Handeye mag

http://www.handeyemagazine.com/

Posemaniacs

http://www.posemaniacs.com/

Since we can't sit and beg a certain pc to take his shirt off in the erstwhile furniture studio on saturday mornings anymore.

The India Tube

The India Tube

Learn Something Everyday

http://www.learnsomethingeveryday.co.uk/

from Shivanjali

I'm a Designer and...

some strange/sad/funny claims here.
Go add yours.

http://www.dotdotdotspot.com/

Tell a Lie

from here: http://dlow.org/index.php?/project/tell-a-lie/

...

An open letter to all design students
link

Kuler.

colour colour what colour do you choose?

http://kuler.adobe.com

Drawing South: An artist's voyage to the Antarctic

In early 2008, visual artist Nicholas Hutcheson spent 7 weeks on the ship Aurora Australis, journeying to the Antarctic. He visited the Australian Stations of Casey, Davis & Mawson as part of the Australian Antarctic Division’s Arts Fellowship for 2007/8.

This site contains the drawings from the voyage.

*from suresh

Sketching

http://www.urbansketchers.com/

To quote from the site -
Urban Sketchers is a network of artists around the world who draw the cities where they live and travel to. We have this blog, which is by invitation, a Flickr group, where anyone can share their location drawings, and a Google group to stay connected and foster discussion. USk was started on Flickr by Seattle journalist and illustrator Gabi Campanario in November of 2007. The blog was launched in November of 2008.

I have been feeling very ill-equipped at drawing and am seriously thinking of taking up something like this. I think most of you would agree that even after four years of study we are not quite confident about sketching and drawing....

IQ, EQ and now CQ

http://www.xrite.com/worldwide.aspx

has a colour sensitivity test.
go check your colour quotient.

Citizen Journalism

This maybe a bit off-track, but lately, all of us have been really concerned about the way the Indian Media has been functioning.Meri News is a venture in citizen journalism. To quote from the website -
Citizen Journalism" or Participatory Journalism is an evolving form of journalism through user generated content. When any common man in his capacity as a citizen of a nation takes up the initiative to report things or express his views about happenings around him then the occurrence is popularly termed as citizen journalism or participatory journalism.
Citizen Journalists are not bound by the conventional term of a journalist. Citizen journalists take up an initiative to express ideas irrespective of their educational or professional background. In a way this emerging form of journalism is promising a scenario of breaking free from media bias as well as taking local news on a global platform.

Here's the link -

http://www.merinews.com/citizen_journalism.jsp

While the articles did not appear as eloquent or even well-researched to me, this seems a way that is worth pursuing, a sort of democratisation of the media.

For MAC users

This seems like a good link on how troubleshooting for your MACs. Needs the nod of the MAC techies though! Merryn, Medha!! waiting for your verdict!
Its quite extensive - they've explined stuff well so you can be sure about waht you're doing and how to rectify it.

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html

On writing.

I've been reading 'Design Culture' an anthology of design writing from AIGA journals. I came across this article in the NID mail, and also remembered this. I don't really know how relevant this post is, but I have always felt that as designers we need to be able to write more, something that we don't do (amongst many other such things).

Liz Losh is an English teacher. But put aside your image of a frumpy schoolmarm with faded gravy stains on her blazer. This hip, forty-something ex-punk rocker teaches at the University of California Irvine, where she oversees an introductory writing course that enrolls over 1,100 students. She also teaches advanced seminars on digital rhetoric, where projects include editing a blog, producing a YouTube video and crafting a virtual persona on Second Life.

Likewise, Cheryl E. Ball, assistant professor of new media at Illinois State University, teaches "multimodal" writing courses, in which students assemble images and texts using video, photography, web design and page layout. Ball says, “We are looking at the idea of ‘composition’ in the broadest sense, going way beyond the old model of grammar-based freshman comp courses.”

Prose painting by Ellen Lupton.

A spate of new writing textbooks suggests that a visual revolution is underway in college writing curricula. The sleek, sophisticated Seeing & Writing series, designed by 2x4 and launched in 1999, shook up the field of English composition by inviting students to analyze visual artifacts, from works of photojournalism to contemporary art installations. A bigger change came with Picturing Texts (2004), which not only uses visuals as prompts for writing but addresses design as an active, generative tool. The book’s designer, Anna Palchik, helped infuse the project with credible instruction on basic visual principles as well as selecting readings by Tibor Kalman, Jessica Helfand, Richard Wilde and other graphic designers. (Disclosure: Picturing Texts includes a piece co-authored by Abbott Miller and me.) Assignments include creating book covers, postcards, scrapbooks and brochures as well as traditional essays.

Meanwhile, many young designers are wondering if their own college English courses were tough enough to prepare them for real-world writing tasks such as bidding for jobs, justifying design solutions, delivering presentations and marketing their work. Even routine email communication requires command of the written language. (Some of my students seem to believe that just because they can’t spell, their employers won’t be able to, either.) Designer Scott Stowell, speaking at AIGA’s recent “Social Studies” conference, talked about the seamless integration of text and graphics in his work for GOOD magazine and other clients. “I can’t imagine being a designer who can’t write,” said Stowell. And it’s not just about business. The glorious, sloppy, over-populated blogosphere beckons everyone to participate, but you can only play if you have something to say and you know how to say it.

