There’s some great stuff in this gallery of posters designed for Flight of the Concords’ Spring 2009 tour.

Great color and texture in this illustration.

Kyle Poff does some nice identity designs.

Love these artistic handmade rugs by Reuber-Henning.

Wow, Hammerpress created this amazing wedding invite, its my personal favorite so far!

I can never get enough hot air balloon things.

Ok, I’m kind of tired of the Venn diagram humor, but this one actually got me to smile.

A nice collection of vintage ads promoting unhealthy medicines.

I like these handmade notebooks with a letterpress graphic on the cover, you can find them on Etsy at the moment.

A dreamy photo by m a r i e.

Erin Hanson leaves colorful reminders around her house for herself.

I want a high quality print on this photo soooo badly, I would even pay money for one if I found it.

It’s a serif slab, get it?

No photoshopping here, this was actually printed on glass and shattered.

Love this vintage pop can, lots more in this set.

Nice photography by David Foster Nass

Love that shape in this design.

Delicious colors in this photo.

The Poster Dezigner does good posters.

Awesome multi-colored tree, even awesomer photo of it.

HUGE collection of vintage travel brochures!

Love the way the type interacts with the enviornment.

Leslie David does good design.

Would love to see more of these Mitten’s Movie Titlers in use.

Nice work by Stas Polykov.

Polatype, a nice little collection of polaroid type photos.

Really nice package design for Rebel Green by Wink.

Clever ad, I hate mangled toast!

I never knew a rat could be this beautiful, it makes me want one. The colors and bokeh on this photo are flawless.

I love the colors in this vintage illustrated ad from a 1960 issue of Fortune.

I wonder what the story is with these central park benches, I guess the fun comes in imagining it.

Fun wood type letterpress print, such a perfect word for playing with wood type.

Very nice logo, these dual image logos are so hard to pull off this well.

Really interesting type design for this building, I love the slim counters and tight kerning.

Really cute illustration based on one of my favorite songs.

The Archer and Gotham typefaces are looking really nice on these hand painted wooden signs. Does anybody know the font on the top sign?

In this photo of Brighton Certified Cold Fur Storage the white type pops against the dark red bricks, and I love the way a script font lies in between the condensed sans serifs. The script font is a nice one and I like the truncated top of the lower-case f.

This Co. (from the words Sacramento Coca-Cola Bottling Co.) is a nice crop because it is still highly recognizable as part of Coca-Cola’s name. The colors in the photo are muted and that gives the lettering a syrupy color that reminds me even more of coke. The little curl of the metal arm that pokes into the sky is similar to the curls in the type, and is a nice way to tie the bottom half and the top half together.

This photo of a word cropped to read as AUTO almost looks like a landscape painting. There are many beautiful layers in the background with the trees, hills, fog, white capped mountain, and intense blue sky. In front of all of it is a bright red and bold word with a natural drop shadow that may be obscuring some natural beauty, but at the same time interacting with nature in a beautiful way.

The lettering on the wall for Ziegfeld Theatre is another one of white text on bricks, but this time the brick is a beige color. You might think this would result in minimal contrast, but in this case the dark sides of the deep extrusion give the letters plenty of contrast while the white on beige scheme evokes classiness. I love the little bird’s nest that seems to be in the bottom of the lowercase f.

The sign for Beauty World is apparently old and falling apart, and you can tell that even in its prime it wasn’t exactly the most beautiful lettering (very strange “A” and “Y”). The inclusion of the old and crusty looking lot really reinforces the sense of irony. However, the double irony in this is that capturing this scene in a nice photo has now brought beauty to it in my opinion.

This photo of a thrift shop’s sign is just really nice to look at. I love the rusty white letters against the vertically striped, faded teal wall. The type is very cute and quirky itself, and I like how the vertically extended letter forms interact with the vertical stripes of the background. I especially love how the counters on the lowercase “f” disappear, the bar on the “t” stretches out over the “h”, and the tail on the “p” goes straight through it.

This 202 address on a house is a stark contrast with the thrift store lettering above. The numbers are very geometric and balanced, the white and the black are both very clean, and the horizontal lines create a grid for the type to sit on. Even the structure of the photo is minimal and clean, whereas the thrift store photo had an odd shadow in the corner, and upper and lower layers peeking in around the main wall. Both do a great job of matching the style of the lettering with the composition of the photo.

The sign for Jellico Motel has those nice generic black letters on white panels and the blue rectangle with the word “restaurant” in white neon lights. It reminds me of countless forgettable motels along the highways in America. The inclusion of the scenery shows how a generic motel sign gets its individuality through it’s surroundings. I love how the foggy background reminds of those early mornings when you are checking out of the motel before most people are even awake because you have an adventure to continue.

