With the freeware version of LiveBrush, you can export your drawings as PNG files. With the $10 paid version, you can export vector files for professional use.

The Interface

While LiveBrush is easy to use, there are no tool-tips to help you get familiar with the interface. In order to get comfortable using LiveBrush, we must first understand the various interface controls.

The Project Bar at the top shows the current project and brush style. It also has buttons for LiveBrush app settings, and saving the project.

The Styles Panel at the top right is the key place where you select brush styles with which to draw. You can create new styles, import and export styles, or rearrange their order.

The most interesting thing however, is that you can select multiple brush styles to draw. It is fun letting your imagination go wild experimenting with different brush styles! It is also useful to preview a style before using it, using the “eye” button.

The different Tools in LiveBrush are shown in a vertical bar at the top right:

• Brush: the main drawing tool. This is a motion-enabled “live brush” as it responds to the speed of your mouse gestures.
• Pen: used to add “points” to previously drawn lines. These points are used as control points for transforming lines.
• Transform: used to transform layers or line points.
• Bucket: standard solid color fill tool.
• Sample: color picker tool.

The Tool Settings panel displays settings for the currently selected tool. For the Brush tool, it provides access to three kinds of settings:

• Brush Behavior: specifies brush response to mouse movements (velocity, friction) and when decorations are attached
• Brush Line: specifies how the line looks at each point, such as width, stroke type, angle, opacity, and color
• Brush Decoration: settings for the graphics attached to your lines in different brush styles

For the Transform tool, the Tool Settings panel gives access to transformation properties for the currently selected line points or layer.

At the bottom is the standard Layers panel to work with layers. You can duplicate, rearrange, remove, transform and flatten layers using this panel.

Drawing and Editing

Drawing is easy! Just select a brush style and draw. Apart from some basic styles, you will find floral, ink splats, fractal, light, smoke, and ribbon styles of brushes. Experiment with different brush behaviors – velocity and friction settings. Try out different Line and Decoration settings.

All graphics are organized in Layers. Use the Layers panel to remove, flatten, or change colors of layers. Click the Transform tool after you’ve drawn a few lines, select a layer, and see how you can move, rotate or resize layers.

Import and Export

Livebrush encourages you to share your drawings with the community. The Livebrush forum is a great place to check out art that others have created. Here is an example from the Livebrush photostream on Flickr:

The File > Import and File > Export menus let you import and export different parts of Livebrush projects such as the whole image, individual layers, brush styles, or a Deco list. New brush styles (Typography, Geometry, etc) and decorations are regularly added to the community, so make sure you check them out to import and use them in your drawings.

Did you like using Livebrush? Share your creations (and experiments) with us in the comments!

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You do not have to sign up or register to enjoy SketchFu to create drawings online, contrary to popular belief. But if you want to save your doodles or submit them for others to see, you will need a free login and password. I did not do that for this article.

Let’s see how it works.

Navigate on over to SketchFu and you will be greeted by this screen:

They have up a basic doodle showing what you can do with the application with a little imagination. You can see drawings other users have created on the right hand side. You can click on them and see what the users created. You can also “cheer” it or comment on it if you have an account.

To create a drawing online yourself (why else would you have gone to the site?) all you have to do is hit the New button at the bottom of the home page. There are 5 colored arrows pointing to it and a circle saying try it. Hopefully you will find the button!

The drawing interface you see above is all there is to it! You can choose the color of your brush and your brush size… That’s it! The other buttons at the top let you undo or play back your drawing, stroke by stroke, anywhere from twice to 256 times. Check that out after you are done drawing – a very cool feature and it can show others how to create your image from scratch!

Above you can see the color picker which is activated simply by hitting the black box next to the word color at the top of the interface. You can either type in a color’s hex code or choose from the chooser.

Next up we see the different brush sizes that we can use. You select the one you want by clicking on it and then drawing. There are 6 different sizes ranging from teeny tiny to whoa that’s fricking big!

You can see I drew a line with each one below:

After finding the site I decided to draw a little. Show everyone how awesome I am with a paint brush….but oh wait! I can’t paint! So maybe you will get a laugh out of my SketchFu sketch as you can see below it is on par with my 2 year old’s skills

Now that you all had a good laugh at my expense let’s take a look at what talented people can do with this application:

So that is the top bunch of sketches that have been cheered on by the community. It is really amazing what some of these artists can do with a simple application like this! Here is my favourite - you can click on it and watch how the artist drew it line by line. This is sooo cool!

