Beautiful Email Newsletters

An amazing gallery packed with tons of beautiful e-newsletter designs!

Questionable Characters

Questionable Characters is run by two guys: Ben and Frank. Together they offer insight and answers to design questions. Fun site to waste some time on :)

Officeal

Officeal is a showcase of workplaces that really take the idea of creative space seriously. These are the types of companies that resist the urge to fill a room with cubicles.

These are our industry heroes of interior design and corporate culture. Officeal exists to bring them to your attention, and give them a spotlight.

C is for Candy

Another interesting blog discovery this week: C is for Candy. Graphic Designer, installation artist, city planner – Candy Chen makes me thing out of my graphic & web design box.

Logo Design Time Lapse Video

I love to watch other designers work. It’s probably not appropriate to stand behind someone and watch…so instead videos like this from Mattosn Creative will have to do. Check out the process of the Mottsy logo design.

Yeah Toast!!!

This isnt really graphic design or web design related, but I know you guys would find this entertaining! Don’t we all need a toast launcher in our kitchens?

Target E-news designs

I’ve been working on e-newsletter designs non-stop this week and came across this insanely clever design by target’s packaging division. Check it out!

Oops I tweeted my pants!

FL2 has an interesting flash based twitter visualization on their site. They also have some pretty sweet work in their portfolio.

Typography in Motion

A nice educational lighthearted video explaining the basics of typography. We should send this video to all the clients out there that want everything big and bold!

Pulp Fiction

Oldie but a goodie – I will never get tired of the this little clip! The typography in this video expresses the tone of the movie quote perfectly. Quite possible the best kinetic typography video i’ve seen so far!

Kinetic Typography Tutorial by Elrond Hubbard

A nice indepth tutorial on how to create a kinetic typography video. Wishing I had aftereffects now!

Sandimation

Another interesting animation technique: Animation with sand…I’ll call it sandimation!

Stop Motion Break Dancing

Funny stop motion video featuring some break dancing moves that i’m sure arent even possible :)

Rotoscoping

This video features a cool animation technique called rotoscoping.

Time Lapse

Cool time lapse video of a guy driving around a city at night. Light is always so much more intense with slow shutter speeds.

Time Lapse Design Process

Video of Mike from carsonified designing some the slides for his presentaiton at FOWD London. Pretty cool to see the process from beginning to end. Amazing photoshop skills!!!

AC Title Design

I love this little techie red/black short intro. Makes me think of Russian constructivism.

3D Typography

A quick intro spot with some awesome 3d typography effects.

Lightpainting

Creepy and serene stop motion light painting set in nature. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Very cool!

Pipes

Animation inspired by the old ‘pipes’ screensaver

Stop Animation + Candles

A cool little spot for VH1 done with stop animation and candles. Love the low tech approach!

MTV Australia

Love the way the MTV logo gets constructed in mid air in some of these spots – and the flowing cloth as well.

Typographic Battle Scene

I love the way this video uses typography as objects in a battle scene. Check out the process work – pretty complex and amazing!

Megaman

Old school videogame enthusiasts will love this vid! Stop motion animation + cut paper + megaman theme. Wow… funny and well done!

Carsonified Redesigns

Carsonified redesigned their site with a wonderfully illustrative and colorful design! Click around the site and let them know what you think.

Obox Theme Shop

Obox Design launched their theme store this week. I’m really digging their hand done ‘left handed’ theme. Go check it out! Great work guys!

Chat Creative

Chat Creative exists to connect the creative community one video chat at a time. Very cool idea to get to know other designers/bloggers and connect with them and learn!

Mrs. Green

Von Glitschka talks about his process of designing a character and how this expresses a brand.

