Beautiful Losers
celebrates the spirit behind one of the most influential cultural moments of a generation .
Behance Network
Creative Portfolios, Projects, and Collaborations. A new platform for the creative professional community.
Cool Hunting
a daily update on ideas and products in the intersection of art, design, culture and technology, and features weekly videos that get an inside look at the people who create them.
Core 77
Since 1995 Core77.com has served a devoted global audience of industrial designers ranging from students through seasoned professionals.
D*Hub
D’Hub brings the world’s best design collections out of the basement, connecting them with news, interviews, opinions and ideas across the breadth of design.
DESIGN 21: Social Design Network
DESIGN 21: Social Design Network’s mission is to inspire social activism through design. We connect people who want to explore ways design can positively impact our many worlds, and who want to create change here, now.
Design Boom
Industrial design today: courses, education, competitions, history and contemporary, shop, interviews, snapshots, design-aerobics, it’s aperitivo time
Design For Mankind
Through photography, product design, style and craft, Design for Mankind is dedicated to showcasing the talents of the emerging art and design community.
Design Friends
Design Friends is a non-profit association gathering together people who are interested in design and its creation, whether it is graphic or not. We will, together with our members, propose many activities such as conferences with well-known designers, ev
Design Matters – Debbie Millman
Design Matters with Debbie Millman is a thought-provoking internet podcast, which profiles industry-leading graphic designers, change agents, artists, writers and educators.
Design Meltdown
What you find here is a collection of hand picked, hand cataloged web sites. The goal is to inspire, challenge and inform you.
Design Observer
Features critical essays and selected writings of design culture.
Design Resources
THERE IS A WHOLE HEAP OUT THERE HERE IS YOUR START…collected and loosely organized links to design related information, work and resources.
Design Talk Board
LATEST NEWS – Keep up-to-date with the latest graphic design industry news.
Design*Sponge
Design*Sponge is a daily website dedicated to home and product design run by Brooklyn-based writer, Grace Bonney.
design:related
design:related(tm) is a community site and inspiration tool that brings together creative people from different disciplines (and parts) of the design world. Design:related serves to motivate designers to share ideas, inspire, and be inspired.
Designer Sobriety
This site is brought to you by the good folks at Rule29. Our goal is to share with you the things we have learned, observed, or refined over the last 15 years.
Designers Toolbox
Design tools for creative professionals. Print resources, online guides, legal forms, and much more.
Digital Thread
Dedicated to the graphic designer, Digitalthread is the oldest existing web design community web site.
Emigre
A digital type foundry, publisher and distributor of graphic design related software and printed materials based in Northern California.
Freelance Switch
We are a community of freelance professionals from around the world, spanning all manner of fields.
Fun is Learning
A resource for everything concerning graphic design students and young professionals.
Gig Posters
This site is dedicated to the artists, designers and musicians who create amazing gig posters to advertise shows and events.
Handmade Nation
Handmade Nation documents a movement of artists, crafters, and designers that marry historical techniques with a punk and DIY (Do It Yourself) ethos.
Hillman Curtis
Hillmancurtis, inc. is a film and web design firm in New York City. Principal and Chief Creative Officer, Hillman Curtis, founded the firm in 1998, after three years as Art Director at Macromedia, Inc.
History of Graphic Design
A website dedicated to putting forth the amazingly rich history of graphic design.
Hoefler and Frere-Jones
Since 1989, Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones have helped some of the world’s foremost publications, corporations, and institutions develop their unique voice through typography.
HOW Magazine
HOW magazine’s goal is to help designers, whether they work for a design firm, for an in-house design department or for themselves, run successful, creative, profitable studios.
I love Typography (ILT)
ILT is designed to inspire its readers, to make people more aware of the typography that’s around them.
Indexhibit
A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound.
Interactions Magazine
The human-built world can afford a sense of beauty, sublimity, and resonance, and through our advancements in technology can come advances in society. At the center of these advances are interactions – conversations, connections, collaborations, and relat
It’s Nice That
It’s Nice That is focused on publicising, promoting and archiving the very best contemporary work from across the creative industry.
Logo Pond
A website dedicated to helping inspire creativity in logo design.
MOMA's Tall Buildings
New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s permanent tall buildings exhibition presents a focused study of twenty-five tall buildings around the world.
Never Sleep
To demystify the transition, we share the failures, successes, and surprises during our years in college and progression into the field: the creative process, monetary problems, internships, interviews, mistakes, and personal relationships.
Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit
Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them.
Omnispace
A website dedicated to all things architecture and more.
Pinball Publishing
Pinball Publishing grew out of the owners Laura and Austin’s desire to be involved in their own design projects from conception to final printed manifestation.
Posters for the People
In 2008 we celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal presidency and his vision for a hopeful and strong America.
ReadyMade: Instructions for Everyday Life
Readymade.com provides great ideas for everyday life including home decor, home design, DIY (Do It Yourself), kitchen designs, and home improvement.
Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information to Web designers and developers.
The Cool hunter
The Cool Hunter celebrates creativity in all of its modern manifestations.
The Daily Monster
Stefan G. Bucher of 344design.com creates a brand new monster every day, time-lapsed before your very eyes.
The Design Encyclopedia
A growing, collaborative resource that describes, tracks and explains culture, commerce, politics, media, sports, brands – everything possible, really – through design.
