*** From the Archives ***

This article is from March 21, 2014, and is no longer current.

The CreativePro Weekly Top 10, vol. 7

1. Didja ever think about designing a light pole banner for your city? Yeah, me neither. But somebody’s got that gig. And now that I’ve seen the free design guide for light poles and city signage by Britten Studios, I think it’d be kinda cool to make one of those signs. And even if you never intend to add a light pole to your portfolio, the guide has some nice spring themes that could inspire you for other jobs.

2. Our Type is a photography project undertaken by designer Trevor Finnegan to document the vanishing landscape of unique typography in old Irish shop fronts. Inspired by his father’s collection of advertising signs, the project has taken on added urgency as many small stores have been converted to private homes or chain stores in the last few years, and their hand-crafted signs have been lost forever.

3. Mt. Mograph is a YouTube channel with weekly tutorials devoted to helping you learn “kick-ass motion graphics.” This week’s video is Hipster Calligraphy, and it shows how to create a really fun motion graphic effect using Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects.

4. Usually I try to keep things PG-rated here at CreativePro, but once in a while something slightly NSFW makes me chuckle enough to want to share it. Such is the case with Nasty Icons, 45 icons to spice up your designs with cartoonish sex, violence, and assorted elements of bad taste.

The set is free for use in commercial work, but you’re asked to pay with a tweet to download them. Or if you’re more interested in a G-rated icon set, Webalys offers a set of 210 free vector icons for Web design and wireframing.

5. Kustomtype is an independent type foundry based in Belgium, offering fonts designed for logotypes, packaging, posters, T-shirts, signage & design projects with a retro & vintage feel. It’s real kool, man. 

6. I love simple (and cheap) solutions to tricky problems, like the kind embodied by Photojojo’s Focus Shifter. It attaches to your camera lens so you can set up focal points ahead of time. Then when you’re ready to shoot, you simply push/pull a handle to focus without fiddling or taking your eyes off the action.

7. Interviewly is a simple, fun site that takes AMA (Ask Me Anything) interviews from Reddit, and tidies them up with nicer formatting and photos. The assortment of people on Interviewly is pretty diverse/random, and includes a few creative types like Austin Kleon and Molly Crabapple.

8. When the producers of Mad Men were looking for the perfect person to design the ads for the show’s seventh season, they turned to none other than graphic design legend (and real-life ’60s ad man) Milton Glaser. The New York Times recounts the story of how Glaser got involved with the show and the ads he created for it.

9. Another from the #want file: blueprint artwork inspired by real vintage patent drawings & illustrations by the Oliver Gal Artist Co. You can get blueprints of anything from the original Lego brick to the Batmobile, reproduced on matte proofing paper in a premium black wood frame.

10. And finally, here’s something that’s that’s 90% amazing, and 10% horrifying: a series of Gigaportaits of human faces called ‘The Machine View’ by photographer Daniel Boschung. Each face is a composite of 600 images (900 megapixels total) taken by a camera-wielding industrial robot. You can zoom in so close that skin wrinkles look like moutain ranges, and eyes reveal what the subjects were looking at in incredible detail. 

 

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
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