Who Am I?

Playing with business card design... can't help but go back to basics: Who is my audience? What kind of image do I wish to portray? Who am I? What do I stand for? A big load for such as small space.

The above pages are displayed through an awesome tool called Pictobrowser. Post Flickr pictures by way of tags, sets or groups. It is miracle-simple.

Gathering Colour and Pattern

This image of fabrics, colours and patterns has been floating amongst my boxes of stuff for a long time. For some reason, it never tires. It must be that girly-without-being-girly-girl type of aesthetic that I always love.

So, when I came across the Colour Palette Generator, this image immediately came to mind. Basically, the Colour Palette Generator takes any image from any website and pulls out a palette of corresponding web colours, both dull and vibrant (as shown in the second image above; the image is a scan from a magazine, elle decor uk i think).

To use the generator, you will need to obtain the url of an image from a website. How? "Ctrl-click" on the image, click on "properties," and it should come up with an "http//www.-site-.jpg" under "location." (This is for a mac, but is similar for pc).

To get a screen shot: shift-command-3. A Picture file will save to your desktop, which can then be opened in PhotoShop, if needed.

These are things I only recently learned, but have used them so many times since... how did I ever get along without them?

Behance

I am always drawn to methods of organization, especially ones that take into consideration the creative process, beauty and sophistication. Behance does just that. They describe their site as: Insights & Tips on Making Ideas Happen in the Creative Community... This is a great site. Why?

• A nice series of products, like The Action Book. (as shown above). They offer great tools that really embrace the self-help/business community, without the typical over-enthusiastic, cartoony type of presentation.

• A blog that features designers, ideas, companies, how real people are living the creative life. There are a lot of well-thought-out articles, like this one.

• If that's not enough, they even offer a printable pdf download of the Action Pad. The link is here. It's the perfect start.

My Screensaver

This is my Screensaver. I love it. It's so simple, graceful, clunky, and it keeps real time. I think it beats the preloaded wavy options by miles.

The site also has other fun downloads like a plywood trashcan. and desktop wallpaper too: pink evian alps, a muji desktop, mohagany woodgrain...

My Moleskine

I have a fairly hefty collection of scrap papers: images from magazines, type samples, doodles, postcards, colour swatches... When feeling creatively drained, sometimes I like to collage them into my journal. It is a complete experiment of layering, cutting, tearing, gluing. It is about embracing a hand-made, almost wabi-sabi aesthetic: learning how to work with mistakes, use intuition, and play. It is about combining things in new ways, stretching possibilities and keeping an open mind.

The above pages are displayed through an awesome tool called Pictobrowser via Swiss Miss. It allows you to display sets of images from your Flickr account. Super easy too.

OSX Shortcuts

I was recently reintroduced to Pocketmod, via the wonderfully resourceful Creative Tech Blog. Pocketmod is a program that allows you to print and make little booklets as a way to organize your stuff. They have templates for various types of calendars, lists, games... Also check out their pdf to Pocketmod converter.

The guys over at Creative Tech have used the template to create a handy little book of OSX Shortcuts. AND they have even provided us with the original InDesign file so we can easily plug in our own shortcuts... the ones we keep forgetting, or ones for different types of software. Imagine the possibilities. I think this type of fold could also be an amazing design solution.

By the way, while on the topic of books, Five and a Half now has their book-making tutorial listed at JPG Magazine. I can't wait to try it out.

Publish it Yourself

The ultimate Design-it-yourself project, in my mind, is to publish an entire book. Now that various self-publishers are gaining great reputations and offering endless options, it’s quite viable, maybe even easy.

Lulu seems to be an online favourite, but I really like the site design and page samples over at Blurb. I am seriously tempted by the portfolio section. And my dream-project-list has been swimming with cook books, picture books, colour-inspired books, travel photo books, books, books, books.

Or... if you aren’t up for creating a whole book, perhaps you’d like to create your very own Penguin Book Cover. It’s interesting to see how people have interpreted/designed/visiualized the works of greats like Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde. Frankly, I love the books left blank; all white with the little orange penguin perfectly composed in the corner. Beautiful.

Or... if you don’t really want to make anything... Remember those great little Choose Your Own Adventure books? They were way ahead of their time. And now, you can even download them onto your Ipod ( for free! until Jan 25).