One of my favorite vintage design resources, Retrolounge, has links to numerous retro design, photograph and ephemera sites. Lots of fun to browse some of these ... and handy when you need ideas for a project that incorporates vintage type or styles.
Recently in Graphic Design Category
There's a nice collection of theme park maps from yesteryear at www.themeparkbrochures.net/mainmaps.html.
Here are a few examples:
An article about the value of features by Don Norman:
"Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven’t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person."
This is cool. An online services that make publishing your own magazine a breeze.
Take a look here:
http://magcloud.com/home
Notes about the first album cover. Designed by Alex Steinweiss, the first art director for Columbia Records, where he invented the concept of cover art.
"It looks exactly like a hardcover book when closed. Like they say, with any truly new medium the first thing people usually do is crank out simulacra of old, familiar media."
"One of the most important and hardest things to overcome when designing is to understand when the piece you are designing on is actually finished."
Interesting tutorial series at Just Creative site:
"In this University project we had to learn how to design a movie poster. We had to consider the role of imaging in a graphic design context and the task involved the conceptualisation, design and production of an original cinematic film poster."
http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/05/13/how-to-design-a-movie-poster-with-an-example/
Great list of design magazines that are freely available in online PDF versions. Get 'em here:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/04/22/inspirational-pdf-magazines/
Lots of interesting and handy information about design and Abode software:
Take a look through the gallery at PaulRand.com, a site devoted to the legendary designer:
http://www.paul-rand.com/gallery.shtml
And check out this great interview with Steve Jobs talking about working with Paul Rand to develop the Apple logo (about six minutes in length).
Vintage wallpaper patters at Veerle.com.
"There is a bit of a trend in interior design at the moment with the revival of the vintage wallpaper backgrounds from the sixties & seventies."
"It’s hard to imagine now, but during the record industry’s first decades of existence, music releases came packaged almost exclusively in plain brown wrappers ... But a talented, 23-year-old New Yorker named Alex Steinweiss would quickly change all that when he took a job with Columbia Records in the ’30s."
Handy techniques for preping screenshots for hi-res use.
A survey of lettering in Brooklyn by Paul Shaw:
"Last spring, in preparation for a talk on lettering at the Coney Island Museum, I surveyed as many Brooklyn neighborhoods as I could. During the months of March and April I managed to record lettering in roughly half of the borough."
6-part series on the Principles of Design at the Design Meltdown site:
http://designmeltdown.com/chapters/DesignPrinciples/