Here’s another photo with a sense of irony, the broken down neon letters from Las Vegas that spell out the word “GLAM“. There is nothing glamorous about the discarded and beat-up letters, but perhaps it is an unintentional comment on the effect living the Vegas lifestyle eventually has on people.

I just love this photo of the word “Meetings” for it’s subtle imperfections. The washed out color, the texture on the wall and letters, the erratic paneling on the wall, and the horrible kerning all provide an interesting contrast with the cleanliness and structure usually associated with Helvetica. As a bonus, I didn’t notice until recently that this photo was taken by Antonio of AisleOne. He’s been talking about getting an SLR soon, and I can’t wait to see what he does with that!

These were apparently “luxury” matches and by the looks of them I’m not going to argue.

This was directly linked to the .jpg in the tumblr post, I wish I knew the original source. It’s simple, but dead on.

Interesting type integrated into a nice photo. I want to try this but I never know what words to use.

Ok, this one just made me laugh. How do I join the American Society For Social Hygiene?

Superb minimalism, great natural gradient, and I just love purple-y photos these days.

I think from the comment on the picture that this design is being made with chocolate, but don’t quote me on that. I just think it’s really intricate and something I could never do. (Edit: It’s actually Henna, my first thought but the comments threw me off)

I want that mint green one so bad.

Clever site design with the code appearing to be behind the page.

Great minimal design for this Lennon album.

Reminds me of an asian woodblock print.

I want to go to there



Really impressive stop motion, I love tiny bits of hand cut paper

Nice book cover, intelligent write-up about the book as well

White text on soft colored photographs is so hot right now

Love the beams of light

Interesting combination of two of my favorite fonts

From a nice looking hand crafted Ampersand book

Just made me laugh

Remember, click on the images to be taken to their source. More “Things I liked last week” posts.

I enjoyed clicking through this nice collection of vintage business cards shared by designer Becca Eley (who also happens to have some nice work in her portfolio that is worth checking out). I especially loved the type in the upper image that I posted, which turns out to be a typeface called Treasury.

Via design work life

Francis Qureshi is a photography and graphic design student. I love the mood created by the color in his photos, especially the signs series. So far he only has one example of his design work, but it’s incredible. If this is the early work of a student, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with in the future.

I’m trying something new where every Sunday I will hopefully post a smattering of things that I recently liked, but didn’t want to dedicate an entire post to. Click on the image to go to it’s source.

I really love the colors and type in this old cookbook page scanned in by Pete Ryan.

Urban Spectacles consists of hand carved glasses frames made of wood. The glasses are beautiful and unique, I just wish the photos and website would do them justice.

Via myturtleneck (a very promising newish blog)

So I was searching around, trying to figure out how to get my Google Reader to alphabetize my subscriptions list because it makes it easier for me to find a specific site when I want to. It used to do it automatically every time I added a new feed, but a while back it stopped, and just put them on the bottom of the list as I added them.

After researching, I discovered that if you use drag and drop to move feeds around in your list, it stops sorting by alphabet, so I figured I must have done that on accident at some point (because I didn’t even know about the drag and drop feature to begin with). As I googled for a solution, it seemed that most people never discovered how to switch it back, but after poking around in my Google Reader interface for a while I finally figured it out and smacked myself in the forehead because it was so easy.

Anyways, this is not the type of thing I usually post on my blog, but I thought I’d share for those that were as confused about this as I was.

“Photos taken with the lens detached from the camera but held in place and moved around to focus. This also lets extra light in sometimes causing light leaks and giving a vintage look and feel.”

Also:
* Gives extra bokeh by shrinking the area in focus (apeture is 0)
* Allows for super macro shots
* Delicious light leaks
* Tilt-shift effects

Above is a high definition video of him moving the lens around and focusing on things, and it kind of shows the exciting organic and hard to control effect it produces. There’s also a small Freelensing pool were a few other people are experimenting with this.

This Exercising Together album cover from 1982 has to be the most fabulous thing I have seen in weeks. I love how they are shamelessly trying to cash in on the E.T. movie’s hype. I found this while browsing through Flickr user IAAFOTS’s collection of vintage and retro imagery. Thanks to Mid-Century Modernist for pointing me in his direction.

I just heard about Obama unveiling the new logos for the ARRA and TIGER programs. Not only are they awesome, but they were done by some awesome people, namely Chris Glass (who has a knack for finding great things on the internet) and Aaron Draplin (who amused me greatly in this rant about bad design in America). Congrats to these guys, it must be an amazing feeling!

I just discovered Ellen McFadden’s huge collection of historical graphic design images on Flickr. Not only is there a lot to look at, but most of them are available in high resolution. Also, she adds very interesting and enlightening commentary on each of them that is worth reading as you browse. The two above images were from the New Graphic Design set, and the top one is a cow poster by Joseph Müller-Brockman that I hadn’t seen before, and I adore it.