l-dopa

Human Vending Machines (found in a Russian-language livejournal community by way of geisha). Клас!

This exceptionally well-designed Ikea ad succeeds on every level of advertising — it’s gorgeously photographed, has an intuitive user interface, conveys the message effectively (”Ikea has beautiful kitchens to fit any lifestyle”), and it’s overall fun to interact with. Why, I’m off to buy some junk from Ikea right now.

~jeff

You know, it takes a lot to get me excited about blank CD-Rs, but these guys have got me excited about blank CD-Rs. Arty!

~jeff

Why didn’t the metal guys in high school realize that Metal was about the gayest thing available? Anyway, the Museum of Bad Album Covers is an extraordinary collection of not only oiled men in leather banana hammocks, but all manner of ill-advised album art. I bet you like, it, don’t you, fag? You like it, don’t you? Homo!

I’ve met people that talk like this. Seriously, it’s awful. On a side note, Neil McAllister, the creator of this strip, is a really great guy. A while back, I asked him what comic lettering font he used for this and it turns out it was a font he made himself — then he sent it to me and I’ve been using it ever since. Thanks, Neil, you rock.

~jeff

What a beautiful piece of science fiction art. That guy’s only 43 cm tall.

Holy smokes — Lokesh does it again. I can’t wait to implement this set of scripts on missmuddypaw.com.

~jeff

Even Ubuntu is going to ship with a Mac OS X style abstract background (in SVG format no less!). Although they seem incredibly trendy, they’ve been around a while, and to be annoyingly exact, around the time of the first iBook, Mac OS 9 shipped with a whole bunch of them. Now they’re everywhere, and here’s how to make one from scratch using the copy of Adobe Illustrator you totally paid for. In the same vein, Fyre looks pretty sweet too.

~jeff

Processing: an open-source, beginning programming environment for multimedia graphic and sound design on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Similar to breve, it’s capable of some truly stunning imagery.

~jeff

Way cool Japanese art.

~jeff

Moo.fx is a nifty little javascript library that creates a whole bunch of those cool sliding and fading text effects that are so damn hip now in web design. I’m using it for a bunch of things I’m doing these days, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand how it worked until I checked out this lovely walkthrough and started implementing and modifying the example code; so if you can wrap your head around that, you’ll be well on your way.

~jeff

Super-lame article in Wired about artist Joshua Davis makes him sound like the digital design equivalent of Itchy & Scratchy’s “Poochie” (“At 34, he’s a skateboarding ex-cocaine addict whose body is tattooed almost as thoroughly as Tommy Lee’s. He seeks confrontation at every turn. OMGWTFLOL!*”), but there’s no doubt the guy has skills. So much so, in fact, that he’ll sell you a CD full of the random files on his hard drive — and seriously, I think it would almost be worth purchasing.

Make sure to check out the gorgeous generative art of once-upon-a-forest.com — cool interface, with exceptional use of color and line.

~jeff

* I added that last part.

Really neat image gallery code, with automatic embiggening on hover.

~jeff

While playing around with building a web interface for my deeply closeted media server, I uncovered a nifty how-to that lets you send osascript commands — essentially, AppleScript commands executed on the command line — via php. This allowed me to create a web page which passes AppleScript commands to iTunes which then streams music to my stereo: pretty cool.

The downside? Welp, long story short, to be able to fire off AppleScript commands via php exec statements, you’ve got to run Apache as “you”; normally, Apache runs as an unprivileged user called “www”. Setting up Apache to run as “you” is pretty unsecure, even by my horribly loose definition of secure; there’s got to be a better way to integrate AppleScript and the web…

~jeff

Wonderful set of free, broken and misprinted fonts downloadable from here; the link was gleaned from this very nice list here.

~jeff