Now in the midst of chaos going on in my life right now, I’m ever more in need of inspiration…not just for work, but just the spark to want to get up each morning to deal with the new day’s challenges. I know, that sounds bleak right?  Well, I do what I can to keep going I guess….I have to!

Anyway, I revisited an old post I made a couple years back and stumbled across this creative little festival trailer made by this group Strukt. Extra little trivia I liked was that it was all shot using a Canon 7D.

Here’s a collection of some great design rules that should be considered when doing web-design. But a few of these are good rules for any artwork in general. A few of these we’re even going to cover in class… (via 3.7 Designs)

So here’s another fun typeface infographic that I stumbled across this morning. Remember the Periodic Table one a few months back?

These are done with a bit of fun and facetiousness of course, but I like infographics like these because not only might they demonstrate fonts you haven’t consider using before, they also suggest fonts you kinda want to avoid because everyone’s poking fun at it. (Scribble via Gizmodo)

OK, in the world of cool business card ideas, here’s one that’s definitely jumped a few notches up my list. Apparently Tamiya, the company that does those cool modeling sets, has a business card that you can actually pull apart and build with it. Racecar, airplane, boats, etc.

Only problem is that once people pull apart your card, I think your contact information is lost. But oh the fun I’d have with this!  (via GeekOSystem)

The words of the day are “Free Fonts” AAAAAAHHH /end my best Pee Wee Herman impersonation.

You know, I don’t think I’ve EVER had the opportunity to use a handwritten script font in a project, which either means I’m unlucky in my projects, or I haven’t been creative enough. But either way, it’s nice to see there are some available options to use that won’t cost and arm and a leg. There are some nice ones on the list that look remarkably like some of the expensive fonts I see in the Adobe font collection. Hmmm. (via WebDesignerWall)

Yet another collection of inspirational ideas I stumbled across today. This one being focused on typography on business cards. There’s a few I kinda like here…especially the letterpress ones I don’t see too many people using them here.

I’ve been playing around a few times with UV coat print lately where you have gloss effects printed over non-gloss paper…but seeing as how many people are doing that now on this list, I’m thinking maybe I should try other things.  Maybe that’s becoming a cheesy trend?  (via Best Design Options)

On the subject about taxes, Gizmodo made mention this morning about this great poster created by an artist named Jess Bachman. It shows a visual record of where all your tax dollars are going with the biggest chunks represented by bigger circles.

When I think of taxes I’m reminded of that one scene from Godfather 2 where the Don in the white suit goes around to each shop collecting protection money. This way the Gov’t takes my money the same way but they don’t look half as cool doing it. (Death and Taxes 2010 via Gizmodo)

Last week a friend of mine posted a tweet from the BBC that demonstrated the level of work they went through trying to come up with a new website look.

Take a peek…it’s pretty interesting the level of detail and work that they went through. Now the next time you approach a designer and ask for something “easy”…keep in mind that it’s a lot of work to achieve that.

Personally, I think it was a little overkill in this case. The end result, while nice and clean, wasn’t something that floored me. Not that a news organization like the BBC needs to have fantastic graphic design, but I guess I think the end-result could have been accomplished with a lot less planning (get to the part where they’re counting the pixel grid?)

I get it, sometimes when you’re working with a team, this level of planning is necessary to get everyone working uniformly, but having seen many column and grid websites before it’s not like they couldn’t have based their grids off of any number of pre-made CSS templates and just built from that?

Well, in any case, it looks like it was a successful project and I love reading about how creative teams go through their process.

Stumbled across another pretty good design-focused website today called Abduzeedo. Here you can find links for inspirational material, neat Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials and even wallpaper for your computer desktop.

Quick glance at some of their tutorial collections I was pretty impressed and inspired. I’ve been a bit bored lately by some of the tutorials I’ve been seeing on some of my magazine subscriptions…it’s like you see the end result and think, “why would I ever want to do that?”

I’m not the only one out there that collects beautiful work out there for our own inspiration. Here I landed on the work of Shaz Madani. In this case it was a campaign for Arctic Paper…using paper materials while expressing environmental thinking. Again with the pop-outs and cut-outs. (Hmm…I must find a project where my client will let me cut-out things like this!)

Anyway, it’s inspirational work. Stumbled across this work on another French graphic designer’s blog at Graphic-Exchange. Great finds there too!