I am very impressed by this site and it’s contributors – do you know of another similar site to create drawings online? We would love for you to tell us about it so we could check it out!

SketchFu

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As I write this article Google’s current doodle is a barcode to celebrate the anniversary of the invention we all take for granted now as we queue up at the supermarket.

Today’s doodle made me inquisitive about the actual doodles themselves so I delved a little deeper and found some cool stuff you can do with the Google doodles. If that piques your interest, check out Saikat’s recent article (5 Sites To Spread The Love For Google Doodle Pictures) which shows you some websites where you can check out the older Google Doodle archives.

Check out the old ones

Until I wrote this, I assumed that once the holiday, occasion or anniversary had passed the Google Doodle was gone forever- sucked up into the abyss that is the Internet. However you can browse through hundreds of different old logos and doodles from all over the world in a gallery kept in an archive by Google.

It’s one way to waste half an hour on the internet when you should be researching an article.

Keep the Good Ones

I found a script that will allow you to scroll through the vast Google Doodles archive discussed above and select one to have as your permanent icon on your Google homepage. I though this was cool seeing as new doodles only come out once or twice a month depending on which local Google site you’re using. It was developed by a Google employee a while back to celebrate the tradition of Google doodles.

There are however a few constraints to it. Firstly you have to have Firefox which you can download from here. It won’t work with other browsers such as Google Chrome (surprisingly enough, although I’m told the developer is going to get one when the browser is developed further and is more stable) or Internet Explorer.  It also needs to have the Greasemonkey add-on installed to work.

The script to select which Google logo you want, cunningly called ‘Favourite Doodle’ is available here. They’re both really easy to set up and should take no longer than 2-3 minutes for most users. You shouldn’t even need to restart Firefox when it is complete.

Then, right click on the Greasemonkey bar along the bottom of Firefox and select ‘Choose Favourite Doodle’ and then ‘User Script Commands’ as shown in the screenshot. This will bring you to a gallery similar to the one discussed above but each logo will have a ‘Make this my favourite’ button underneath.

Once you select which one you want as your favourite you’ll be redirected to the Google homepage where your favourite logo will replace the original one. When a holiday rolls around, you’ll still get the new custom logo for that day in place of your favourite one.

Make your own doodle

Google also allow people to submit doodles in annual worldwide competitions. Normally, this privilege is reserved for leading artists and cartoonists who are allowed to submit their designs not for money, but for the sheer publicity designing a Google doodle would bring.

The scheme is called Doodle 4 Google and is open to anyone still in their country’s education system. The winning entrant gets their college tuition of up to $15,000 paid for and a host of other goodies. Plus an all expenses paid trip to the Google HQ in the Big Apple (this is the US prize – it will differ depending on each country).

Google also give the winning school and district thousands of dollars. There are thousands of prizes to be won in each country for those who didn’t quite make the cut such as laptops, t-shirts and goodies.

So there you have it, three cool ways we can ‘interact’ with Google’s Doodles.

Aside from amusing us by catching us off guard, the Google logo and its many incarnations will be going down in the history books as a mover and shaker within the industry.

Do you know of any other tips and tricks to make the most out of Google’s Doodles?

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The latest one by the way is a celebration of the barcodes birthday (check the thumbnail on top). The now commonplace barcode was patented on October 7th, 1952 and Google marks the commemoration by tweaking its logo.

Some doodles are for selected countries. As an Indian, I especially remember the tweak on October 2. Google honored the man who led India’s independence movement. Google replaced its ‘G’ with a line drawing of the national icon’s face. So the Google Doodle pictures are also gentle reminders of the significant days in our busy lives. I caught that one but I missed the one they did as a tribute to Michael Jackson.

It is a very minor thing, but it’s an oddity. And it’s oddities like Google Doodles that make for collectors items. A Google Doodle picture may be nonphysical for the real world but it is a curiosity nonetheless. So where does one go to see the graphic magic that Google is doing with its logo? The fan pages, of course!

The Official Google Holiday Logos Page

Google has an obscure page devoted to its art form. The page is a comprehensive listing of all logos going right back to the first one in 1988. The Burning Man festival was the first one (see pic).

