, comes out within weeks. I can’t wait, so I’m reading the German-language edition first.
• Finally, Lettercult has an excellent interview with Doyald Young about his new book, Dangerous Curves: Mastering Logotype Design. What an inspiring guy!

Tags | Reading List

Czech It Out: I Won!

John over at iLT just announced that I won the copy of Designing Books: practice and theory that he was giving away! I can’t wait to get it: I’m so excited! I’ll be sure to post more once it’s here.

Since this week’s Sunday Type was focused on Czech Type, it reminded me that I have been meaning to post about this site for a while now: The Little Czech Primer.

In my “spare” time, I’ve been trying to learn more Czech. There doesn’t seem to be as many resources for learning Czech on the web (if anyone knows of a good podcast, let me know), but in my searching, I stumbled across this little gem. LCP is basically a cute little flash card site, and I really like the simple illustrations:

When your mouse hovers over the word, you see its English equilivent. What fun, simple line drawings! I’m not sure if they are original to the site, or pulled from other language resources (some seem to have Russian in the background). It reminds me of some of the fun illustrations that were in my German textbooks while in school: wouldn’t a foreign language book be a fun project?

Tags | Czech, German, language

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: How To’s

This week there seemed to be a lot of really good how-to’s that I came across. The exciting thing? Many of these how-to’s were things I had been wishing for, but not necessarily looking for. Joy!

How To’s

• Making a Repeat-able Pattern with Julia Rothman
  
  Rothman’s guest post on Design*Sponge walks you through how to create your own repeat-able patterns by hand. I’ve always wondered how they do that! (thanks to CelestinaCarmen)
• Creating Your Own FlipBooks – Since I’ve been in an animation kick, I was excited to see 2 links on this topic that I can’t wait to try:
  Photojojo’s How-To and The Curious Blog’s How-To
• Print Gocco Instructional from etsy
  My new printer (which I haven’t had a chance to post about yet) is waiting patiently in my studio while I’ve been researching tips on how to best use it. I’ve found a lot of great information out there: my favorite tip of which has been Celestina’s technique to waterproof the frame: thanks! I’ll be posting more about gocco once I have the chance to break it out of the box.

Resources

• Web starter kit from Quommunication has everything you need to mock up a website in photoshop: handy! (via Designer in Action)
• Typography for Lawyers has good advice for anyone. (via Typophile)
• Designing Books: practice and theory – iLT just posted a great review on what promises to be an awesome book. I’m adding this one to my reading list!

Tags | How-to

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Wish List

Well, this was an unusual week: usually I find several items to share that all relate to each other. This week, I had a hard time categorizing them. So I guess I’ll just have to group things the best I can:

Adding these to my wish list:

• Neubau Berlin has put both of their popular books in one sweet collection: Neubau Exposition. I might just have to preorder this since I’ve been waiting to get my own copies of Modal and Welt. (via QBN) Update: here’s what they look like…
  
• Also found on QBN was this cool Fabric Clock:
  
  I just really like the customization of it.

Some sites to check out:

• Snow and Graham Letterpress just updated their site, and boy! is it eye-candy!
• Check out The Journal of Urban Type for some cool vernacular type.
• Creativebits posted some links to great blank images for use in digital mockups.
• Lastly, Steven Heller weighs in on the Orphan Works debate.

Tags | German, Neubau, Orphan Works Bill, vernacular type

Wednesday’s Weekly Reader

Another week’s worth of great stuff on the web, but first an Fantasy Olympics update: it seems that despite a good start, Austria has slipped to the bottom. Alas!

Re-visiting the Orphan Works Bill debate:
I first posted about this issue here and here, and now Etsy’s Storque puts the debate up to their readers. 

Great Resources:

•  If you’re like me and always hoping to brush up on more webdesign skills, WebChicklet posted a great resource list for learning CSS. (via swissmiss)
• SpeakUp! just posted an awesome review of the book Dear Lulu. Designed by design students in Germany, the book is essentially a test to see how well the digital on-demand service could print everything from half-tones to colors and how well the piece was trimmed and bound. Sweet idea and well designed:
  
• For those art history nerds like me, check out Nancy Stock-Allen’s well-designed History of Graphic Design site for class notes. (also via swissmiss)  
• And finally, if you love Sprint’s Speed of Light campaign and want to do your own light drawings, check out Light Doodles for a gallery and how-to. (Thanks, Linden!)

Pure eye-candy:

• Shadows Never Sleep reinvents the picture book for your iPhone (or iPod Touch!)…via Coudal
  
• And in honor of my upcoming post series on animation, this gorgeous snippet of a short from Carlos Lascano: A Short Love Story is one of the most beautiful pieces of stop motion in a long time. (also via Coudal)
   

Tags | art history, German, iPhone, iPhone apps, Orphan Works Bill, Webdesign