Pantone Mugs

These great Pantone Mugs would be an awesome gift but at 130$ they might be a little to much. But I have heard of a few places that sell them individually.

T-Shirts

T-Shirts are something no one can ever get enough of. This one from Bad Designer Threads is sweet.

Design Magazines

MOMA Under 50$ sections

The Museum of Modern Art Store has sections for gifts under $25, $50, and $100. The under 50 and 25 dollar sections have some cool gifts, the Munny toy is especially cool.

Veer

Veer has some great merch the Pentagram Calender is especially awesome.

You can read the whole bit here, where he goes in depth about how he made the coin and the processes and inspiration for the coin.

Paper Cut Illustrations

With all the work I have been doin with paper latly this was a great find on stumbleupon. Yes they really are all paper you can see her full portfolio here.

50 Creative Portfolio Designs

I’m starting to do research and beginning designs for the next version of upsidedowncity which will be a portfolio site with a blog attached. Smashing Magazine always comes up whenever I’m doing research and it always is smashing. This article features some amazing portfolios and is no exception.

29 Texture Packs

Textures I never can seem to find a use for a growing collection. But here are 29 more I’m looking at downloading.

Human Flipbook

Erbert and Gerbert did this great using tshirts with various amounts of ripping and tearing to create a flipbook/stop motion animation commercial which went viral on the internet.

Save Polaroid

If you dont know Polaroids Instant Film will be gone soon. The group trying to save it is already up and running. Meanwhile stock up on the film if you use it.

Sovergn Back

I found Sovereign Beck through the Cool Hunters Video Podcast. Put simply they make awesome ties. No this isn’t an ad I just really want one.

Pantone Shoes

Another awesome peice of designer clothing. Pantone shoes though at 200+ dollars they are a little out of my league.

A SEO Guide from Google

If you haven’t heard the news yet Google released an short guide to SEO optimization via the Google Webmaster Blog looks pretty good check it out here.

Imaginary Design

Love can damage your health

Another awesome portfolio from the UK, that’s 2 in a row. Can I make it three next week? At any rate check out this portfolio for some great inspiration.

280 Slides

280 Slides is an online slideshow maker.

After alot of poking around and Google searching I finally rediscovered 280 Slides. Its pretty much an online slideshow maker with some pretty awesome features.

Wordpress Theme Toolkit Plugin

Theme Toolkit Plugin - A better theme editors for wordpress.

Abduzeebos Daily Insperation #38

Abduzeebos daily inspiration series is getting better.

Effektive Design Studio

Effektive Design Studio

60 Free Vector Graphics for Digital Art Pros

Vectortuts just launched an awesome freebies post.

Guide to creating a minimalist website.

Create a minimalist website.

Look for a new brush set early next week and and some more design related posts to come in the next few weeks.

DinPattern

Free Pattern From Din Pattern

DinPattern is a collection of patterns (and a few free wordpress themes.) from Evan Eckhard. There are a ton of high quality free patterns on this site and they are free for commercial and non-commercial use. Even better.

easy CSS sprites

This is a CSS Sprite.

CSS sprites are something I’m always told is a great idea because it lets you make less requests to the server by grouping images together and then useing sections of the images to display. Its a little like making CSS image rollovers.

CSS Dropdown menu framework

CSS Dropdown Framework

Dropdown Menus have always thrown me for a loop. Everytime I need one I have to go search for one to hack apart until I get what I want. At least I wont have to do anymore searching and I can just go here.

Thesis Theme for Wordpress

Thesis Theme For Wordpress

Always alert for new wordpress frameworks to work from I was delighted when I found Thesis. It looks slick and stylish and forms a basic background for you to use for your theme.

Bonus Link : Doctype declarations

How many web designers honestly know how to code a perfect doctype declaration. I sure don’t so the next best thing is copying all of them down from here.

Until Next Week

4 Color Silkscreen Howto

4 Color Silkscreen Process

Back when I was getting into silk screening more I found this article on making silkscreen halftones to use with silkscreen process inks. It seems like a neat trick if you need to produce things for mass production which I was looking at for The Machine Project.

Stern Metal Typeface

Stern Metel Typeface

This is want I want for Christmas. But at a 2 month wait and 80$ I don’t think I’ll get it.

It’s not Its

it's not its

One of the downsides of being an art major is that you never get to copyright and the it’s vs its has always stumped me forever. Now I know better thanks to this great and informative website.

byroglyphics

byroglyphics

byroglyphics is the website of designer Russ Mills. Its always inspiring to see how he integrates splats and real artistic elements into his designs and with such a limited and subtle color pallet they are absolute master pieces.

Today is Blog Action Day! And here I almost forgot. I just want to make a short post to point people to KIVA, which is a site that supports small bussinesses and entripenurs in developing nations with small denomonation loans.

Another organization i would donate to is Heifer which supplies animals to families around the world to help them become self sustaining. My mom used to get their catalog and donate and one day i hope i can make enough to also.

Happy Blog Action Day!

I recently thought about The Rasterbator at a meeting for the UO Digital Arts Student Group, ASDA, where we discussed doing some large scale outdoor art with it. It takes an image you upload and turns it into a massive halftone reproduction, on letter sized paper. Take a look at the gallery for more ideas and inspiration,

This is a new tutorial from Digital Arts. In it the author take some extruded text in illustrator and warps into abstract shapes I’ll post my results with this technique this week end, as I’m using this for a new poster design.

In case you live in a hole (you would have to if you haven’t found this yet) and you haven’t found Designers Toolbox yet, it’s now your new best friend. Loads of templates and other goodies are in here just poke around and you will find something you need.

Context Free. One of my favorite little tricks. It generates vector objects based on certain rules you define the code looks a little like CSS and is easy to learn. I’ll probally post a basic tutorial on how to use it later with some examples.

bittbox has really outdone himself this time with his community created font “Conglomerfont” all characters were hand drawn and sent to bittbox for inclusion even one by a six year old girl. You can read the post here.

I know I found textorizer a long time ago I recently rediscovered it on stumbleupon. It takes images that you uplaod and creates text outlines of that image using words that you specify.

Art of the title if one of my new favorite blogs. it archives movie title posting the fill content of either the starting or ending sequences. Some of my favorites are, Catch Me If You Can, Casino Royale and Iron Man.