Cute trends.

Owls, for example. Past cute trends you may have forgotten are: white geese with blue bows; applique scotty dogs, either black or tartan; two cherubs resting on their elbows and gazing up. I don't want to kill the owl-love, but I take it with a grain of salt myself.

The cycle goes
1. cute trend.
2. twee and embarrassing.
3. forgotten.
4. retro/ironic cute trend.

Thoughts on sleeping masks

Image from http://www.beautyimpex.co.uk/

• They need to be made of breathable material, such as cotton, otherwise you will sweat while wearing them.
• The side which touches your face should be made of dark-coloured material because light-coloured material won't block out enough light.
• It's handy to own a few.
• Wash weekly.
• Sleeping masks are very precious to me, as are ear-plugs. I always have a few ear-plugs and sleeping masks around.

Free fonts.

Type 'free' into myfonts.com and you can find all the fonts that have a free weight for sample download. Such a handy way to broaden your collection and try things out for usefulness without spending money. They are generally the 2nd rate fonts, but there are a lot of OK ones there. See Museo.

Design nerdery.

I had some spare time today, and since I've been feeling uninspired about stuff I make, I thought I'd try and recharge my design juices before I start any new projects. 

Colour:
Adobe kuler is a web application for choosing colours. I love it. I realised today that I need to break out of my habitual colours and get some structured palettes happening, googled and found it: a fun way of getting a 5 colour palette. You can spin a wheel or upload an image, and when you have a set it how you like, download it and import it as swatches into InDesign—instant colour scheme! This is a colour scheme from my crochet work:

Font:
Stumbled over this article at a font foundry website. This makes me feel sort of depressed. I'm not super expert at typography, so I'm going to try and memorise this page. If only fonts weren't so jolly expensive.

Random:
Pinterest is my new favourite internet thing. It's very girly, lots of pictures of cupcakes and hipster home decoration stuff, and it's really useful. You set up virtual pinboards, and when you come across an image (or product or idea) on the web anywhere, you pin it to one of your boards. So they are visual bookmarks, and I'm forming idea palettes. Nice bits of design will go there.

2011 is the start of something annoying.

Here is something you might not know about my job. I kern the year. 2011 unkerned above, 2011 kerned below. Kerning makes words more aesthetically pleasing by adjusting the spaces between the characters. 1 is a very bad number because it always has enough room to swing a cat, so 2011 looks all big and fat on the left, and all skinny and awkward on the right. Imagine 4 people of different sizes sitting on a bench and two of them are bumping elbows while two of them are unsociably alone. It's much nicer if everyone has the same amount of personal space. That's why I kern 2011. I will have to kern every year until 2020.

The 2011 above is unkerned, the 2011 is kerned.

Banana Guards, do-doo do-do-dooh!

I had planned to post the epic story of how the crow flew into my head, but this afternoon Karen delivered my order of Banana Guards!!!


This is one of the best pieces of design ever! They make me laugh, AND they protect my bananas from being squashed in my bag!