Here are examples of some inspiring Showreels.

If you know of any others please send them in! [ dertmobile[at]gmail.com ]

Enjoy.

MK12

Glasshouse

Diana Paez

Stuart Cloete

Mark Hough

Vj Robson Victor

Dan Difelice

DongHyun Kim – !f Works

eR Reklám

Lois van Baarle

Alex Levchenko

Follow Friday

@JoshHemsley

@CreativeOpera

@KrisColvin

@WebLittlePieces

@drewWiliams27

@snookca

Community Reader Submission

Oscar over at Tierra Virtual sent us their 2 latest web projects.

A Wordpress plugin to automatically send Newsletters, check it out and download for free (non commercial use)

A very slick use of 3D elements in Flash:

Design Articles

Kayla at Webitect.net posted this collection of 25 Wonderfully Creative Vector Illustrations

A must read for all freelancers or soon to be freelancers The Roadmap To Becoming A Professional Freelance Web Designer

Tutorials

Another great tutorial brought to you buy Tutorial9 – Creative Photoshop Animal King Photo Manipulation Tutorial

Animate Curtains Opening with JQuery

Web Design Finds

A great download SlickMap CSS

The Smashing Magazine Typography Contest Choices were announced this week.. head over and download some beautiful typography examples.

A very cool video for HP Invent

HP – invent from Tom and Matt on Vimeo.

Coming Up on Inspiredology

Great Demo Reels

Know any great demo reels? Send them in! dertmobile[at]gmail.com
Here is a sneak peek, from one of the best in the motion graphics biz, MK12’s 2009 Spring Demo Reel.

The Character Palette

At first glance, the Character palette is pretty straightforward. You can select a typeface, its style, the leading (the space between lines), tracking (the overall spacing between characters) and kerning (the space between an individual set of characters) as well as some text distortion options. While simple in function and layout, control over a wide variety of typographical options exist within this palette, particularly with regards to tracking, kerning and leading.

The hidden side of the Character palette can be discovered through the drop-down context menu. In this menu, a wealth of other options is available: overall OpenType settings for contextual replacements and other OpenType features; type styles, whether all caps, small caps, strike-through, etc; as well as further options for both underline and strike-through. The OpenType settings allow you great control over selecting which OpenType features you want to enable for this paragraph. The side benefit to both the strike-through and underline options that is you can use these to highlight live text within the text box itself, as opposed to having to create a separate rectangular object to draw attention to a particular word or phrase. When digging a little deeper, we discover that the Character palette has much more to offer than just simply allowing us to choose a typeface and size.

The Paragraph Palette

The Paragraph palette, meanwhile, allows for over-arching control suited to creating the shape of the paragraph itself. Justification, alignment & hyphenation options abound, and these allow for a wide degree of control over the typographical color of a paragraph or page, providing macro-level adjustments which affect entire bodies of text.

Where the fun begins, much like with the Character Palette, is with the drop-down context menu. The first two options are for Single-Line or Paragraph Composers. Single-Line optimizes the hyphenation and justification options for each individual line, whereas Paragraph optimizes lines based on the needs of the entire paragraph. For example, Paragraph will adjust the spacing and hyphenation of an earlier line to make room if a later line in the paragraph contains a troublesome word, whereas Single-Line would simply adjust the paragraph on a line by line basis.

Some other options within the context menu for the Paragraph palette include links to the menus for Hyphenation and Justification (more on that shortly), an option to balance the ragged lines of a non-justified paragraph, options for bullets & numbering for lists and other larger-scale options. Once again, the depth of InDesign’s typographical control really shines through within the context menu of a particular palette.

The Glyph Palette

We’re only going to take a quick look at the Glyph palette, as it’s not as deep as the other two, but it is still quite useful. Basically, the Glyph palette contains every character for the font you’re working with. The principle use for the Glyph palette is for the manual substitution of a selected character or set of characters within your document for ones you choose from the palette itself. Some uses for this could include subbing in old style numerals to replace lining, or manually inserting ligatures. The other main use for the Glyph palette is the creation of Glyph sets.

