Free Vector Downloads

I found some great (and FREE) vector assets this week and thought it was my duty to share. Click on each image to go to the download page.

iPhone 4 GUI PSD + Vector (Retina Display)

Vector + PNG Social Media Icons

Filed under: Design, iPhone, Vector

My Next Jazzercise Assignment

“Can you help jazz this up? I would like to put this in the bulletin for a couple of weeks. Thanks.”

Requests I receive like this make me smile.

Click on the image to see the flyer in its full glory.

Filed under: Design

Random Links

I usually like to save up random links for a post such as this. Most of the time others blog on the topics before I get a chance to gather enough to make a full post. Some times I just get bored of the topic. Today, however, was a rare instance where I landed on enough cool random links in a single day that I just couldn’t pass it up. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

The Chris Farley Show — The Chris Farley Show is the official, authorized biography of the late actor and comedian Chris Farley. Fans knew Chris as Saturday Night Live’s sweaty, swaggering, motivational speaker; as the irresistible Chippendales stripper; and as Tommy Callahan, the underdog hero of Tommy Boy. His family knew him as sensitive and passionate, deeply religious, and devoted to bringing laughter into others’ lives.

How I Spent My Stimulus — In January, Congress approved $152 billion in economic stimulus checks for millions of American households, intended to boost the economy and avert a recession. Just how this money will be spent remains to be seen. We hope this website helps shed some light on where the stimulus money is going.

Free Dunkin Donuts Coffee — Dunkin’ Donuts is celebrating Free Iced Coffee Day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. next Thursday, May 15. Customers can walk into any participating Dunkin’ Donuts restaurant throughout the country and receive a free 16 oz. cup of Dunkin’ Donuts’ premium regular, Berry Berry Iced Coffee, which combines the seasonal tastes of blueberry and raspberry with Dunkin’ Donuts’ award-winning coffee, or many other delicious flavors.

First Look at Oliver Stones ‘W’ — Entertainment Weekly goes inside the director’s dark, comic, and already controversial movie about George W. Bush’s rise to power, starring Josh Brolin.

Britain’s War On Chewing Gum — Every year, 935 million packs of gum are chewed by 28 million Britons, leaving millions of sticky, inconvenient lumps in their wake. The globs can only be removed with high pressure steam hoses, expensive freezing machines, or corrosive, environmentally unfriendly chemicals, costing taxpayers £150 ($300) million per year. The desperate state of affairs has attracted millions of dollars of research into non-stick chewing gum, but the country is desperate for a quicker solution.

Barack Obama Podcast — Barack’s greatest hits and most significant policy speeches on iTunes in both video and audio-only formats.

23-6 — 236.com is a co-production between the gigantic, vaguely Death Star-like IAC, and The Huffington Post, a progressive news hub where outraged people go in order to get more outraged before going to have dinner at Nobu.

Marblehead Blog — Marblehead, a marketing and design company that my buddy works for, created this blog to show off their work, share their opinions, and pass on industry news.

Filed under: Barack Obama, Blogs, Britain, Chris Farley, Design, Dunkin Donuts, George W. Bush, Government, Gum, Humor, iTunes, Links, News, Oliver Stone, Randomness, Spending

Digital Outlook

1. Old-school design methods are failing. The pace of change among consumers and competitors has grown so fast that using a conventional process to hatch a marketing campaign, a Web site, or a new product virtually dooms it to being obsolete by the time it’s complete.

2. Innovation is the new currency. The days of a whopping marketing budget or a pretty design equaling success are over, as Blendtec has so well proved. If you’re not creating something that’s genuinely new—as well as useful and delightful—you are screwed.

3. Everyone is a creative. Your next-door neighbor can make a YouTube video or design a MySpace page that sits on an equal media playing field with anything we produce here at Avenue A Razorfish.

4. Narrative is the experience. As the Web becomes the preferred destination for brand exploration, digital experiences must become richer, deeper, and more able to tell compelling stories. If your brand experience depends entirely on pages and clicks, it’s time to wonder, “What is my story?

From a 2008 Digital Outlook Report by Avenue A | Razorfish.

(ht: Logic + Emotion)

Filed under: Advertising, Creativity, Design, Innovation, Marketing, Narrative

Love Wins

Inspired by the hate-filled garbage being hurled by the Westboro Baptist Church in the wake of Heath Ledgers death, The Plow have designed the beautiful posters above. They are encouraging people to download and use them to help spread the fact that God is LOVE.

Download Poster Here

I created the posters above to try in my small way to fight back at this view of sinners. No one is better than me or less deserving of Christ’s grace. I need to remind myself daily to love everyone no matter what, because Christ loved me, a wicked and filthy sinner.