Apart from the holiday logos, you can also check out the Fan Logos link which is a showcase of Google buffs getting inspired and amok on their graphic programs. If you are looking for a particular logo, use the keyword in the search box. And if you are that keen, using the RSS feed on the page would be a good option.

Doodle Source

A beta site which has the avowed aim of gathering all Google Doodle pictures and building an archive of them. It’s fairly new with all the recent listings going back to August of this year. So don’t expect a huge collection just yet. The site though lists the logos categorized by countries. You can also use the search link to search by keyword, country or date. The site has a sister website at Doodlerepository.com.

Perfnova.com

Almost resembling a mirror site of the official Google site with its date linked holiday logo listings. The Google style logos’ online museum is a fan site and as much a comprehensive display going right back to the beginning.

Google Logos Collection

A blog style site built on the appreciation of Google art work. The amount of logos showcased here are around 222. The author also lists his favorite Top official Google logos.

Logoogle

Just to break the same-old-thing yawn, check out the collection of fake Google inspired holiday logos. All created by Google devotees from around the world. You have a whole series of logos poking fun at the Google logo. Think of it as an off-handed compliment. But check out the linked interview (featured in Korean Herald) with Dennis Hwang, the hand behind the real Google logos.

Here’s more from Dennis Hwang and his thoughts on oodles of doodles.

Though there are few more fan sites expressing love for the Google logo, these five should hold our interest. With their complete collection, they should be adequate reference points in case you miss the point of a certain logo.

For example, did you know that Google holds a competition for K-12 students to re-imagine Google’s homepage logo? The Doodle 4 Google 2009 winner, Christin Engelberth’s winning entry is below –

As I said, there’s a little story behind each logo. Call it clever branding or just call it fun, Google gets its doodles right.

Which is your favorite Google logo? My favorite one was the ‘Unexplained Phenomenon’ on Sep 05, 2009.

Let us know yours, share them in the comments.

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What PimpTheFace lets you do is create a awesome face with their different body parts. You can create some really cool looking faces with this service. Drawing cartoon faces of someone is definitely a good way to kill a few hours.

Let’s take a look at how it works and then I will show you two videos on the service. First start off by browsing on over to PimpTheFace.

Once you are there, click on the paint splatter that says click here. Right after you click on that you will be pushed to a page with a Photoshop-esque editor. It might look intimidating at first but it is really quite easy to use and master.

You will see two columns on the left and one more on the right. One of those columns – the left most one, allows you to pick the body part out of the choices. This includes the head shape, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, facial hair and more.

The column closer to the middle is how you select which body part you want to add next. Select the top icon like you can see in the below screen shot. This is the faces outline or silhouette. Once you click on it, the items you can pick are on the left. Click on one of them and it will appear in the drawing window. If you want to change it simply select another icon. It will replace the one that is currently there – easy peasy.

In the above shot I added my silhouette and below you will see my head or dome type. I am really having fun with this – are you having fun yet?

Now you should have the hang of it. Once you see how it works it is pretty intuitive. Keep on adding facial items until you reach the bottom of the list and have a full face. You can go back and change any items you like until you have an image you love.  Here is the image I created in about 5 minutes.

After you are happy with your face you can let him travel the world in the form of adding backgrounds. You can do that by using this toolbar on the right: It allows you to save your face as well as print or store it online. You will need an account for these features. I just copied my face out.

Here is a video on creating a face with PimpTheFace:

And one more on how to draw President Obama using PimpTheFace.

We would love to see your creations! Post them up for us to see. Link to em’ or what ever you want but we can’t wait to see your creativeness! If you’re familiar with any other website offering easy tools for drawing cartoon like faces please let us know about them.

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• LiveBrush – A Versatile Freeware Image Editor That Lets You Draw Like An Artist (12)
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As such an almost ritualistic art form, getting the right tattoo can be incredibly difficult. How do you find one that will represent what you want? Will it fit with your personal style? Does it really speak to you and about you? If you’re not very artistic (and I am not) you may want to look at some tattoo flash. Flash is tattoo jargon for pre-drawn tattoo designs. You’ll often see books of them in any tattoo parlour. Ideally, the flash should show you what styles your artist is capable of. So, each shop will have different flash. But you can’t go to each and every shop hoping to find something that you will recognize as being in the right vein for you.  That’s where the free tattoo design sites come in handy. Here are some that I think could be the best.

