I love Esty, and I love these hand cut-out donut stickers with little faces on a splash of frosting. (more…)
The French Paper Company makes handfuls of colorful paper that would make any scrapbooker / cardmaker / colorliker jealous. I especially like the cool designs in the Pop-Ink Patter-Paper line. (They’ve got plenty of bright & neutral plain papers, too.) (more…)
KNOCK KNOCK is a new(ish) design company that makes both funny and useful pads, stickies, folders, & more. I happen to think the pads are a great example of design at its best: organized, functional, and aesthetically pleasing.
As a former psych student and a mental illness knowledge bank, I happen to love the “Mood Tracker” pad (above). In fact, why not throw some good design and humor into shitty situations? I know the pad is glib, but shrinks often have patients with depression or bipolar disorder track their moods, but usually on a crappy, black and white, poorly designed charts copied from the middle of a textbook. Knock Knock’s well-designed, simple, colorful and easy-to-read pads show that pretty things can also be useful and useful things don’t have to be ugly. (more…)
DELARGE offers printable stickers (made to print on specific Avery paper sizes, a very convenient feature), downloadable posters, fonts, and wallpaper all for free. It’s a more urban feel than I usually go for in my graphic selections, but it’s well done and I don’t know about you, but I once spent two days trying to track down some classic “HELLO my name is” stickers from places like Staples, but it was DELARGE who offered up the goods in the end. (more…)
Whether or not MPBooks knew of the pun when creating their Novella Series, these little books really do show off The Art — graphically speaking — of the Novella. Each book contains only three colors (one of them very bright, the other two being black and white), one font (all caps), and no games, these novellas mean what they say and say what they mean. How perfect to select such a straightforward cover for such a (well, compared to the novel) short form. ($9 on Amazon.com or the MPBooks website)
The Poetry Foundation, on its well-designed, graphically lovely little web-site, has a handful of free poem posters (”For the Fridge”) that you can download as pdfs and then print and stick anywhere. You will instantly look well-read and graphically astute. (Or, you know, just bookish and weird.) (more…)
Neenah provides paper for any printing kind of printing fun, and offers lots of free swatch books to play with and dream about. The site also offers free “Classic Crest Identity Libraries” (get one here) which is a little paper case full of reference cards for designers and proof readers (check out the Proof Readers’ Marks card above). They also have cards featuring Fold Types, Binding Types, State Abbreviations and more. What’s fun about this freebie is that it’s useful, well-designed, and printed on very nice paper. Yays!
Pulitzer prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is, actually, amazing. That’s beside the present point (but worth mentioning anyway). The “Amazing Website of Kavalier and Clay” documents some of this book’s many amanzing and not-so-amazing covers.
Print Magazine recently featured an article called “Cover Girls” about Young Adult Novel makeovers for each new generation of YA readers. Of course the re-design of YA novels makes lots of sense, since that age group is swiftly changing and very focused on cool. But why does Kavalier & Clay need to be redesigned dozens of times in the last mere eight years?
