I’m not sure about the idea of people-powered search. But maybe Jason Calacanis should stick to video trailer production instead. This intro video for the new Mahalo Daily video podcast was very good. The part with Alex Albrecht was genius.
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Stuck with a crappy graphic designer? Say goodbye to all your worries with easy to apply “Make My Logo Bigger Cream”. Big improvements with only one application. And there are lots of other deals to be had too, like “Whitespace Eliminator Spray” and more.
This company could put many hard working designers out of business. 🙂
ps. The look on the designer’s face when confronted with “Flouresencizer” is priceless.
Check out all of these wonderful products right here.
🙂
[via boagworld]
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While not one of my normal topics, I have to say that Top Gear is an absolute kickass show (and magazine). Very high quality production and always a gem to watch. Alas, I don’t get the BBC channel at home, so much of my watching comes via YouTube.
Anyway, this race between a Bugatti Veyron and a Eurofighter Typhoon jet is a good indicator of how entertaining this program can be. Very nicely done and I won’t tell you who wins the race. You’ll have to watch! 🙂
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Saw this excellent and interesting demo of something dubbed ‘Liquid Rescaling’. In essence it allows you to stretch or compress an image but keeps some semblance of proportion for the objects within the image. It’s hard to describe but imagine you had a 4×6 image, but there was an ugly garbage can on the right hand side. With this tool, you could crop off the right 2 inches (leaving you with a 4×4 image) but then stretch it back to 4×6 *without* fattening up the people in the picture.
It uses algorithms to detect areas in the photo where it can stretch while minimizing distortion. It’s really quite neat. Even neater is the fact that there is a plugin for the GIMP which uses the tool. If you watch the demo you will be amazed at what you can achieve.
I also believe that there is no equivalent tool in the beloved Photoshop that does this. 😉
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I’ve entered a few logo contests in the past just for fun. It’s been a creative outlet for me and always ends up being a learning experience as well. But today I came across the winner of the Ruby logo contest. It’s definitely not what I would have picked as the winner, but over and above that, I’m glad I never knew about the contest – especially if I got the ‘shoe-ing’ that the winner seemed to get in the comments to the winning results post.
I’m simply not sure my skin would be thick enough.
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I haven’t done a lot of photography related posts lately. Unsurprisingly, that’s because I haven’t done a lot of photography lately. 😉
Not that I have lost interest mind you, but anybody who reads this blog regularly will know my interests shift around all the time. Sometimes it takes a little creative inspiration and awe to get me moving again on certain fronts. This gallery by Nick Brandt is just one of those things.
While his photographic subjects might be dramatic to start with (how often do you get to photograph lions, elephants and zebras in the wild?), his use of tone and somewhat dramatic burning and dodging techniques add a huge amount of drama to each and every image.
I’ve always been a fan of post-processing when it’s well done; and in Nick Brandt’s case, it sure is. And given the tools you get in the GIMP and Photoshop, applying these techniques to improve your own images is not so hard. I’ve always found John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough tutorials to be incredibly useful in teaching techniques that can really enhance your post processing work.
Expect to see more photography related posts here in the future.
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As I’ve likely mentioned before, I’ve been very interested in graphic design for the last little while and typography is one of the elements of design that I find most interesting. I’ve been humming and hawing over trying to create a font just for the heck of it. So I was quite happy to see the start of the So You Want To Create A Font series over at ILoveTypography.com. I installed FontForge on my system quite a while back and I’m looking forward to taking the font creation plunge.
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Over the past few months I have noticed something different in my neck of the woods. I do a lot of driving (commuting etc.) and a great deal of it is on back country roads north of Toronto (the area where I live). It is not uncommon to see the odd car pulled over on the shoulder with a dead battery, flat tire, child peeing in the bushes.. y’know, the usual. But lately, when I spot one of these cars, I look over further and see people with their digital SLR cameras across the ditch photographing some grazing horses, a majestic sunset or just a nice picturesque farmhouse scene. Sometimes they’ve even got tripods set up!
You can clearly see that almost all of them are not professionals (no big camera bags, or huge elaborate glass), but amateurs satisfying their passion and hobby on the way to and from work. Sometimes I’m almost tempted to pull over from the rat race and just chat them up about photography, but alas, my social skills are not that well developed I guess.
I’m not sure if it’s just my own perception, but it seems like digital photography of the more serious kind is really on an upswing. Very nice to see.
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Although as a parent, I’m twice removed from this situation (I have only one child, and she’s a ‘she’), I did grow up as the younger of two boys, so Tony Woodlief’s post made me genuinely guffaw this morning. Mind your step. 😉
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While I don’t necessarily like Apple’s relatively closed system. I do hold their designers (both industrial and graphic) in high regard. So why then does their new Leopard packaging remind me of a GeoCities webpage motif?
The problem with raising the bar is that you have to meet it every time after that.
Btw, I’ve watched the Leopard tour video just to see how the other half lives. I’ve got more thoughts on that to come, but one thing sticks out. Is it just me, or does the Aqua blue (or graphite) scroll bar just seem to stick out of their new interface like a very sore (and very shiny) thumb. I think the glass buttons for drop down lists etc. still look decent in the various dialog boxes, but when those scroll bars pop up on a general application window they just look completely out of place with the rest of the interface.
Have the aqua controls finally worn out their stay?
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Just another test site 