The Donut Project
On The Donut Project, we will post anything that inspires us, makes us laugh, makes us think or pisses us off. Design is not only about literal design, and this site won’t be either. If we like it, whatever it may be, it’ll be here.
The FontFeed
A daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world.
The Webby Awards
The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.
Time Tracker
Time Tracker is a simple tool to keep track of the time you spend on any task. Think of it as a to-do-list with a clock. And yes, it’s free.
Under Consideration
A growing network and enterprise dedicated to the progress of the graphic design profession and its practitioners, students and enthusiasts. At times intangible, its purpose is to question, push, analyze and agitate graphic design and those involved in th
Visual Culture
Visual Culture is a daily design blog that presents a fresh mix of visually inspiring material as it relates to modern day life.
We Love Typography
WLT is an image, video, & text ‘bookmarking’ site that is wholly dedicated to type-related content.
The following is a way for you to get involved in the community and stay current in design.
NEW YORK, June 29, 2009. The White House and the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) have requested AIGA members’ help in
promoting public service opportunities in their communities during the “United We Serve” initiative, a summer of community involvement culminating in a National Day of Service and Remembrance on September 11, 2009.
On behalf of the Obama administration, the NEA has asked members of
AIGA, the professional association for design, to visually promote
local opportunities for community service and then create a visual
record of the results. “Designers should be involved as citizens and as
designers. Each designer has the ability to move others by making
stories visible and capturing the community experience,” said AIGA
Executive director Richard Grefé.
The following is from the AIGA web site and worth downloading and reading if you haven’t got your copy in the mail yet (I’m not sure if student members get the survey).
The 2000 survey draws from the largest pool to date of designers and
others allied with the profession nationwide, and includes responses
from more than 9,000 design professionals. The AIGA|Aquent survey is
widely recognized as the most comprehensive annual survey of
compensation data for the communication design profession in the United
States. Visit www.designsalaries.org to use the interactive Salary Calculator.
In addition to the compensation data, this year’s survey includes essays written by design professionals offering advice on staying competitive in a turbulent economy.
Ever want to self publish your own book? Go to the Blurb web site and check it out. You can have a single copy of you book published for $12. There is a catch, since Blurb needs to automate this service to offer you a book for $12, they need you to use their online or InDesign templates and you must use their book sizes.
If you hurry and make your book by July 16th, you can submit it to their Photography.Book.Now competition.
The Project You can train your imagination the same way you train for a marathon, the more miles you put in the longer and faster you can run. The more you exercise and use your imagination, the more creative and quicker your imagination will become. The following project is an exercise you can perform regularly to increase your imagination’s creativity and stamina.
The Objectives • Develop your imagination to be more creative. • Discover your ideal working method. • Train to be creative on demand.
The Process Create 10 different concepts that visually solve one specific problem and create one thumbnail sketch for each concept. Spend only 2 minutes per concept (use a timer). For this project to be effective, each concept and thumbnail must be completely different from each other. Make the thumbnail sketches in a journal that you keep with you. Don’t worry about being neat or how effective each concept is. This is supposed to be quick and dirty, you never have to share these ideas with anyone if it will help you relax and be more creative and productive.
The problems should vary and have very specific goals and outcomes! Force yourself to think of ideas that aren’t obvious. The more limits you place on the project, the more creative you have to be with your solutions. To help get you started, come up with a poster that will let immigrants know of the value of the public library system and it’s new hours. Here is a news article you can download for more background information. Keep in mind you can make up your own projects if you don’t like this one! It’s not about the project or the solution, it’s about the repetition of doing!
The Format Spend 20 minutes thumbnailing 10 different concepts. Spend 2 minutes on each thumbnail. Spend 5 minutes journaling the circumstances, your mood and the surroundings you experience when doing the exercise. Spend 5 minutes ordering the concepts from best to worst.
Tips Do this project more than once a day or at varying times over several days and journal the results. For example were your ideas more creative just before bed or after a good lunch, do you produce better in a coffee shop or on the subway, was your first idea always the best or worst. Besides your surroundings, journal your moods, are you happy, sad, playful, excited, tired, etc. Over time, patterns will develop, maybe you’ll find that you’re more creative at night, maybe you’re more productive in the morning, maybe you’re less creative when too caffeinated or not caffeinated enough. Learn your working habits and exercise your imagination!
Again, another great find by the folks at Visual Culture!The Uniform Project is a great example of how to exercise your creativity by taking something mundane and reinventing it day after day—for a year—and see how much your creative muscles will have grown!
Many desperate acts of design (including gradients, drop shadows, and
the gratuitous use of transparency) are perpetuated in the absence of a
strong concept. A good idea provides a framework for design decisions,
guiding the work.
Everyone should check out the videos Lev Yilmaz has produced as part of his Tales Of Mere Existence series. The videos are funny, accurate and oddly insightful. Take a few moments go to his web site ingredientx.com check out his work and get inspired. I have embedded my personal favorite Procrastination.
OK, you really need to pick up the latest issue of HOW magazine (even though I know you all have subscriptions already)! 90% of the articles are geared towards students or recently graduated students. It also lists several of your peers and what they are up to. In addition to the afore mentioned articles, it also gives you some ideas on how to remain creatively active.
I’ve come across quite a few sites where designers can find out how to help create change in their community, country or the world. Out of all of these sites that I have found, the blog Visual Culture does a great job of compiling all these resources. You’ll also find quite a few design competitions, some deadlines have already passed others are close but at least they will be on your calendar for next year! Anyway, check it out and get involved!