A Glyph set is a collection of glyphs which you might use on a regular basis, regardless of which typeface or style it is. Let’s say you’re a fan of a particular set of old-style figures and use it across multiple documents, regardless of any other design factors. Creating a glyph set containing those old-style figures allows you to quickly and easily find them and insert them into a document without having to go digging through each font for the right options.

Hyphenation

The control we have over hyphenation with InDesign is unreal and, particularly when combined with the justification controls, can result in some really slick paragraphs which let the text breathe and helps captivate the reader’s interest. We can reach the hyphenation controls through the context menu in the Paragraph palette, which gives us a pop-up dialogue box containing the hyphenation controls. While what each option does is self-explanatory, there are a couple of guidelines which can help your text sing.

Proper hyphenation requires some care and supervision, but can be generally controlled through the hyphenation options. In general, we should leave at least two characters on the start line, and have at least three on the finishing line; with InDesign, we’d set that as hyphenating after the first 2 letters but before the last 3. We should also avoid more than three consecutive hyphenated lines, to prevent a distracting rag. Any word shorter than 5 is too short to require hyphenation (though you can set this as low as 3), and in general, the last word should not be hyphenated in order to prevent any widows. InDesign can take care of all these more automatic hyphenating tasks, leaving the subjective ones (such as avoiding hyphenation where It awkwardly int-terupts a word, etc) to us to remedy.

Justification

Like hyphenation, we reach the justification panel through Paragraph palette’s context menu. The options for justification are self-explanatory, but the real benefits don’t kick in until we begin to explore a bit. Word spacing will adjust the spacing of words, and generally a range of 80%-100%-120% will give us a decently spaced paragraph without too much distraction. Letter spacing, meanwhile, can afford some flexibility as well; in general, a range of -5%-0-5% is ideal. Glyph scaling affords another means to “tweak” the words to make a paragraph optimally justified, and generally around 95%-100%-105% will allow the glyphs enough room to adjust without being noticeably larger or smaller.

There’s also options to adjust the auto leading percentage as well as single-word justify; 120% is InDesign’s default for leading, and typically single words should be aligned left. Through all these different adjustments, ensure that the drop-down menu for Composer is set to Paragraph in order to set the engine to adjust for the paragraph as a whole, not each individual line.

These are general guidelines which I’ve found make a decent, workable range. Each paragraph might call for different settings, but like all things design, smaller changes are preferable to sweeping ones. When combining the features of hyphenation with justification, some really beautiful paragraphs are possible which stretch from margin to margin, without rivers, orphans and widows or any other distractions.

That’s a Wrap

InDesign is a powerful program which, unfortunately, doesn’t enjoy the same widespread appeal in the tutorial & blogging world as Photoshop or other programs in the Creative Suite. However, the wide range of options and tools available to you makes it the ideal program for working with typography. I hope you found this post useful, as it barely scratches the surface for what InDesign is capable of with type.

#FollowFriday

@Adam_Wagner

@Woork

@ryancarson

@theleggett

@elliotjaystocks

@cheth

Web Design Finds

http://kits.sparklelabs.com/news.html – Received an email last week – with some really cool business cards… check them out.

http://www.brushpilotapp.com/ – Jay from BittBoxx emailed me the other day with a release of his new app… love the logo – with the quality of work he does, you can be sure that this app will rock.

http://freelanceswitch.com/ – They did it again…

http://tinychat.com/ – A great app that Dert introduced me to… we played with it with some friends the other night.. really cool.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=adf_1245828170

Designer Spotlight

http://www.chris-wallace.com – Dert sent me this fellow`s website as well – really cool site, and some well done themes.

http://metalabdesign.com/ – I have been a fan of this site since I saw it.. I love the simplicity of it, and their apps are fantastic.

Designer Tools

http://www.storenvy.com/

Tutorials

http://onlinetools.org/tools/domtabdata/ – I was trying to look for a tab system for a new website I am building.. I cam across this … and so far it’s been a good fix for my situation.

http://www.learningjquery.com/

http://www.cssbasics.com/

Contest

There is a great contest going on for U.S residents.. top prize is $2500

what if God had a logo?. I wanted to see what the design community would create around the challenge of envisioning God in logo form. – Joshua

http://www.godslogo.com/contest/contest.aspx

Coming Up on Inspiredology

Showcase of Dark Websites

Showcase of Large Background Websites

No Doubt: Rock Steady

The Killers: Day and Age

P.O.D.: Greatest Hits

Pillar: Where Will We Go From Here?