Love Wins.

**UPDATE**
Updated poster and explanation of revision available here.

Filed under: Art, Design, Hate, Love, Love Wins, Rob Bell, Westboro Baptist Church

Similar Diversity

Those five graphics are showing the positions and the frequency of the word “you” in the different Holy Scriptures (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism). Each picture is read from upper left to down right, whereas the most upper left pixel represents the first word of each book, and the most down right pixel the last one. Every colored position (word) means the word “you”.

Fore more on the Similar Diversity project click here.

Filed under: Art, Buddhism, Christianity, Design, Diversity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Religion

I Make Pretty Pictures

Jason found a great Photoshop tutorial site yesterday, and I’ve been having a ton of fun learning some new tricks. It’s called psdtuts.com, and it is layed out beautifully. Below are the results of a couple of the tutorials I just went through. Pretty sweet, eh?

Advanced Glow Effects

Super Slick Dusky Lighting Effects

(Check out the original photo)

Filed under: Design, Photoshop, Tutorials

I Do Work

It may not be ground breaking, but I do work. Here are a couple of websites I’ve designed recently. Overall I’m happy that these both happened on my watch. I’m full aware they’re not ready to be submitted to CA, but I’m wading through the waters of web design and it’s feeling pretty good. I may just go in a little deeper now.

edenpasta.com — Completed this one a few months back. It’s pretty basic and straightforward, but I created the whole thing in Dreamweaver so I feel pretty good about that. We went down to Detroit to do a photoshoot for this and I can’t applaud them enough for the work they do in the conditions they do it in. Support the crew by buying great organic pasta!!

edenfoods.com — We just wrapped this one up a couple weeks ago. This one was a long time coming. It’s our first major redesign since 2003. The guy that did the last one left to redesign SI.com, so the shoes were slightly large. It’s intentionally not flashy though. We’re more information driven, but it’s a ton easier to navigate now. I did all of the design, created the images, and the flash banner on the home page. My boy, Jason, joined the fun did the flash logo on the home page. But our IT genius built the entire site by hand coding it.

I’m already excited about edenfoods.com 3.0. My job description is slowly shifting to a web majority workflow and I’m digging it. Maybe one of these days I’ll do a site for myself.

Filed under: Design, Dreamweaver, Eden Foods, Flash, HTML, Organic, Web, Work

Go White?

It was a sad night last night. I was forced to make a change that I’ve been dreading for some time now. My birthday is next month, and with that comes the annual renewing of the licence plate tags. Only this year I am forced, along with the other 5.6 million blue-plate owners, to switch from my current plate to the new design—which is hideous.

All my life I’ve enjoyed the all-blue Michigan license plate. They are so simple and unique. In college it always brightened my day to come across another Michigander in the parking lot. Now that’s all gone. Instead we’re thrown into obscurity with this vanilla garbage. They’ve even changed the bottom words from Great Lakes to a web address.

Are you serious?

The reason they say their changing the plate is that the color scheme made it difficult to see at night, and the new plate’s fully reflective background makes it much more visible. I’ve got two words for you… Bull Butter.This plate has been working for the last 20 years. That’s the lamest excuse for making a change that I’ve ever heard.

Well, what can I do but slap this junk on my car? What a shame that we’re losing our heritage. Speaking of heritage, I was also especially fond of the plate Michigan introduced in my birth year (1975) to commemorate the Bicentennial of the United States.

Your thoughts?

Michigan Licence Plates 1969-Present »

Filed under: Change, Design, Michigan

Chicago: A Designers Delight

Being a die hard Cubs fan, you might expect me to love Chicago. But I’m a midwest country boy at heart. I don’t dig the big city lights. I get a special kind of anxiety walking around, trying to avoid the street people that remind me that this world is full of darkness and pain and suffering.

But after being in the city for only a few hours, I’m reminded why Chicago is so much different than any other big city I’ve been to and why I’m in the business I’m in. It is so rich in design—a virtual designers paradise. Even the newspaper dispensers are designed well.

Jason and I walked a few miles to a restaurant tonight and I just soaked up the architecture and design around every corner. My only regret is not having a camera with me. I came here with the intentions of learning more about Flash to help me in my job, but I think I’m going to be more inspired by the visuals that will surround me during my stay.

Note 1: The picture above is the Cloud Gate sculpture at Millennium Park.

Note 2: My company supplied laptop did not come with Photoshop, so to size the above picture I downloaded a sweet (and FREE) Mac photo editing program called ImageWell.

Filed under: Chicago, Design, Inspirational