Dave who?
Who is Dave Campbell and why is he linking to my site? Is he important or something?
p.s. Just keep telling people you’ll be back in 6 months or so. (Really, I plan on coming back. I swear!)
Look Over Here
I’m now posting on:
Shit on the Internet - Daily Doses of Shit on the Internet
The Madness of the Heart - A Hate A Day
Back in the Saddle Again
Hey! Remember me? I’ve been gone for a while, but I hope you do.
Near-Mint Heroes has been around off and on since March 2004 which makes it four years old soon. To celebrate I thought I would rethink both the blog and my busy schedule to offer what few readers I have left some regular content. We haven’t had “regular” content on this site in a , so that’s quite a present.
Anyway, weekly posting will start soon, as well as categorized links and a streamlined archive. So there’s your heads up. Don’t be suprised next week when posts start popping up again in my RSS feed.
Quick Links
25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs
100 legal sources for free fonts
Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?
99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
How to disarm 10 difficult client observations/requests
13 Steps to Optimize Your Website
Things Magazine on Design Classics
These little exercises would be far more challenging if the participants were not allowed to select anything designed in the past decade, thus forcing them to seek out true ‘design classics’ that have melded gracefully and purposefully with the chaff-rich wheat of the consumer cycle. In other words, what is usually described as ‘good design’ has a fast-decaying half-life, fading quickly from the public view with only a slim chance of being ressurected as a ‘design classic’ many years down the line.
Faced with this potentially catastrophic decline in reputation, many designers appear to be creating ‘design classics’ straight out of the box, objects steeped in references and knowing winks, with cute names and attention-seeking materials. But what goes around, comes around. Just as that thrift-shop staple, the artfully esoteric glob of coloured glass, perhaps in the shape of a fish, has skyrocketed in value in the past five years, so the stringy and bendy chairs of the noughties will ultimately end up being defined as a ‘classic’ in some way. And the word will lose a little bit more of whatever meaning it might once have had.
The links are great, but I always enjoy the commentary that goes along with them. When I get back from my honeymoon expect more of that on this site as well.
Yep…still a few links left in there.
Wilco UniPo! Aren’t they cute?
All known bodies in the Solar System larger than 200 miles in diameter.
Plushie Chairs. I’m not sure it looks that comfortable, but it looks cool.
Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life
Darth Vader Blues is the funniest thing I’ve seen done with Star Wars in a long time.
Wristcutters: A Love Story Wtf? A dark comedy/love story about suicidal people in the afterlife. I don’t know why I want to see it, but I do.
45 Years of Design and Art Direction Annual Covers
Sites that don’t let you choose your own browser suck. Why would you eliminate 80% of the people coming to your site? I have four browsers installed on my computer, including Firefox, but I don’t want to have to switch from one to another just to see one site. It’s just bad business.
God these are horrifying. 7 of The Most Awful Social Ads Ever Made
Adobe hires the co-inventor of image resize technology. This is great news.
My God! It’s full of links!
Tool For Previewing CSS Type Styles.
Nice List of Good PDF Magazines.
60 Places to Find Design Inspiration
Create Seamless Striped Backgrounds
Web Design Tactics to Use When You’re Stuck
Computerlove needs to be added to the blogroll.
15 Examples of Good Web Typography
Avi Green has got to be the craziest comic book blogger out there.
Photos of an Old Type Specimen Book
The 17 Sides of a Cultural Identity
Combine Lolcats and Post Secret and you get…
This looks like a good alternative to cafe press.
I wonder if this actually makes the cats sound like lolcats.
The Beginners Guide to Lockpicking
What would the world be like without us?
The Allure of the Underground City
Ten Podcasts Apple doesn’t want you to know about?
Color Inspiration from Paintings
8 Points for Better E-mail Relationships
Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design
16 Best-Loved Font Bits In Web Design
Free Vectors for Non-Commercial Usage
The Best Way to Comprehend Text on the Web
How to turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller…
A Few Thousand Science Fiction Magazines
Ever Want to Know What Font a Specific Company Uses?
Planned Parenthood Comic Book on Birth Control
Interesting Article on Loot Farmers in MMORPGs
Handbound Blank Journals Made From Old Books
Dazed Digital’s 50 Creative Endeavours on the Web Today
Old Video Game Production Drawings Now Up For Auction
Are Font Foundries Embracing DRM?