Flash and Furious

The only real drawback to this free tattoo design site is that it’s in French. Now, I can read a little bit of French, but even for someone who doesn’t, this site is very easy to get around in. That’s the beauty of tattoos – they aren’t language dependent.

With over 2500 designs on the site, broken into 6 categories, you are bound to find something you’ll like. At the very least you’ll find something to take to a good tattoo artist to give them some idea what you are looking for.

Tattoo Tribes

Completely free and with some very cool features. There are a few hundred free tattoo designs to look at here, but expect this site to grow exponentially. The designs are crisp and clear. You can use the Virtualizer to get an idea of what it might look on you, or where best to put it. You can download and print high-resolution images of the tattoos to take to your artist.

The tattoos are mostly suited for black work, but they are just as eye-catching as any colour work that I’ve seen. Really, check it out. You will get some great ideas here!

Tribal Shapes

Seems that the word tribe and its derivatives are very popular in tattoo circles! Tribal Shapes has a fairly large collection of, well, tribal shapes. The tribal tattoo genre is defined by its use of broad black strokes and stylized images. These tattoos pay homage to real Maori and other tribal tattoos. Most often, tribal designs are 2 dimensional in nature, but there are a few 3-dimensional ones out there.

Tribal Shapes also host a large number of Kanji characters. Kanji, “…are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese…”, according to Wikipedia. On a personal note, I would beg you to NOT get a Kanji tattoo, unless you are a native reader of Kanji and have a tattoo artist who is a master at scribing in Kanji. Do you really want to end up with Japanese people laughing at you?

Old Timer Tattoo

If you’re looking for some genuine old school flash, this is the site. The drawings were originally done in the late 1970’s. There is definitely a 70’s vibe or outlaw feel to a lot of these designs. Some are really neat renditions of sailor style tattoos. You’ll also see some that tend more towards the stoner side of the 60’s and 70’s. Still, you might get some free tattoo design ideas, even from them.

For some ungodly reason, there are tattoos here featuring Nazi swastikas. At one time, those kind of tattoos were favoured by outlaw bikers. No one even remotely associated with MakeUseOf.com approves of Nazism. Please try to think of it as more of a historical perspective of tattoo trends.

Tattoos By Design

This site out of the U.K. is more of a community site, with forums, photos and flash. Unfortunately, the flash part costs about $19 a year to join. But you only need to join to get full size images of the flash. If you want, you can go through their entire catalogue and see the smaller images to get ideas. The gargoyle is an example of how small the images are, but how they are still useful.

Of course, the photos of tattoos sent in by community members are free to view. This will also give you some excellent ideas, however, it’s not a good idea to get a copy of someone else’s custom tattoo. That’s just poor tattoo etiquette.

Where do you go if you need to get inspired for a tattoo? Tell us in the comments.

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Some of the time however, I found somewhat good use of my time by doodling various stick figures onto a stack of post-it notes, creating what we know as a flipbook.

Flipbooks are quite possibly the simplest form of animation and easily the oldest. Several drawings of similar, but different figures that transform into one long or short animation for you to look at or show off. “Old School Art” such as this has really taken a backseat to today’s computer generated graphics and products from Adobe and others. Even you yourself can create online flipbook drawings on various websites and can even create your own from an incredibly simple and free application, called Flipbook Printer.

Flipbook Printer is a simple application that allows you to create your very own flipbooks from your very own movie collection. You import the movie of your choice, edit accordingly, and print them onto business cards. Below is a more in depth look at how it works.

After importing either an AVI or MPG, you would first select where you want the flipbook to begin and where you want it to end.

After that you select the card stock that you’ll be using for printing off all the various animations. You have a couple of default Avery options, along with customizing your own if you like. You can then select a front and back cover, along with several various print options.

After you’ve selected all of the options you’d like, you simply insert the business card sheets that you’ve purchased into your printer, and print away. After they have completed the printing process, you simply have to cut each of the individual animations out, assemble them in the correct order, and staple them together, similar to the below screenshot.

If you’d prefer not to go through the more advanced editing process, Flipbook Printer also offers a simple step-by-step wizard.