Bio-Bak.nl

Flashy website with some interesting navigation…

Scrolling Background Effect

Nice header background animation tutorial from youlove.us. Nice use of png’s and jquery!

via The River Current

Packaging With Attitude

Love this simple packaging and identity system and witty copy-writing for Brooklyn Fare. I’m sure all the designers out there would love to have clients like this! :) By Mucca Designs

Post-it Note Stop Animation

Checkout this awesome stop motion post-it note video. I’m amazed at the complexity and length of this video!

Copyright 101 for Designers

Amy has some great tips for designers on basic copyright info over at design sponge. A must read if you a newbie designer or student.

PIXELATED – a lightweight IconKit

PIXELATED is extremely lightweight – the icon file sizes average 60 bytes!
All icons contain only two colors: #222 and #EEE. (I’m considering releasing a developer’s package with PSDs so users can easily customize their colors)
Since the icon’s edges are hard, these transparent GIFs will work on any background.

The icons are free to use – no strings attached.

How To Create a WordPress Theme

Themeshaper has an 11 part tutorial covering wordpress from beginning to end. Good through tutorial for beginners.

Free Typography

Love free (and decent) typefaces? Check out freetypography.com for all the latest on great free typefaces!

Rainbows oh my…

This site might cause you to have a seizure, but this is the glory of the internets. Prepare to bask in the warm glow of animated rainbow gradients :)

Screen Jelly

Screen jelly allows you to record your screen from within the browser. Pretty cool for on the fly tutorials or demonstrations.

247 web usability guidelines

User Focus has put together a HUGE checklist of usability guidelines for web projects. Great in depth resource!

The Rebranding of a Company

Sam over at Build Internet has a great write up of how he rebranded his web design business from Cazzu Media to One Mighty Roar. Its always great to read about the reasoning behind others design choices!

Helvetica Moleskine Icon

Bigkobe over at deviant art has some sweet moleskine icons – including the two limited edition Helvetica Moleskines! if you are a swiss-nerd like me you will enjoy these! I’ll be using mine to replace the text edit icon in my dock!

When Free Fonts Aren’t Free

Web typography is about to make another major shift in implementation – weather the font foundries embrace this or not! Typekit has a great blog post about EULA agreements and how they are often times vague and need to change.

Modernizr

Have you ever wanted to do if-statements in your CSS for the availability of cool features like border-radius? Well, with Modernizr you can accomplish just that! Modernizr uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming features like rgba(), border-radius, CSS Transitions and many more. These are currently being implemented across browsers and with Modernizr you can start using them right now, with an easy way to control the fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support them.

XHTML WTF

Web-God Zeldman breaks the news about the death of XHTML and the transition to HTML5. Interesting discussion going on in the comments.

Gridmaker

A sweet grid generator that will help you with your web designs. Just plug in the number of columns and generate a png file to build your designs off of!

You’ve Got 20 Seconds Or Less to Live

At the end of the day, packaging has tobe about substance, not just style, if it is going to be effective. Great article on package design by Ted mininni over at The Dieline.

Table Styling, Fixed Header and Highlighting

Just a couple of quick tricks, from scratch, on coding up tables. We use the proper semantic tags for a table header and then set it to a fixed position so when scrolling the table the header is always visible. Then we implement row AND column highlighting with a bit of semi-clever JavaScript.

Copycat!!!

Looks like the designer of this political campaign website was a little bit more than ‘inspired’ by the iconic Obama design…

Design Boost

Designboost envisions a holistic approach as a condition for sustainable design. To fulfil this vision we believe in upgrading design competence and boosting competitiveness by knowledge sharing. Our four inter-related platforms, BoostUpgrades: BoostEvent, BoostMedia, BoostResource and BoostConcept can be further explored in our periodical table of design knowledge.

Brush Pilot

Do you have too many photoshop brushes? Have trouble finding that *one* brush that you need? Check our Brush Pilot™ by @bittbox. Brush Pilot is designed to save you time by allowing you to instantly preview your brushes without having to load them into Photoshop.

Silverback

I know Silverback isnt new, but I heard this app mentioned like CRAZY and An Event Apart Boston this week. If you are in need of a way to do some quick usability testing cheaply check this app out!