Photographs of signs that transcend their objectivity to reveal our humanity
Schools aren’t teaching the Classics Anymore?
Calculating the value of prostitution
The 30 Strangest Deaths in History
You Got Your Picture in My Logo
All about design, errrrrr, and other stuff.
Marketing and Selling Design
Five things all clients want to know.
Questions to ask when choosing an ecommerce package.
Website redesign is a bad idea? I’d say no it’s not a bad idea if it’s done right. The client has to change how they handle the website when the design changes as well. It’s the design firms job to explain that. Also, some sites really do need to be updated. If you built a site 5 years ago, sure it “works”, but will it bring new customers in? Not likely.
Before the Design (Inspiration and Process)
A step by step look into the design of “The Future Of” brand
What’s in a title? Are we designers or developers?
Designing with CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity)
The design process behind stopdesign’s CSS Zen Garden entry.
Blasting the Myth of the Fold The key is to keep the fold in the back of your mind, but don’t let it restrict you. Actually, better yet, keep the audience in mind and you’ll know if you can safely break the fold or not.
Chip Kidd tells Esquire readers How to Make People Buy Books
50 Design Manifestos to celebrate 50 issues of Icon Magazine.
Design Questions Design starts with a question, not an answer.
More of the same. Justifying design decisions.
10 Designer’s Checkpoints To Be Aware Of God, Smashing Magazine is such a good site. If you don’t believe me, then you need to look at their Best of July post. I guarantee you’ll find something interesting.
10 Lists Every Designer Should Bookmark
Zeldman talks about writing for the web and staying creative
Top 50 Inspirational Websites for Designers
My First Rule Of Writing Group Writing Project
Design Production (Tricks and Tools)
A typeface cheat sheet on mixing fonts.
20 Best License Free Official Fonts
40 web-typography resource tools.
The 80 Best Photoshop Text Effects on the Web and how to create them.
Scrollovers I’m going to have to try that.
Improving the look of your search boxes with background images
30 CSS based blogs with grid designs
This CSS cachebuster script will come in handy when developing sites.
8 tips on combining different typefaces.
6 Keys to Understanging CSS Layouts
Design in the World (Reviews and Objects)
The Road to Clarity - Redesigning America’s Roadsigns
Hallmonitor is a blog that reviews album artwork.
The Font Clock is a clock with 12 different fonts that display randomly. I really like it, but the small one is almost $400.
25 celebrity artists, each design a deckchair canvas
Beautiful Social Networks. No that’s not an oxymoron.
Design inspiration from concert posters.
Analysis of 200 Business Homepages
A gallery of book trade labels.
A Flickr set of cool looking shop signs.
Miscellanea
A portrait of Marlon Brando created from the Godfather script.
An awesome flip clock screensaver. I’m using it at home and at work.
Slate asks, “Remember when cheating at video games was harmless fun?”
Every instance of the phrase “is the new” encountered from various sources in 2005.
Cooking with the real Christopher Walken and Cooking with a Christopher Walken impressionist.
Comic strip artists draw their characters blindfolded.
In their own words, “Quiltsrÿche turns traditional quilting on its ear with modern heirloom quilts that look like they were made by your metal-loving, half-blind Grandma.”
The Marvel Guide to Collecting Comics
Click the images for larger versions (pdf and cleaned up scans coming soon.).
A Few Links
Book Coverage
Art Deco Inspired Decorative Book Bindings
The original designs for these decorative book bindings incorporate figurative and geometric representations and rhythms that are strikingly realized when seen as significantly larger images. Originally an expression of applied art “La Canne de Jaspe” by Pierre Legrain uses pure geometric forms, to create a strikingly beautiful abstract image.
A Look Into The Past
Yesterday’s Papers covers all sorts of old papers from days gone by. Children’s books, adventure stories, women’s magazine’s, just about anything is fair game, but it’s always interesting. It’s not just about the work either, it’s also about the people who wrote the stories.
My Code is Prettified!
Smashing Magazine offers us a way to make our code as nice as our designs.
Everything is Better With a Trampoline
The band zZz demonstrates different video editing techniques using a trampoline.
So Change Things
…these things are technically innovations, but they don’t feel that way to me. i loved you, 2001 internet, because you enabled people to create and communicate in ways that really meant something. i liked reading what my friends thought about their lives and about what was going on in the world. i liked reading what strangers had to say, too, as sometimes those strangers would become friends.
