Skin Alphabet

This is kinda nasty but its something creative!

alfabet in huid

My New Ffffound Ffffriend!

Ffff**k! What a simple and beautiful idea to capture and display images you come across in various internet wanderings. I tend to pull images off of sites and place them into my ‘wallpaper’ folder, which then becomes a designy screensaver. My biggest complaint about my own system is the lack of metadata in the image: I don’t know where it came from once I have copied it onto my drive. Ffffound fixes this problem, creating a social medium for bookmarking images. The EXTRA bonus is the recommendations and associated images that come with every picture. You can easily spend hours meandering through hundreds (soon to be thousands and then millions) of images. I will be first in line when this comes out of private beta.

Ffffound (with 4 F’s) describes itself thusly:

FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

Look for a new wave of sites to be named with four consonants now, instead of missing vowels. I’m serious!

Link via Daniel Burka on Pownce.

Blackgle + NASA Night Launch = 1337

With Blackle.com you need to use Nasa Night Launch theme to make it match. Now you can feel like you are special and stuff.

Watch Watching: Top 25 New Faces

I feel like setting up a separate category just for watches. I would love to own every single watch on this list. Some are beautiful, some are technical marvels, some are insanely creative, some are useless, and some are all of the above. My favourite idea is the JITWatch that tells you how much time you need. It knows where you are, what’s next on your calendar, and how much time it will take to get there, even considering traffic. It looks a bit big and lab-experimental, but people used to say that about the cell phone too… If you just want cool design, the O-Ring Watch looks pretty hot in a Kubric 2001 kind of way. Prices range from $80 to $220,000.

Keeping Abreast of the Buzz in the Biz: My Not-So-Secret Weapons Revealed

Many of these sites have been mentioned on this blog, or even exist in the sidebar, but they are worth repeating. If you want or need to know more about global internet trends, then there are a few fun ways to put your finger on the pulse.

VIDEO:
What are people watching? What are people linking to? What are people talking about? Two sites do a very good job of covering this from two different perspectives. ViralVideoChart measures links, Videmeter measures views.
ViralVideoChart.com
Vidmeter.com

SEARCH:
People look for things that interest them. They have a specific intent in mind when they type words into a search engine. This stuff is gold, and both Yahoo and Google have interesting pages to track trends and cultural shifts.
Yahoo! Buzz
Google Zeitgeist

BLOGS:
Blogging makes the internet world turn. It is word-of-mouth in a rocketship. Knowing what people are talking about is the key to understanding them and what they really want. These sites are worth their weight in wit.
WTF [Where’s The Fire] by Technorati
BuzzFeed

We only feature movies, music, fashion, ideas, technology, and culture that are on the rise and worth your time. – BuzzFeed

ONLINE ADVERTISING:
There are a million ad blogs, but the best aggregation I have come accross for one stop shop-talk is the Ad Feed.
TheAdFeed.com

There. Now you know a few of my more obvious secret weapons. I’m going to have to dig a bit deeper next time…

Smashing Free Fonts

Smashing magazine puts together a list of 19 (21 actually) free fonts for download. Usually when you think of free fonts, it’s those shitty dirty deconstructed grunge knock-offs from the 90s. Or it’s another ‘hand writing’ font that’s missing most of the special characters. Well, not this list. These are premium fonts at a free-er than free price. $0.00. Go get ’em!


And while you’re on their blog, check out the amazing aggregate of web and design articles… stunning. Everything from the best Fonts of 2006, to WordPress Themes, CSS, Ajax, Design, Websites, Resources… honestly I don’t know how they can keep up with themselves. It’s going to take me a few years to wade through all their content.

The Ad Feed Launches Ultimate “Adgregator”

The Ad Feed is inspired by popURLs.com, a site that really does nothing more than pull in feeds from the most popular sites on the web. Ad Feeds aggregates the best of the Advertising blogs, sites, videos, print, and outdoor. It’s a convenient one-stop-ad-chop if you’re into that kind of thing, and we’re into that kind of thing.

Here’s a list of some of the sites they’ve pulled in:

Adage
Adweek
Adrants
Adfreak
Agenda Inc.
NY Times Business-Media
Adjab
Adverblog
Media Buyer Planner
Design Charts
MIT Advertising Lab
Clickz
Logic + Emotion
PSFK
Adpulp
American Copywriter
Seth Godin
Beyond Madison Avenue
plus: Quotes, TV Spots, and Print Ads.

**phew**

They neglect, however, to include a few of my favourites:
Creative Juice
Adverbox
Billboardom
Banner Blog
Advertising Ourselves to Death

If any of you have the time to read all of these sites on a regular basis, you obviously don’t work in advertising.

Bookmarks

A few weeks back I asked people to send me their favorite online bookmarks. Well here they are. Some are useful, some are funny, and some are just plain wierd. But take a few minutes and see where your coworkers are spending their time. Oh, and feel free to keep adding to the list.

www.topleftpixel.com
www.smokinggun.com
www.laineygossip.com
www.ihaveanidea.org
www.babelfish.altavista.com/tr
www.quikbook.com
www.citizen-citizen.com
www.exactitudes.com
www.oneword.com
www.erwinolaf.com
www.blueballfixed.ytmnd.com
www.theonion.com
www.boingboing.net
www.engrish.com
www.happytreefriends.com
www.adrants.com
www.metaball.ca
www.adventuresofclover.blogspot.com
www.newsarama.com
www.aintitcool.com
www.pauseandplay.com
www.pitchforkmedia.com
www.newstoday.com
www.designiskinky.com
www.cynical-c.com
www.lounge72.com
www.tokyoplastic.com
www.drawn.ca

EDITOR’S NOTE: This list of links has been added to the sidebar under the title Paul’s Picks.