A Feed Apart

Didn’t make it to An event apart this year? Well you are in luck! The designers that did attend TWEETED like CRAZY! The awesome folks over at Lion Burger made a cool site that aggregates tweets and pics by speaker and session. Go enjoy! Its just like you were there!

Mac Dock Icon Spelling!

I’m not the only geek that notices this: inadvertent spellings in your dock! Check out this gallery of doc arrangements that spell out words. A great time waster :)

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond

I attended Aarron Walter’s session on building findable websites this past week at An Event Apart boston. This is the companion website that has some valuable tools and tips on making your website findable.

Paul-Rand.com

A Paul Rand tribute site that contains biography information, writings, and his works – great if you are looking for classic logo inspiration.

Cardon Copy

1 find crappy hand drawn poster
2 redesign
3 post

Apple Nav in Pure CSS

Tutorial on how to make the apple nav using nothing but HTML and CSS. Pretty impressive!

Left Channel

Left Channel just updated their portfolio and show reel with some sweet new motion work. Go check it out!

Technique For Creating A Hand Drawn Website

The guys at From The Couch have a great video tutorial on a technique for creating hand drawn websites. Definitely check it out if you are looking to try something different!

Rounded Corners In FireFox And Safari

A quick tutorial on CSS3 selectors that make rounded corners a piece of cake in FF and Safari!

Stop Trying Start Doing

Another great video blog from the guys at From The Couch.

Interview with the guys ‘From The Couch”

Tired of the from the couch links yet? Ha! Well this is the last. Check out this interview Aaron did! Its cool to see how the guys got their start video blogging and what they are inspired by.

Build a Photo Gallery Tutorial

Chris from CSS-Tricks seems to never run out ideas for video tutorials. Check out this tut on building a photo gallery.

jQuery for Beginners

Looking to learn jQuery but don’t know where to start? Check out Jeff’s video series that will teach you how to use jQuery from the ground up!

Diving Into Php

Another great series by Jeff over at Theme Forest & Nettuts is diving into PHP. I’m currently going through these tutorials and learning a ton!

From Design to Print Podcast

Enough web stuff – let’s talk about print design: Bleeds, die cuts, paper types oh my! Check out this podcast if you want to learn more about all things print related. (itunes link!)

Boagworld Podcast

Another great web design related podcast to check out, subscribe to and follow religiously: Boagworld. This weeks show is about conflicts that surround design decisions.

Rookie Designer Podcast

Adam over at Rookie Designer runs a great podcast that covers important topics that newbies need to know about. This most recent episode Adam talks about how hiring a sales person to bring in new business may or may not help freelancers out there.

Grasshopper

Last but not least – check out this typography based video on entrepreneurship. Quite inspiring! :)

Guru

I love all the quirky little animated characters in Guru’s show reel. Lots of inspiration for animation based motion design.

Pysop

Pysop has a large variety of work for a large variety of clients, but I really enjoy their propaganda section.

Mass Market

Mass Market has a great portfolio filled with lots of big name clients from the music industry. I’m really digging the bubbles and subtle effects in their diet coke commercial.

Lobo

I love this whimsical FIAT commercial that features animation and the gas pumps chasing the car.

Justin Harder

What else can you say about amazing stop motion animation that involves surfing sandals? Niiiiiiiiice!

Shilo

Shilo has a nice spot for gap combining dance and hand drawn marker graphics.

Oktobor

Oktobor has a nice short spot for Fresh & Fruity yogurt. Love the little yogurt character chasing down its owner – very creative!

The Mill

I love the simplicity, 80′s color scheme and lighting used in this video for La Roux.

Dvein

Dvein’s work is in a class of its own – bordering on strange, organic and other-worldly. Definitely inspiring and different.

Buck

Finally the Mt. Dew rebranding makes sense….sort of. Buck designed this spot to be released with the new Dew rebranding.