Lately if you have been browsing the video sharing web sites and communities, you’ve seen a rise in stop-motion animated clips, from commercials to music videos and school projects. Stop-motion is simply frame-by-frame animation using still photos, with objects and/or actors moved incrementally between shots to create the illusion of movement. It’s an old medium, pre-dating the advent of modern motion picture and video cameras. And it can be pretty labor-intensive! But it also can produce some spectacular effects, as in the following set of some favorite (and mostly fairly recent) stop-motion shorts. Anything here to provide new ideas or inspiration to designers? I think plenty, but you be the judge.
1. KaBoom! by PES
This is the latest work by the amazing stop-motion film artist known as PES. If you haven’t come across PES before, enjoy!
We, as designers, need lots of inspiration daily to help us come up with great visual ideas.
For every new project, there is a research phase when we look into a great amount of visual information, be it design books, magazines, web sites, annuals and more. It is important to stay updated with the latest news and trends in the design world and we browse daily in search of new resources to keep us sharp and well documented.
If online there are thousands of designer’s web sites, archives, blogs, magazines and more to get inspired and learn from, offline there are only a few great magazines you can subscribe to and check out monthly at least, helping you being a better designer.
So here are 5 prestigious design and designer magazines you need to look into:
Wallpaper
Wallpaper covers all creative industries, from interior design to fashion and architecture and it is the best at this, offering lots of information and features.
Did you know that you can make the dead come back from the grave in your own home? Sure, it’s easy. You don’t need any fancy necromantic magic, radioactive waste, or goat’s blood. All you need is Photoshop, a portrait (by Faestock) and a texture of something rotting (in this case earth by Elisa Fox.)
Digging Up Deathly Pallor
Our model is the picture of health and that’s just unacceptable. After opening the first image, we’re going to Layer/Duplicate Layer. On top we will have a layer named “Background copy.” We click on the eye to the left of the top layer so we can see what we are doing beneath. We’re going to the original “Background” layer and go to Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Hue-Saturation. In order to get the greenish decaying vibe we need the Hue slider will be set at “+35,” Saturation will go to“-70” and Lightness will drop slightly to “-5.” (more…)
Because sometimes 2Ds are just not enough: Here’s a showcase of tutorials on designing, decorating and using 3D text. The collection includes a number of new tutorial posts, as well as some older classics. Most use Photoshop or Illustrator, and a few use Cinema 4D as well. Let me know if you have a great 3D text tutorial and I’ll add it to the list. Also included at the end is a new 3D text generator.
The right watch, necklace, or any other kind of jewelry can set off an outfit, make a person more noticeable and even give a window into an individual’s personality. In Photoshop, we can accessorize after the fact to set a mood, or to enhance a person’s apparent personality traits–or contrast them.
We’ll demonstrate how to realistically accessorize anyone by adding a sassy silver bracelet by Visualjenna-Stock to the wrist on this stock portrait by meglillyan. In order for our model to say it with silver, we first need to get that bracelet down to a size that will fit our portrait. We’ll go to Image/Image Size and set the width to 1000 pixels and the height to 750. (more…)
The good people at “Programming Blog” are spreading the word about my post yesterday on blog theft:
That’s a joke, as I hope is obvious. The entire blog theft post was stolen and republished at neurosoftware.ro/programming-blog, without permission or attribution. I’m looking forward to seeing this new one on their site as well.
Meanwhile there have been some changes to report overnight regarding the Sydney Australia blog scraper site affiliated with Shift Interactive. Apparently my post was noticed, because all URLs on the webdesignsydneyaustralia.com domain have been redirected to shiftinteractive.net. So for now at least my 53 consecutive stolen Spoonfed Design posts are off that site, and hopefully will remain so. They are still indexed in Google with scraper URLs, but eventually these will drop out and my duplicate content problems from that particular site will be resolved. Gee, thanks, Shift Interactive!
Interestingly, a number of other domains hosted on the same dizinc server are also now redirecting to shiftinteractive.net, although the Google cache shows these sites were up and running within the past week. On socialmediaaustralia.com, for example, we can no longer see the numerous fanboy.com posts that were there last week. Likewise, the site seotipstricks.com no longer shows the material from the Stepforth marketing blog it had published there recently. In both cases with the author’s permission, I’m sure.
I enjoyed looking at web2.0newsroom.com (that’s web 2.0 newsroom, get it?) because up until a day or two ago it displayed the same Wordpress theme as the site that was robbing Spoonfed Design:
Apart from the visual appeal there was some great content here too–great because it came from a great blog, profy.com. But now it’s all gone, it all redirects to Shift Interactive.
Now I don’t know too much about this, but is it really good for SEO to have dozens of smammy-sounding domains on the same DNS all redirecting to your main business site? Well I guess these guys are the experts.
Thanks for the great supportive comments on yesterday’s post!
Here’s a post I wish I didn’t have to write, but it’s a cautionary tale for anyone out there still going to the trouble of producing original content. In the design realm lately it seems that there are as many “bloggers” ripping off other people’s content as writing their own. And I don’t mean in the legitimate way of publishing excerpts and links to good stories from other sites with proper acknowledgment. I mean outright thievery.
The last 53 posts on Spoonfed Design have been copied in their entirety, without permission or attribution, on the site webdesignsydneyaustralia.com. This is an example of blog scraping at it’s worst. All of SFD’s original content published since February 12, 2009 has simply been lifted and republished on this site without so much as a thank you. The past 39 consecutive posts on the Sydney site, without exception, are posts from Spoonfed Design.
The offending site is part of a blog farm designed to funnel traffic to a Sydney-based design and SEO firm called Shift Interactive. How do I know that? Well, Shift Interactive is owned by a gentleman named Jamie Harbison, who also turns up on a WhoIs search as the admin contact for the scraper site. When I sent a polite note to Jamie asking for removal of my material from his site, twice, I received no reply. But one thing did change: the scraper site URL stated above now redirects to shiftinteractive.net. That has only made things worse from my perspective, as I’ll go on to explain. But first, here’s a look at the scraper site homepage as of a few days ago, from the Google cache:
Spoonfed Design, also known as SFD, is a design and development blog that publishes content to inform and spread knowledge to creatives. SFD mainly focuses on the fields of web design and development, graphic design, illustration, print, typography, and more!
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By Scott, January 27th, 2010
in Design Articles, Inspiration, Photography, Showcase |
2 Super Comments 
In order for our model to say it with silver, we first need to get that bracelet down to a size that will fit our portrait. We’ll go to Image/Image Size and set the width to 1000 pixels and the height to 750. 
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