Design Readings

Vignelli’s Canon
A 96 page great book published by  Massimo Vignelli. He shares his methodology & experiences with type, grid & design thinking. And the great thing is that he has released it for free online. A must read for every designer and in fact, i will suggest also take print and keep a hard-copy for yourself.

Grids Are Good !
Grids are Good ! Ya ! And so this PDF is.A nice document by Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton explaining step by step Grid Construction for a web.

Better Typography – Mark Boulton
A detailed 129 slides for better typography. Also talks about Gray Box modeling and web grids.

Web Typography – Jeff Croft
Another typography document. Jeff Croft covers type basics to CSS styling.

Web Application Form Design
By Luke Wroblewski, practical explanation and guidelines for designing web forms. Really helpful to understand the way user interacts and performs tasks with forms.

Why Design ?
AIGA has been alaways providing respectful resources for design students and proffesionals. This booklet outlines the design business strategy and the process to approach a project.

Advice for Emerging Designers : After School Special
12 useful advices for students and also who are in state of developing a new design business.

Introduction to Good Usability
Visual impact is necessary but a good usability approach is what makes a website or application functional to the end-user. Introduction to good usability by Peter Pixel works well as a handy e-book for basic usability guidelines.

Getting Real by 37 Signals
A book with 16 chapters, 91 essays explaining practical approach to web-app development. And best of all its free to read online !

Corporate Identity Process
Detailed document by Identityworks.com for designing better corporate identities and brands.

Wireframes for the Wicked
37 slides by Nick Finck. Nice documentation about wire-framing and patterns involved.

Tutorials & Resources

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/
http://tutsplus.com/

Tools

Boks
Boks is an AIR application (so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux) that provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework. It handles grid configuration, baseline rhythm pimpin’, CSS (with or without compression) and grid.png export, HTML layout and much more goodie-goodie!

Adobe Kuler
Must have for graphic artists. The Adobe AIR based desktop client allows you to search and create color schemes and later import directly to your Adobe applications.

COLOR lovers Desktop App
Desktop Color Search by Colorlovers.com, its an Adobe AIR app that runs on your desktop and allows you to search the entire COLOURlovers database for colors, palettes and patterns.

Pencil Project
Pencil is a small add-on that turns your  Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package. Useful for creating quick mockups and wireframes.

Have more links ? Do Drop them as comment.

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Founded in 1995 with the opening of Museum of the Future, ARS Electronica is an organization focusing on complex changes and interrelationships in art,technology and society. And they also responsible for organizing the ARS Electronica Festival and the Prix Ars Electronica.

This time, with the theme Human Nature the Festivals turns 30 years old.

The festival schedule looks extremely promising for great experience and learning. The event starts with the “Starry-Starry Night” showcasing projects like “80+1 A Journey around the World”. The whole day will be lined-up with the events and workshops related to stars, the cosmos and astronomy.

The other great attraction is the Cyberarts exhibition showcasing 3,017 works from 68 countries on topics like :
“The Physical Value of Sound“, which reflects on the physicality of music and the tense interrelationship between analog and digital. “Call Cutta in a box”, an expermental installation. “In the Line of Sight” which uses 100 computer-controlled tactical flashlights to project low-resolution video footage of suspicious human motion and a lot more which makes the whole event sound like a wonderland for me.

The other sections are “Device Art”, a new art-form, a synthesis of art, design, technology, science and entertainment and “Pixelspaces 2009″, which is dedicated to the art of new and not-yet-institutionalized transdisciplinary linkup sand spotlights the innovative new poetic forms of expression engendered by them.

Apart from all that, the festival is full of experimental exhibitions, conferences, lectures and live performances and concerts.
I wish i could get a chance to be there…but for now, i will say thanks to WWW and try to keep a watch on the updates coming from there official site and twitter.

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Faltjahr a project by Johann Volkmer, is a beautifully crafted calender consists of 12 A3-size paper-based pop-up objects. Every month is presented with elegant paper crafts done with monochrome white paper.  And every monthly theme craft can also be used a hung up wall decorative piece.

The project is aimed to explore the possibilities of paper as a medium of expression.

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Was playing with PHP earlier today for developing a wordpress theme. Being a designer, digging into development i was expecting the 404 to come again and again while testing and i wasn’t wrong. But, thankfully after a while got my hands on code and this quick wallpaper came out as a side-effect of too much of 404ness today.

Download if you like. : )

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Hate Advertising ? Make better ads.

After Helevetica and Objectified now we have one more film dedicated to creative industry. Directed by Doug Pray, ART & COPY is a film about advertising and inspiration.

The film talks about the advertisements and creatives who had influenced our lives and impacted on our culture but yet are unknown outside their industry. ART & COPY features George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others who were responsible for “Just Do It,” “I Love NY,” “Where’s the Beef?,” “Got Milk,” “Think Different,” and more brilliant campaigns.

Now, we hope that apart from inspiring the creative individuals these films will also help in generating a social design awareness and make people realize that they are so much influenced by an industry which sometimes they are not even aware about.

The film was released on August 21, 2009 at IFC Center in New York City.
Official Website : http://artandcopyfilm.com/

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