The flipbooks can be used simply for your own enjoyment, to have fun with your kids, or maybe even a fancy party favor to pass around. Whatever the case, it doesn’t get any simpler than what the free Flipbook Printer application offers. With a few movies from your own collection and a little computer knowledge, you are well on your way to generating your very own flipbooks.

Know of any other similar flipbook creation products? What other programs or sites have you seen to create flipbooks?

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With it being so easy to create and upload digital photos to the web, there are a lot of creative and innovative individuals out there who just know how to make you enjoy a lot of your worthless and not so worthless pictures. Something I just recently discovered, and surely will begin making the rounds via yours and my e-mail account, is WriteOnIt.

WriteOnIt is a fun way to have fun with your photos and create hilarious captions to pass around your e-mail and blog. Amongst the three sections on the site, you have caption creation, fake pictures and famous magazine covers for you to plaster your friends faces all over.

Create Funny Photo Captions

Caption creation lets you select amongst several WriteOnIt images with a blank slate for you to enter any words that you like. There are currently three dozen of funny photo captions to choose from. They include Einstein, Santa Claus and even a gravestone, all with the ability to create your creative caption for whomever or whatever you like.

Create Fake Photos

With creating your own fake photos, you can take any image you’ve taken yourself and upload it to a billboard, a mirror or a pencil drawing. After the image is uploaded, they’ll be instantly transformed into whatever you like, the aforementioned options, along with a couple of dozen more.

Make Fake Magazine Covers

Ability to make fake magazine covers may be the most fun part of WriteOnIt. Take images of just about anything applicable, and add them to Playboy, Playgirl, Time, Rolling Stone or Wired. Along with an image, you can even come up with your creative caption to add. You could definitely have some fun with this one. I’ve done my best to represent MakeUseOf on their future Wired cover.

Although WriteOnIt doesn’t have a lot of hidden treasures, its simplicity and ease of use make it a great place when you’d like to create something for a quick laugh. Whether you’re trying to poke some fun at a friend or make someone famous (or infamous) for a short period of time, this website should be one at the top of your list.

Go check out some of the latest entries, or maybe some of the more popular items. You’ll get a better idea of what fun there’s to be had.

What do you think? What other photo and art websites can you create a great laugh at?

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We also covered this area in 6 quick ways to jazz up your photos.  Varun also recently covered AndreaMosaic.

But if you have a large number of images stored locally, and you run Windows, then Foto-Mosaik just might be a better bet for you.

A photo mosaic, just in case I’m racing ahead, is an image made from tiny copies of a lot of your other images. All will become clear.

But first you obviously need to go ahead and download and install the application.

Once it’s installed, you then need to add a large (the larger the better) number of images to the database Foto-Mosaic needs to do its work.

Click on Add pictures, and name the database something useful. You can also change the folder used to store the database if you wish. Click Next.

Foto-Mosaic can extract the necessary images from pictures of movies. We’re sticking with pictures here. Next.

Browse to the images you want to use. In my case I’ve taken the folder that contains my screensaver images. I’ve also told it to use any subfolders it finds there. Don’t mess with the resolution settings this time around. Click on Show Preview even though it slows things down. Next.

Your chosen images will flash by one by one in the preview window…

… and progress will be shown down below. If you have a lot of images, or they are very large, you might need a coffee. For those of you who are numbers geeks, the process averaged 4 frames/second, and the 12,000 images produced a database of 370MB.

Two more things…

First, you need to browse to the image you’re creating the mosaic from. This is the image from which the software is going to build a new picture. Then you need to tell Foto-Mosaik where to put the result.

I used an image I have on Flickr, but at a higher resolution locally:

With a detailed section consisting of the man’s head and shoulders:

Then click Next yet again…

and select the database you just created. Would you believe Next?

Time for some options. The first is the number of tiles to use. The more the better, within reason.

The second option is the orientation of the resulting image. It should be the same as the original image normally.

The third option is the size of the tiles to use. The defaults are a good place to start.

The last option is how many times to use the same tile. You can experiment later, but stay with the default of 5 for now.

Umm… Next!

A number of analysis steps take place, and then the final image is constructed.

This next option determines how much of the image is made of the tiles, and how much is overlaid by the original image. I left that off for now, but you can adjust the slider back and forth and hit the Preview button to see the difference it makes.

