laryn.kragtbakker

Swiss Miss (Tina Roth Eisenberg)

Swiss Miss (aka Tina Roth Eisenberg) has a prolific blog which throws up plenty of interesting content. There's a lot to sift through, so obviously not everything is as intriguing as the next, but she has a high enough "interesting to ho-hum" ratio to make it worth adding her RSS feed to the list.

Images taken from these recent posts:

• Toothpaste Type: Heldentica. [More info - including a ketchup font and a gel font]
• Christian Faur: Crayon Series
• Forest of Woods: trees made from scrap wood

RobertLPeters.com

I believe it was my brother Elbert who sent me a link to robertlpeters.com -- "a 50s-something designer and principal of Circle, a design consultancy I co-founded in 1976 in Winnipeg, Canada" (my hometown). I added the RSS feed to my subscriptions as I do to put a blog on "trial mode" and I've been impressed with the concise but almost always interesting posts he makes on topics from design to pacifism.

Images featured from these entries:

• Christoph Neiman...
• Worth 1000 words
• Social security...

Osocio: social advertising and non-profit campaigns

I'm a big fan of non-profit design. I've been daydreaming since my college days about one permutation or another of my plan to start a non-profit design firm or focus a freelance career around non-profits. I continue to work on this idea, and I think it's still a real option for the future (after Janel is done with her dissertation, assuming we have to move somewhere when she gets a job offer). And, of course, the diversity of non-profits and projects is my favorite part of working where I currently work. So I was pleased to stumble on a design blog that focuses on exactly the kind of design that interests me most. Osocio "...is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns...the place where marketing and activism collide." The images above are from a few campaigns that caught my eye:

1. Diversity of Species in the Rainforest: "The destruction of the rainforest comes in many shapes. And there are all kinds of animal and plant species which suffer as a result. Every hour three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct."
2. Second hand smoke campaign: an "oversized arm to let you see that smoking not only harms yourself."
3. Brisbane Advertising and Design Charity Challenge: "“Despite what many think, our industry has a big heart..."

(Originally posted on larynandjanel.com with alternate example images).

Bittbox.com

Who can resist freebies when it comes to design elements. Bittbox.com is a great resource to follow for free vectors, brushes (for Photoshop and Illustrator), textures, and tutorials. I've got the site in my RSS feeds to get a general sense of what he's got on the site and I check it out every now and then when I'm looking for something in particular.

(I used some of his grunge watercolour textures for the CEDC web redesign)

Wooster Collective: Ephemeral art

One of the sites I like to check out now and then for visual interest (and I'm rarely disappointed) is Wooster Collective. They showcase various street art that they find and which gets sent in to them.

Wooster Collective