A newly designed commerative Dutch 5 Euro coin, designed by Stani Michiels. The whole design was created using only free software. A design to rival the new UK coin designs.

(Via Burstoid)

Designing Better Email Messages
Zurb have written a really good piece on designing text only emails. Simple points, but they are often ignored.

2008 Election Maps
Kottke has a round up of US election maps used by different news agencies. It is interesting to see the difference in styles across different standards and types of media. Although it’s quite ugly, I love the BBC map that shows states made up of squares, with each square representing one Electoral College vote. Talking of which…

ObamaBats
Well it had to happen really.

Is graphic design art?
Um…no.

And finally…
The Couple
My friends at Stalelife have an interesting video by Geert Desager about advertiser/consumer relationships in the new connected world.

MultiColr Search Lab is an Idée Inc toy which allows you to search over 10,000 interesting photos from Flickr, all licensed under Creative Commons. The difference with this service is that you search photos by colour combinations. As a source of colour inspiration for design, this service works really, really well and could be very useful.

Above is a video of gameplay from indie game The Unfinished Swan.

From the official site:

The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden. The game is still in development and no release plans have been announced.

This looks amazing, but is enough to give nyone nightmares of a colourless world.

Via the directory of pretty thing, Paper Cut Panic:

Industrial designer, Ignacio Pilotto, gives the classic Rubik’s cube a colourful twist.

So if you want to have my taste inflicted on you, visit my Huffduffer page to subscribe to my podcast. I’ll be posting songs I find and like as often as I can, but only files legitimately posted by the band or their people. So far acts include Bishop Allen, Dntel and M. Ward covering Bowie.

A couple of other podcasts worth checking out so far are Si and Samuel Cotterall.

Congratulations to Polwarth Publishing on the achievement.

We now have to use phonetic spelling on film posters for kids? Come on.

From the Upcoming page:

A few of the Scottish/Scotland-based survivors of dConstruct are meeting up for a bevvy or two having lamented the relative absence of geek socials north of the border.

Freelancers, full-time web monkeys, anyone interested in the interweb do come and join us for a beverage and blether.

Wedneday from 6pm at City Cafe, Blair Street.

30 Reasons is an interesting project where 30 designers create a poster each, with one released per day from 5th October right up to the US elections on 4th November. The idea of each poster is to give viewers a reason to vote for Barack Obama.

The designer line-up looks great, so it’s well worth signing up to receive each poster by email, whatever your political ideas.

Sign up for email updates at 30Reasons.org

Not Paper is a lovely blog about collage.

Love him or hate him, Gary Vaynerchuck is quite the motivational speaker.

As I commented on Sam Brown’s post:

Having had the pleasure of hearing Gary speak at SXSW, holding court in the hallways, the guy is an inspiration. I am in awe of people with so much self confidence, but no arrogance.

So if you see me, come and say hello. (Please, I don’t know anyone ).