I found these handmade greeting cards at the MacArthur Artist’s Market here in Springfield. They were made by Good Behavior and feature found art from school textbooks and other recycled stuff.
Bonus: I also bought the greatest thing ever–a little bound notebook featuring a ’70s drawing of the Mercury spacecraft.
I’ve been finding a bunch of typography-related videos on the YouTube. Here are some of my favorites. There are definitely some similarities between the entries based on movie dialog, but they’re still amazing to watch.
The blood spatter is precious.
We’ve been looking for an online substitute for Quickbooks for some time now, mostly because we run our business off of three 
computers and the one that has all the invoice info. always seems to be the one that’s 1) farthest away and 2) not turned on. Here’s a great list of online invoicing services, but they all function pretty similarly: You get a free account that allows you to have either a very limited (3-5) number of clients or only be able to send out a small number of invoices per month. After that, you gotta pay. Most sites have multi-tiered setups that allow you to incrementally add clients and invoices, depending on the size of your business.
There are two things I don’t like about doing invoices this way:
I had an idea for a website the other day: I play the guitar, and I have a terrible memory. So, when I come up with a song idea, I usually record it on the computer before I forget it. I assume I’m not alone, and a lot of other people have a bunch of half-done songs on their computers too. So here’s the idea for the site: it’s a place where people can upload their half-written parts of songs and combine them with other people’s half-written parts of songs, like a giant imaginary website band. I also added a Twitter-like brevity requirement to keep the Zepplin-esque wanking to a minimum: every upload must be less than 60 seconds.
SPOILER ALERT: If you want to see the (in-progress) site, head to Rifflet.com.
I don’t use CNN.com on my phone, because it sucks. I’ve sort of given up on news sites in general, but that’s a different story. The real reason I don’t use CNN.com is that after every line or two, I have to click a ‘more’ link to go to the next line. It’s super awkward, it makes reading a story take forever and it’s the old way of looking at the pay-per-kilobyte mobile web.
Smartphones and unlimited data plans are getting super cheap–I won’t tell you how much I overpaid for the Blackjack over there about a year ago, but it arrived at the photoshoot in a hovercraft made out of golden baby seals. I understand however, it would get annoying if you just skim your news and don’t want to wait for the whole thing to load. Read the article…
And the record industry suckers me out of another $10. From the gatefold packaging to the actually hand-drawn typeface (I always compare similar letters to see if it’s just a fancy font or not), this album is one of my favorites this year. The highlight is the fresh-from-a-foodfight photo cards packaged away on the inside, complete with Tiger Beat-style questions on the back: “What’s your favorite food in a can, spray or otherwise?”
P.S. If you don’t want to feel old, don’t look at the birthdates. One of these guys was born in the nineties. I’m gonna go do some situps. No I’m not.
I opened my e-mail this morning to find this gem. I know making fun of people’s names isn’t all that funny, but come on.
Trust me: the guy on the left knows how to “enter into negotiations.” And check out how the guy on the right is just…staring right at it, as if there isn’t a big, orange, clipart wang staring him in the face. (Hint: Rollover to see the funny.)
This comes from a real-live computer software company’s website. And I know that I’m not making the funny up here, because it was covered up with a de-cocked version several hours later.
Even worse, this clipart was supposed to indicate a friendly merger of two companies. Not counting the aired out sausage, is there anything friendly (or at least not hostile) about the posture of these two guys?
S
o I downloaded the IE8 beta 1 last night. It’s not bad. Seems pretty promising, in fact, although a couple of the new features are less than intuitive at first glance. As a disclaimer, Microsoft is pretty clear that this beta is aimed at “designers and developers,” so I’m sure there will be a bunch of usability improvements before the next release. With that said, some first impressions: Read the article…
There’s probably not much demand for this kind of stock, but it’s cool to look at, and you never know when you can use it for some unorthodox purposes (website navigation, anyone?) Bassboy.com has put together a five-disc library of photos, brochure scans, and schematics for hundreds of old tape recorders, stereos, amplifiers, and other old-timey stuff. Each disc costs around $30, and they each have variations of open-reel-tape-inspired disc art. (Side note:Why isn’t anyone making blank discs like this? I’d buy them by the pantload.)
As an extra bonus, think of all the dirty ’70s things your parents total strangers did while listing to Paul Anka records on these things. Explain.
W
e stuck with our new spaceman (person?) theme and redesigned our cards for the third time in as many hours, it seems like. For those of you who are interested in such things, we had them printed at 48HourPrint.com with rounded corners and the nice-to-the-touch matte dull finish on both sides. Whatcha think? (Special thanks to Griffin Crowdson for loaning us the space helmet.)
I‘m kind of a font-whore, and as such, it takes me about a year to go through all of them one by one. There seem to be a lot of crappy font managing programs out there, but here’s one that seems a little better: Opcion Font Viewer, written by Paul Chiu. Opcion’s best quality is its ability to display a bunch of fonts at once. It uses a page forward/page back system, so you can see a whole new group of fonts (with your chosen text) with the click of a button. Opcion lets you choose how many fonts to put into a page, so if you have a big enough monitor, you can probably fit 15 or 20 at a time.
Opcion also lets you preview fonts that are not yet installed and lets you save a list of favorite fonts for quick recall. The only thing missing is a way to to see extended character sets, but that’s not really the point of this program anyway.
One final thing that gets a little annoying: Opcion was written in 2004, so it can’t be blamed, but every time I open it up in Vista, I get a warning message telling me that an “unauthorized program is trying to access my computer.” Honestly, this is more of a kavetch about Vista, but you’ve been warned.
I
have a secret. I don’t hate Vista. I wanted to, though. A big, glassy turd salad, I thought. When I buy my next computer, I’m gonna get that XP downgrade so I don’t have to put up with Vista’s crap, I thought, like a smug jerk.
Sadly, I was pretty much totally wrong.
I didn’t get the downgrade, but it wasn’t my choice: I got a refurbished HP Pavilion laptop ($600 from buy.com - I recommend it if you’re in the market) that came with Vista Home Premium. Fortunately, my cheapness got in the way of my desire to jump on a Vista-hating bandwagon. Here’s a summary of what I like: Read the article…