Next again, for the last time.

The image has been built, and you can close Foto-Mosaik. Just for a change of pace, click Close.

If you browse in Windows explorer to the location you chose for the image, you can open it and take a close look.

My first result looked like this:

A closer view revealed a fairly grainy attempt.

I adjusted the number of tiles from 1,000 to 10,000, and the results were much more acceptable, though the resulting file was accordingly rather large.

The details are still pretty bizarre.

Just because it was so much fun, I then re-ran the same process with the repetition option set to 100, instead of 5.

Obviously your results will depend entirely on your raw material.

So, how did you go? If you gave it a try, how about uploading the result somewhere, and posting a link to it?

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“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” -George Bernard Shaw

Of course art can be found online if you open your eyes and follow the signs. Below are some pointers and discoveries I made.

Photography

Photos have been a way to capture delicate moments of history, everyday life, extraordinary details or impressions since the early 19th century. I recently introduced 10 Stunning Photo Blogs displaying the regular works of contemporary photographers.

Here I would like to share an art installation showing 178 people passing a spot on a bridge in Berlin over the course of 20 days. The installation is called “We’re All Gonna Die – 100 meters of existence“.

Video & Music

One of the greatest places to look for contemporary art online are video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Film is the youngest type of art and probably the one that currently enjoys the most attention. I found it incredibly difficult to pick pure sound files, so I combined video and music for the combination of both.

Below are three examples of extraordinary video/music compositions that deserve to be called art.

The first one is a music video for a song from Oren Lavie called Her Morning Elegance. Reminds me a little of Peter Gabriel. Incredible piece!

The second one is a video of Carina Round sitting in her apartment and playing a song to the beat of droplets of water dripping form the ceiling into a bucket. Ingenious and beautiful!

This last video is a piece I discovered browsing randomly. It pretty much relies on the same technique as the first video, but the canvas is the city of Berlin. The pictures were assembled by samuelle3, a Spanish artist whose website will be featured below as well. But first watch his wonderful piece OUROBOROS.

Animation

Animations technically fall into the video category, but I wanted to give them a little extra exposure. A fantastic website to discover animations is aniBoom and I discovered the site via the artist Trevor Piecham who has his animation 15 Steps hosted there.

Art.VideoSift

If you enjoyed the videos above and want to discover more artistic films from all different sources, check out Art.VideoSift, a website where members can “sift” through videos and vote for what they like, i.e. Digg for videos. Users can not only vote on videos, but can also create playlists of their favorite videos and interact with other members. The British Comedy playlist is the number one voted on the site.

Websites

The Lens Zero, nothing, the nothing that is… …at any time. An online art installation created by Lee Lewis. Did you capture the message?

If you enjoyed sam3’s video, you may want to see more of his work. Sam3’s website reveals a great collection of art installations, wall paintings and drawings.

This post is of course limited and only shows a small selection of what may be found online. What is art to you, where do you find it and how do you enjoy it most? Please enlighten us!

Picture credits: thanx

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Design inspiration sites help you refresh your concepts. You look at the work of the best designers, and incorporate – not copy – those concepts into your own. There are tons of websites and blogs that showcase creative design content, but here are some that actually specialise at the task. Here are some of my favorite sites to get inspiration and ideas for webdesign and other design projects.

FaveUp

One of my favourite design sites, Faveup features categories for logos, business cards, flash websites and CSS websites. The submissions are hand picked by the staff, which ensures that only the best of designs get through. Seriously, there’s no junk in here. The site itself is pleasant to look at, with minimal ads and interruptions (although a bit of a pain to navigate). From the day I discovered it, FaveUp has stayed in my bookmarks.

Web Creme

If designing websites is your thing, you’re going to love WebCreme. The site provides a daily dose of websites that reeks of quality. These are not concept sites but real websites that are designed by professionals.

Web Creme also has a pleasant design of its own, with ads tastefully placed so as to not interrupt your great enlightenment!

Logo Pond

For logo design ideas, look no further than Logo Pond. Featuring an extremely large user base, constantly fed with logos. The quality control isn’t as tight, but most of the logos that come through are solid. You can even hire designers or buy logos directly from the site.

