Design By the Book

 

I had a heart attack [of joy] when I watched this video.

DesignSponge and The New York Public Library have collaborated to make some amazing webisodes about books and design. This episode is specifically about finding inspiration, and how libraries are a great resource for doing so. There’s such a different experience that you get from books in a library than you do from endlessly searching for inspiration on the web.

I think I could live in a library. *swoon*

Creative Crops

Amazing!

If only I had known where to get an ample supply of creative juice before I started design school…

Good Ideas in 2009

 

Trend analysers PSFK have channeled their knowledge into book form, featuring 9 “Good Ideas” intended for marketers and creatives. Flipping through the online version is pretty rad too.

Little Fury Studio

I rather like the minimalist design of Little Fury‘s website, especially the arrows for back/forth navigation. There is barely any copy, yet you still have a sense of where to go. I wonder if you could use smaller arrows instead of the 1 2 3 4 to flip between images of the same project… And maybe turn the rest of the copy into symbols as well, except for the Project Name. Only downfall is I wish there were rationales somewhere…

Digital >> Print

In case you were worried about your blog getting lost in cyberspace, Blog Books imports all the information into a book layout that you can customize as much/little as you wish (hardcovers, dust jackets, oh my). Interesting idea, they say you can have up to 440 pages and the turn around time is 7-10 days…

CityMurmur

Shape your own city! This interactive map will alter the map accordting to topics, typologies, and impacts of media to create some interesting visuals and information design based on the news collected from that specific city. There’s a timelapse feature as well that visualizes for example, the changes in news topic from week to week. Here.

You can’t search what you don’t know…

More inspiration? Come to this site to find fresh ideas and discover new websites that you likely wouldn’t have tripped over otherwise. Minithink is a simplified search engine, without the search, with the absence of user control leaving you at the whim of the link generator.

…When other modes of procrastination just aren’t getting you the results you need.

Coöp Collective

This portfolio site is actually really simple; all the text is html, and each project uses the same ‘internal’ layout, varying the amount of scroll needed to see everything. Tons of content for the user to discover at will, without the need to click between pages. Brilliant!

Typetweets

The latest talk about type. Literally.

typetweets by typesites finds the latest feeds mentioning typography on twitter and pulls them into a visual overview so you can see the type talk du jour. Interesting to see the themes that start to happen here.

Your Message Here

I love this project from Something’s Hiding in Here. For the last two months, passersby have been greeted by a different message in the window of Urban Outfitters in Philadelphia. The messages were generated from user comments that were submitted to their blog and changed each day. Oh, the whimsy! A raving success, the project is now travelling to a (as of yet) undisclosed location. See the photo archive of messages here.