How are graphic designers learning to write? Since the late 1970s, a movement known as Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) has argued that writing should be taught in every course on campus, not just in specialized composition courses. Because each discipline—from art to engineering—has its own standards and conventions, faculty in each field should be teaching its own practitioners how to write. Yet few design educators have the time or confidence to load this duty on to their studio courses.

Some are giving it a try. Andrea Marks has authored a new e-book on writing for visual thinkers, which emphasizes brainstorming techniques rather than grammar and composition. As for me, I'm teaching a stand-alone writing course for graphic design MFA students at MICA this spring. I won’t be using any of the sexy new composition textbooks, however. Instead, I’m focusing on basic style, starting with how to craft a seaworthy sentence and how to pare down over-upholstered prose. Our textbook? Strunk and White’s classic Elements of Style (Maira Kalman’s illustrated edition, of course).

Even Liz Losh agrees that most young writers still need to work on the basics, especially on college campuses like hers, where over half the students speak a home language other than English. As foot soldiers in the visual revolution, students have more to learn, and faculty have more to teach. Introducing the principles of web design and typography shouldn’t replace teaching writing as a precise, rule-based medium of communication. In the digital age, people are writing more, not less. The alphabet isn’t dead; it just has a lot more company.

About the Author: Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, curator and educator. She is director of the graphic design MFA program at MICA. Her next book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things, is forthcoming from St. Martins Press in May 2009.

COOL WEBSITE

Merryn, tell us how its done!! they have video backgrounds and still the website loads quick.. The website design is damn slick!
http://biennalesaint-etienne.citedudesign.com/en/#/home

Reading

Some interesting articles on Design Taxi

Design is in the details
Arabesque: Graphic design from the Arab world

Infomen

Infomen is an Information and graphic design firm jointly run by designers Aman Khanna and Carlos Coelho.

A lot of information graphic work. For those interested, there are a couple of signage projects as well in their portfolio (they're explained a lot better than any of the signage projects on the Pentagram website).

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

This is something I saw on design observer, was reminded of it again
when Rustom mailed about it.

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
by Michael McDonough


1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
Talent is important in any profession, but it is no guarantee of success.
Hard work and luck are equally important. Hard work means self-discipline
and sacrifice. Luck means, among other things, access to power, whether it
is social contacts or money or timing. In fact, if you are not very
talented, you can still succeed by emphasizing the other two. If you think I
am wrong, just look around.

2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is
what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of
the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking,
negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you
don't learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your
profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
You hear a lot about details, from "Don't sweat the details" to "God is in
the details." Both are true, but with a very important explanation:
hierarchy. You must decide what is important, and then attend to it first
and foremost. Everything is important, yes. But not everything is equally
important. A very successful real estate person taught me this. He told me,
"Watch *King Rat*. You'll get it."

4. Don't over-think a problem.
One time when I was in graduate school, the late, great Steven Izenour said
to me, after only a week or so into a ten-week problem, "OK, you solved it.
Now draw it up." Every other critic I ever had always tried to complicate
and prolong a problem when, in fact, it had already been solved. Designers
are obsessive by nature. This was a revelation. Sometimes you just hit it.
The thing is done. Move on.

5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
In design this means "draw what you know." Start by putting down what you
already know and already understand. If you are designing a chair, for
example, you know that humans are of predictable height. The seat height,
the angle of repose, and the loading requirements can at least be
approximated. So draw them. Most students panic when faced with something
they do not know and cannot control. Forget about it. Begin at the
beginning. Then work on each unknown, solving and removing them one at a
time. It is the most important rule of design. In Zen it is expressed as "Be
where you are." It works.

6. Don't forget your goal.
Definition of a fanatic: Someone who redoubles his effort after forgetting
his goal. Students and young designers often approach a problem with insight
and brilliance, and subsequently let it slip away in confusion, fear and
wasted effort. They forget their goals, and make up new ones as they go
along. Original thought is a kind of gift from the gods. Artists know this.
"Hold the moment," they say. "Honor it." Get your idea down on a slip of
paper and tape it up in front of you.

7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
Overconfidence is as bad as no confidence. Be humble in approaching
problems. Realize and accept your ignorance, then work diligently to educate
yourself out of it. Ask questions. Power - the power to create things and
impose them on the world - is a privilege. Do not abuse it, do not
underestimate its difficulty, or it will come around and bite you on the
ass. The great Karmic wheel, however slowly, turns.

8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes
unpunished.
The world is not set up to facilitate the best any more than it is set up to
facilitate the worst. It doesn't depend on brilliance or innovation because
if it did, the system would be unpredictable. It requires averages and
predictables. So, good deeds and brilliant ideas go against the grain of the
social contract almost by definition. They will be challenged and will
require enormous effort to succeed. Most fail. Expect to work hard, expect
to fail a few times, and expect to be rejected. Our work is like martial
arts or military strategy: Never underestimate your opponent. If you believe
in excellence, your opponent will pretty much be everything.

9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your
essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can't output it,
distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn't exist. Orient
yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The
Output.

10. The rest of the world counts.
If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the
people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design
school where the idea was "If you are here, you are so important, the rest
of the world doesn't count." Not a single person from that school that I
know of has ever been really successful outside of school. In fact, most are
the kind of mid-level management drones and hacks they so despised as
students. A suit does not make you a genius. No matter how good your design
is, somebody has to construct or manufacture it. Somebody has to insure it.
Somebody has to buy it. Respect those people. You need them. Big time.


Discussions, people?

The Boom Box Project

The boombox project

When Logos look alike

from iyer.

http://www.logodesignlove.com/similar-original-logos