DesignFLAVR

If Photoshop, Illustrator or one of these graphic editors is your kind of application, DesignFLAVR is your kind of site. While it includes CSS and Flash website categories, its main content revolves around digital art, advertising, photo manipulation and such.

The artwork isn’t necessarily done by professionals, but it’s a lot better than weeding through hundreds of amateur submissions on DeviantArt. The site is updated regularly with decent quality content.

I Love Typography

What is design without type? Typography is a means of communicating with the viewer, spelling out the words we speak. Started by graphic designer John Boardley just over a year ago, the I Love Typography blog has taken the design world by storm. iLT features a brilliant site design, well written articles and is a great resource for finding type used in the most unique ways.

The site will also prove to be an excellent font resource for your design needs. You might also want to take a look at these free font download catalogues.

That completes my creative fodder. What remains is of course, putting it all to practice. What is your regular stop for design inspiration?

Photo Credit : I’m Your Pusher

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This post has two goals in mind: first, it lists a few interesting sources, some that offer photographs that are simply beautiful or quirky, while others are pertinent to events or offer cultural insights. The second goal is to challenge the reader to share with others their finds, ranging from the obvious to the under-appreciated.

Before we proceed, a word of caution: while the sites mentioned here are both interesting and artistic, be warned that not all the content on them may be safe for work.

Flickr’s “Last 7 Days Interesting” Set

It would be sacrilege to speak of photography on the internet without mentioning Flickr, and some might contend (though I do not) that the list can even end right here. The above is a screenshot of Flickr’s page of interesting pictures from the last 7 days. The page can be refreshed to display different subsets of photographs that are almost all reliably worthy of viewing.

Alternative ways to explore Flickr include Flickr Groups, or any of a number of Flickr content showcase sites like FlickRiver, an AIR application called DestroyFlickr (don’t let the name scare you, the authors intent is anything but!), RSS feeds from Flourish (Flickr offers its own RSS feeds, of course), or a Flickr widget from WidgetBox.

Other sites, such as Photo-Eye offer sumptuous visual galleries of professional and artistic photography that are well worth your time.

DeviantART

DeviantART is an old (and favourite) name for chronic wallpaper hunters and admirers of digital art. Also available from this “community of artists” are collections of impressive photographs that are categorised into Still Life, Street, Humorous and other sections.

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture

A few times each month the Boston Globe presents in its “The Big Picture” web pages, collections of some of the most amazing photographs that range from natural wonders to political events. The page includes an RSS feed, a comments section, and archives are also available.

Views of the News

Sure you scoffed at “the MSM” (MainStream Media, for the uninitiated) during the US election season, but now that that’s all settled, you can quietly return to their online offerings, since many of their websites offer interesting multimedia, including slideshows that provide a pictographic equivalent of current events and news.

The New York Times multimedia page includes photo slideshows, interactive features, audio slide shows, and a Pictures of the Day section.

The German newspaper Spiegel provides a section called “Picture This” (clever!?) updated daily with interesting pictures, typically from Europe.

Time Magazine’s website includes a Photo Essays section that includes sections similar to other such sites, sorting pictures by day, week and year. Also of interest is their “Graphics” section with, well you might have guessed it, graphics highlighting various bits of data (e.g: 5 Truths About Health Care in America). One recent Photo Essay offers a haunting look at The Remains of Detroit.

The BBC gets in on the act with their In Pictures offering the now familiar temporal categories, as well as Audio Slideshows and user contributed content.

Its brethren, the Times Online (broken down by region and kind) and The Guardian (including this cheerful Flickr set that documents the recession) too offer similar photo galleries.

And then there’s Tumblr and Google Maps Sightings

In the last two years, the micro-blogging (or perhaps more accurately, tumblelog) site Tumblr has attracted photography and picture buffs whose posts include their own snapshots as well as interesting pictures found elsewhere. One contributor you will find infinitely resourceful in teasing out the most intriguing and amusing pictures from the nooks and crannies of the internet as well as the real world is Szymon Błaszczyk, author of the Inspire me, now! blog:

So… what are you lookin’ at?    What online photo sources feed your fetish?

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With the rise of the internet came the ability for everyone and anyone to self-publish. ‘Webcomics’ is a term that came to refer to any cartoon published on websites and archives.