Lee Morgan: The Rumproller

The Chemical Brothers: Push the Button

The Hives: Tyrannosaurus Hives

The Hives: Black and White

Portishead: Third

Pink Floyd: The Wall

The Beatles: 1

AC/DC: Back in Black

The Clash: London Calling

Metallica: Ride the Lightning

Coldplay: Viva La Vida

Norma Jean: O God, The Aftermath

Green Day: 21st Century Breakdown

Paramore: Riot!

A Perfect Circle: Mer de Noms

DJ Shadow: The Outsider

Spank Rock: YoYoYoYoYo

Radiohead: In Rainbows

Van Halen: II

The Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bollocks

The Who: Then and Now

Lambchop: Nixon

Blood, Sweat & Tears: Greatest Hits

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Show Your Bones

Daft Punk: Discovery

AFI: Sing the Sorrow

The Rolling Stones: Rolled Gold +

Blindside: Blindside

Chicago: 13

Danko Jones: Sleep is the Enemy

Third Day: Revelation

I would like to announce that I recently revamped my personal website. I created a social hub website, the idea was inspired by the great work of Tim Van Damme. I wanted to create a central place for users to visit, to find out where you can find me and what I am doing. I am in the midst of organizing my blogging and freelancing, so stay tuned for a few new exciting updates, this is just the beginning.

#FollowFriday

@leemunroe

@imjustcreative

@inBlogs

@DesignNewz

@patternhead

Tutorials

You might have seen my new redesign chadmueller.com and noticed those sweet album covers at the bottom… well courtesy of Komodomedia.

Designer Tools

Web Design Finds

I have been a big fan of DesignFloat for a very long time and last year the site really broke down…and it hasn’t been the same. DesignBump started up a year or so ago, and just recently went under the knife for a complete site overhaul… It looks fantastic, I think designbump might be the #1 source for you design like diggs.

This is a fantastic blog, that you have to check out… I waas contacted by the illustrator, and I was blown away by the drawings and the creativness of the site. I am hoping Inspiredology gets a creation from them.

A great looking search engine for everything WordPress.

I have always been a huge fan of the WooThemes group, they have recently redesigned their website, and started up a brand new blog.

Graphic Design

A great alternative to DesignByHumans.

The great people over at GoMedia offered this DIY tip… I do plan on trying this, and when I around to it, I will be sure to post the finished creation.

Inspiredology Hits

This is new this week, I would like to post a few great articles from Inspiredology that had received some great feedback. Andrew was lucky enough to find a great set of Vintage Coke Cans, and we had the opportunity to have Aloke from Logofi contribute a great Logo post.

The King of Pop

In honor of Michael Jackson’s untimely death I wanted to show this video if his very first public moonwalk at Motown 25. The video is just classic MJ – the moonwalk appears at 3:50 and again at 4:45. He is a legend, and we will live on with his music forever.

I think that George from Stone Laboratory said it best in the comment he left on the first Flourish post : “Flourish “organic” designs are… organic, living, and so long live flourishes!!”

Winners

Ondrej Ilincev - 250 rounded  business cards

I would like to do a pro-bono project. It will be a blood donorship promotion. According to yesterday’s news, there is not enough blood in the hospitals to treat patients. Card will be handed to underground passengers. I have recently donated blood, and although it was physically uncomfortable, I felt very good about helping someone in need.

SavingDiva – 18×24 rolled canvas print

I would love to use the canvas to decorate my brand new condo!

Thanks to everyone who participated, it was fun reading through the comments.

About UPrinting.com

For over 25 years, UPrinting has been a trusted leader in Online Printing , featuring its signature easy-to-use website and the famous free file review, a complimentary proofing service which requires no upfront payment. UPrinting offers convenient marketing support services such as design, lists, and direct mailing to help grow small and medium-size businesses nationwide.

UPrinting.com’s high quality printing services include Canvas Printing, Business Cards Printing, brochures, postcards and more, all at the most affordable prices.to

This a mash up of 45 amazing logos from Logofi.com. These designers understand what a logo needs, to be unique and successful.