3 Tracks, 3 Different Stores?
Someone doesn’t like the Smashing Pumpkins new marketing technique. I’m inclined to agree.
Smashing Pumpkin Debacle. As an insult to fans, Billy Corgan decided to release 4 versions of his new cd. Only Target has the version of the CD with the title track. I-Tunes and Best Buy get a different track…
I Bet I Can Turn On The TV and See One Now
Videoville has a huge list of band cliches.
Speaking of Lists
Remember these? You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine! Good for Life! Dick and Jane is dead. History of Branding has more old avertising slogans ready for your perusal.
More to come…
The Future: Present and Past
Paleo-Future- A look into the future that never was
Retro Future- A site dedicated to collecting images from the past about the future.
The Institute for the Future’s Reports on such things as The Mobility Explosion, A Ten-Year Forecast, Innovation in the Urban Wilderness, and Intentional Biology.
The World Future Society- Publishers of The Futurist magazine.
The Sunday Times’ Chronicles of the Future series
The Future of the Book Blog- Examining the future fo the printed page.
Novelist David Brin writes about the near-future.
How long before superintelligence?- If Moore’s Law (Processing power doubles every 18 months) , Gilders’s Law (Bandwidth doubles every 12 months), and Metcalfe’s Law (Effectiveness increases exponentially with the number of connections) are true then I’m betting not too much longer.
Wired’s Things to Watch for in 2020
Wikipedia’s entry on Retro-futurism
A Boing Boing entry on a gallery of retrofutristic pictures.
Henry Jenkins on the retro future- An article on retro future ideas.
Transportation Futuristics- The future of transportation.
Disney’s Retro Future of Tomorrowland- A look into why the future stopped in 1977.
Helpful Articles for Bloggers
All you ever wanted to know about Copyright.
Kevin Church has a handy guide on how to increase your hits and google rank for your blog or website.
The 20 Best Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools
Free Legal Forms for Designers
My Old Art Signature
This is my old signature I used to put on all my drawings. Can you tell what it says and how it relates to my name? (Hint: It’s not my initials.)
Commenter Nobody figured it out in the first comment so I put up an animated gif with the answer.
Rip Hunter Notes
I planned on the DCUness of the Rip Universe to be nods to certain storylines in the comics.
“Command D” and “Damn Dirty Humans” is a two parter that introduces one of Rip’s cast, Kamandi, but he’s all grown up now as it takes place in the future of the DCU Kamandi that we know. We explore that time for a while and get into a bit of trouble as “Command D” ends with Apes charging at the group firing lasers at them.
The next episode starts as they make it back to the Time Ship and travel back in time to find the Ape Civilization that was just attacking them, but relatively peaceful. That is it’s peaceful until the assasination of Solivar. Someone or something seems to be manipulating events behind the scenes and Keone tags along to find out who killed his father and led the apes down the path that apparently ends in violence. There’s tension between Kam and Keone due to Kam’s future and the way the apes treated him there.
The next episode “Dying to Live Again” involves Rip getting injured and the only way he can be helped is if the group travels into the past to find a young Rip to help. This is an origin episode. Oh, and they’re are mummies as it takes place in Ancient Egypt.
So it’s the DCU, but it’s not the DCU. Sound good?
“8 Things People Don’t Know About Me”
1. I might have an actual paying job writing comic book reviews soon if things work out. More details on this later of course.
2. I haven’t bought any comics in a month and a half after years (since I was 8 or 10 at least) of spending almost $40-$50 a week on them. I’m making the switch to trades instead of monthly comics.
3. Near-Mint Heroes started out as an idea for a web comic, much like The Rack is today. It wouldn’t have been as good. I kept the name and trashed everything else for the blog. I was even a character in a webcomic for a while at a site called Visionary Ink.
4. I’ve designed an adult site as well as a church site in the same week. Am I going to hell?
5. I was almost named Shane Oliver Bailey. Think about those initials for a second. Luckily my parents were kind.
6. I’m going to have Jaguars pacing back and forth behind my wedding cake at the wedding. How cool is that?
7. I once had every “halo” that Nine Inch Nails produced, but got rid of them for a girlfriend that was very religious. That was a mistake.
8. I’ve lost 25 lbs in the last month or so and plan on losing more if I can. I’d like to get down to about 250lbs. That should be an ok goal for my 6′2″ self.
Plok tagged me. I’m not tagging others. If you want to participate then feel free.