While many conventional cartoons are also published on websites like Comics.com, Webcomics developed a unique and definable style which differentiates them from print media comics.

To give you a sample of some popular Webcomics I’ve chosen just 5 which are my favourites. Don’t get too worked up over me omitting your favourite comic, it was hard narrowing it down and there were quite a few more I would have liked to put in.

Dinosaur Comics

Dinosaur comics is a WebComic that has also made itself into print media and a selection of strips have even been published in book form.

The format consists of just one set of 6 panels which contain exactly the same art each day but are accompanied by a different series of dialogue.

The characters consequently remain consistent throughout the series; T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus. Occasionally other characters will interact with T-Rex but only through dialogue and stay off panel.

A Softer World

It’s hard to ever truly explain a Softer World. It’s humorous, sometimes, even when you’re not sure why. It’s thought provoking, which isn’t always a good thing and often it’s just plain disturbing.

Every strip contains three panels displaying one photograph by Emily Horne and several captions by Joey Comeau. It’s released three times a week and one book of selected comics have been published.

On the Softer World website hover your cursor over each cartoon for an additional sentence which often provides the text what could be a 4th panel.

Garfield minus Garfield

Barely 6 months old Garfield minus Garfield is already gaining rapid popularity and success and has been featured in numerous publications such as Time and Rolling Stone.

“Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.”

In fact Garfield creator Jim Davis likes the idea so much he’s even publishing a book juxtapositioning the originals against the modified ones.

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”

Possibly the first original idea to come out of Garfield for 20 years.

Gaping Void: Cartoons on the Back of Business Cards

I don’t really know if this is a ‘web-comic’ as such, it’s published on a website so that is good enough.

Hugh Macleod draws cartoons on the back of business cards and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.

In recent times he seems to have branched out a lot more and does giant squiggly patterns to sell to New Yorkers to hang in their apartments. He also wrote an incredible article on “how to be creative” which is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read.

He posts his business card cartoons on his blog as well as his work in progress and his thoughts on technology and marketing in general.

ToothPaste for Dinner

A minimalist hand-drawn WebComic consisting of single self-contained panels which cover strange, ironic and surreal topics.

Do you know of any good webcomics that I have missed out that you would like to recommend? If so, post the URL in the comments and let us know why you like it! Or maybe you have your own webcomic you would like to show us?

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.

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Wordle is a unique web application that lets you specify a RSS feed or a specific block of text. Wordle then uses that information to create a word cloud. Don’t know what a word cloud is?

The Wikipedia definition is:

A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

I am sure you have see them before. These clouds are usually on blogs, they show that sites tags, allowing you to click on them and see that specific topic.

Here is a quick one I generated from askTheAdmin.com’s feed.

No big deal, pretty ordinary right? Now here is where Wordle comes in. I put the same AskTheAdmin.com feed into Wordle and it generated this:

I know, I know… You are saying to yourself

“Sure it looks cool but how the hell am I going to get addicted to that?”

Maybe if all Wordle could do was RSS feeds it wouldn’t be so cool in my book (Yeah it would!) but here is where we can make it fun for anyone. First you should ask yourself “what do I like?”. Do you like music? So then lets throw some song lyrics in there. Let’s use everyone’s Rick-Rolling favorite jam… Never going to give you up by the legendary Rick Astley.

Not doing it for ya? How about a little Sir-Mix-A-Lot and baby got back?

Are you feeling it now? There are lots of customizable options like color, font and my personal favorite Randomize. Now how could I do a MakeUseOf article without including the Make Use Of wordle?

I couldn’t! So here it is:

The possibilities are endless! But beware before you know it hours will be gone and you will find yourself inputting stuff from the strangest places. You can find any song lyrics by Googling the song name + lyrics, you can find the text from many books online on Google as well and of course Wordle takes any URL and will search for its RSS or Atom feed. Bigger feeds take longer to process and the outcome is always pretty fricking sweet!

Want to do something artsy fartsy?

Print out your Wordle and you have an instant collage! Make one for that special geek in your life. You know she will treasure it. (As long as the subject is something that she digs and you don’t pick say a Midget Tossing Website!)

(By) Karl L. Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry who wears many hats and changes in telephone booths. Karl mostly uses his powers for good and the occasional hysterical prank. Get your geek on & follow his geeky antics at askTheAdmin.com today.

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