Source: TechCrunch.com

A great resource for free pixel based pattern tiles.

Source: Kollermedia.at

You’ve designed a new logo, identity, and business papers for a good client. It looks great. They are happy. Then a simple request derails everything:

“Can I get a copy of my new letterhead to use in Microsoft Word?”

That seemingly innocent question has driven more than one designer to distraction. While this week’s creative tip won’t win people over to designing in Microsoft Word full-time, we can help make this client request a little easier to accomplish.

Read more at: CreativeTechs

A friend of mine just sent me a link to this website. Free fonts are always great and these are particularly well designed. Download them now, I bet they’ll start charging you money for these treasures soon!

Source: Exljbris Fonts

photo by Mark Frauenfelder

“The photography style tilt shift makes aerial photographs of real scenes look like miniature models. The effect is charming, but expensive, because you have to buy a tilt-shift lens. Here’s a nice little tutorial for faking the same effect using Photoshop. The results are very nice.”

Source: BoingBoing.com

Crazy Talk is a cool new software application that allows you to animate a face from a photo or illustration and then bring it to life through speech.

For more information check out the Reallusion website

Mediumroh, a German company took action against ugly burnable CDs and created a variety of “high-end looking” silk screened CD designs. The final product is a modern and professional looking package that includes 3 CDs and cases which can be used to burn your favorite files (music, photos, or just backup) in style.

Source: Mediumroh.com

… or travel around the world in 90 seconds without ever leaving your couch!

About 6 months ago I did some research for an upcoming vacation to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand by reading through old school travel guides and finding myself increasingly more frustrated by the fact that there weren’t enough pictures in these books to give me a good idea of what to expect when I got there. The hotels were listed by location and rated from 1-5 but it left me feeling empty, that I didn’t have enough information to make an educated decision where to go and what hotel to pick.

At the same time I started to REALLY getting into flickr, mainly to share photos with my friends and family who live halfway across the world in Switzerland. I also started looking at other people’s pictures and was blown away by the variety of content that people had posted.

So I took my travel guide, went to flickr and started typing in some hotel names in Hanoi Vietnam and to my surprise, almost all of my searches came back with pictures. But in addition to the pictures, there were comments, like: “I really liked to stay in this hotel and ended up having breakfast at the so and so place next door which I highly recommend”.

A travel guide and Flickr turned out to be the perfect way for me to do a thorough vacation research and once I arrived in Asia I was already familiar with some of the sites and found it easy to explore new places.

Yahoo recently came out with it’s new TagMaps World Explorer, a new way of browsing through maps by zeroing in on words from an overlaying tag cloud. The tag cloud is generated through geo-tagged images from flickr. When hovering over a tag, the right hand side of the webpage reveals related images from flickr. This is exactly the type of online evolution I was hoping for. Yahoo buys flickr, allows people to add valuable content for free or very cheap and uses it for a new tool that’s useful usable and desirable. I love it!

This is one of those great companies that prints more than just one kind of your designs on stickers and cards for fairly cheap. I think I’ll get some stickers made!

Check out their website: www.moo.com

One of the projects I am currently working on is a logo for a fitness company. I am a bit bored of the traditional fonts and did some research online to see if there is a new font that inspires me. Typodermic has some cool new fonts. There is a free section and a fairly cheap pay section. Not sure I’ll be using any of these fonts for my current project but if I ever get a grunchy music client, I’ll definitely come back here!

Source: typodermic