Friday, March 2, 2007

Useful tools for designers and creatives

I have set this out in two categories: INSPIRATION and RESOURCES. Feel free to add your own to the list, and tell me of your experiences using any of these sites and tools via the comments section below.

INSPIRATION:

Worlds best advertising is an advertising archive and forum discussing all the best work worldwide. Covers all media: Print, TV, Radio, Online, and Ambient.
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Find thousands of logos for study and inspiration at Logo Lounge
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An insightful and stimulating read on the logo trends of the year, can be found here
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In opposition to today's digital fonts, this site inspires by focussing on the beauty of Antique wood type
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The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising is an amazing brand and packaging collection over in Notting Hill, showcasing 200 years of consumerism, all reflected through packaging design, brand development, poster and TV advertising.
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The 24 Hour Museum alerts to news, listings and features from 3000+ museums and galleries. A fabulous guide to UK culture.
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If all of the above fail, just pick a good selection from wine.com!


RESOURCES:

Download eps logos for free at brandsoftheworld.com Here you'll find access to all the well known (and not so well known) brand logos in vector EPS formats.
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For high resolution textures Texture Space can't be beaten for an enormous selection of 3D textures. A very useful and thorough site.
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Fontifier lets you turn scanned samples of handwriting into a digital handwriting font.
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If you're trying to name or recognise a font, the font identifier site, Identifont enables you to locate it by answering a series of questions. Incredibly useful if you want to match an existing typeface, or identify a typeface you have seen in a publication.
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If you can't find locate a font by answering the questions in Identifont, then What the font? locates it for you by allowing you to scan a sample of it in (if you've seen it in a publication, for instance). Once submitted, it will supply you with the font name – a very useful tool and a real timesaver.
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Getty Images is an excellent search facility for an enormous range of photos, illustrations and films covering every type of theme.
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iStockphoto is a royalty-free image web site with a good selection of imagery and, more importantly for low-budget projects, they are incredibly cheap to purchase
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A good site for adding customisable, royalty-free music to multimedia projects is Partners in Rhyme. Also useful for voiceovers and sound effects.
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Photoshop Support does what it says on the tin!
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For every style of font, for use on a Mac, with a great search facility, check out Mac Fonts
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Once a printed magazine, x-height is where you will find interesting and useful information on and about fonts, type design, designers and technology written by industry experts.
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Magma is the best place on the web to find the most inspiring books covering all aspects of art and design.
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NB. I will soon be adding a post of inspiring websites of fellow designers and design and advertising agencies eg. Non-format, as recommended by Matt. If you know of any that you'd like to recommend for this forthcoming post, please notify me via the comments section

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another interesting site to try is brandchannel - take a look!
I find it useful for keeping up to date on big design/branding issues:

http://www.brandchannel.com

ML

Anonymous said...

Very useful - thank you - especially www.brandsoftheworld.com

Anonymous said...

Geeky, but useful: a link for paper sizes and measurements:

http://home.inter.net/eds/paper/papersize.html

and envelope sizes and measurements:

http://home.inter.net/eds/paper/env.html

Anonymous said...

Here are a few that you might find interesting:

dropload.com - for anyone that doesn't have an ftp site, it's useful for transferring large files.

furturtle.com - really nice screenprints, good illustrators that are open to commissions.

lost.art.br - nice brazilian artists site.

flatstock.com - more illustrators and screenprints, associated with south by south west in texas, again, open to commissions.

and last, and strangest, the nato website has a really good reference image section.

Anonymous said...

Thought you might like this link - some of these are great!

http://www.atelier-v.ch/

Anonymous said...

Interesting and useful - especially the font identifier - as an old comp who's forgotten most faces!! By the way - could we have a photo of your face please!

Anonymous said...

what a site !
so rich and inspiring
it's like being in wonderland
so many goodies for designers...
I'm gona be a devoted member.
lovlov
drora

Anonymous said...

Two graphic design sites for inspiration. Lots of examples of work.

http://www.csadesign.com
http://www.segura-inc.com

Karen Cinnamon said...

www.logochief.com good for inspiration and ideas too