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Recently, I have been looking at designing a website, but I haven’t really decided what I want it to look like, yesterday I found a cool site, and there are millions more!.

vintage ads

a little bit of vintage inspiration!
travel to china
this is a pretty cool site because it uses a full image background, which was pretty much unthinkable a couple years ago, with the bandwidth limits. A lot of sites have been transitioning to this, and it is really cool to see some of the results, this site does it especially well, with clever scaling and great images.

Favourite picture of 08

Favourite picture of 08

So I decided to browse my photo library for pictures from 2008, and I came across this picture from montreal, with memories of coffee in the early morning hours, old buildings, and awesome architecture, I was looking around, and I found this cool company that does landscaping/architecture design. I also really liked their site, how the text is cutting out the image that you will see if you click on it.

I came across a great site the other day, david airey’s design blog, and it is awesome.

Tons of great posts about everything from advertising to typography, to critiques, he has an amazing quantity but also quality of posts and information available on his site. He even has a list of 13 typefaces everyone should have.

Also, from his site, check this video out.

I find that the best music for me to get work done, is the type that doesn’t have a ton of hard to interpret lyrics, and, even better, has none at all.

I found this band the other day, that has some really simple beats that are nice to listen to in the background, if you are writing or something, its pretty cool. Also check out goose, which is a little bit more energetic and has a bit of lyrics. there is always daft punk!

I think my new favourite song right now for designing, well basically anything would definitely be kids by MGMT, check them out, they have some really awesome music and can actually sing, which is pretty unusual for a more electronic band.

An avid designers toolbox fan for years, I thought I would share the secret!, You can use this site for inspiration (check out their website of the week), resources, and if you are new to the whole client/designer thing these forms are really sweet!

(this site also used to have more free stuff, unfortunately they have realized that people actually use their stuff and are starting to charge)

:(

Sort of nerdy, but I found an awesome widget, which is an addon for art directors toolkit. Anyways, it lets you convert from:

fraction to decimal
decimal to fraction
unit conversion including inches, centimeters, millimeters, picas, points, and pixels!

it also shows you common page sizes (ie A4) and their corresponding size in inches.

So, nothing at all to do with time based communication at all, exept for I guess in the end, if you wanted to include time based communication on a portfolio site or something like that, this would help you out.

I found some awesome tutorials, for photoshop, web design, audio, and vector artwork, if you ever need to find out how do something with any of these, or are just bored and want to learn something new, which I was, check out these sites!

So ever since the class that we were first introduced to the amazing world of animation and particularly animation with humor, which the french seem to have a pretty good grasp of, I have been watching film after film of animation by gobelins l’ecole de l’image, which has amazing shorts and inspirational and fun to watch movies.

One of my recent favourite, round 0, is an amazing short that has an amazing quality of animation, and a witty and cute storyline. though it has a couple parts that are a little awkwardly sequenced and don’t flow smoothly, overall, it’s a great little movie

This second film is more just for fun, a little bit of sadistic french humor, but with the classic twist that all of these movies have, at the end.

View soundtrack here.

The narration, originally following the story of a boy learning how to play the trumpet and his challenges along the way, changed into a short story about falling in love with the piano. The narration is strongly supported by the music, both recorded and found.

Narration

When I was young I used to fall asleep listening to the trumpet player of my mom’s orchestra. I decided I would do anything to play that beautiful sound.

And, it came down to just that, anything, because when I asked my mom she said I had to play the piano before I learned how to play the trumpet. This definitely didn’t make sense to me, how does playing the piano have anything to do with learning how to play the trumpet, but in my mind this didn’t really seem like much of a task, because the end result was still the same, I got to play the trumpet.

So, a few weeks later, I had my very first piano class. God, I hated that instrument, but I knew in the end, the trumpet was mine, so I kept on playing. Years passed, hours and hours and hours of practicing, I slowly began to get better at the piano.

My fingers got stronger, my rhythm got better, and I started to understand just what music was all about, but at the same time I also started having fun. Playing the piano wasn’t a chore anymore, and I started playing it more often.

And one day, I completely forgot all about that trumpet.

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