Funky Friday Collection – 12 June 2009

Hi all, hope you’re enjoying the Friday wind down to the weekend. Been a busy week online, and some great sites and discoveries, so a pretty full Funky Friday collection this week. Hope you enjoy.

Design Inspiration

35 Stunning Elevator Advertisements – FrancescoMugnai.com

Very cool showcase. Advertisements that go beyond the usual and take full advantage of the medium they’re presented. Going to advertise in an elevator? In which case, why not make the elevator an integral part of the ad. Some really imaginative stuff. The forklift truck one is particularly clever.

Niche Showcase Galleries – Mogdesign

Yeah, I know there are a bunch of submission sites for design, like Design Bump, Design Float, etc. They’re for overall design though, all aspects. This is a great selection of sites that drill down into a smaller niche. There’s a site dedicated just to showcasing horizontal scrolling, another for church websites. Some awesome content.

Retro Futurism At Its Best – Smashing Magazine

I adore this kind of style. Along with steampunk it’s one of my favorites, and it probably translates much better to the web than steampunk does. Not only is this a great showcase of art, but it all links back to tutorials and techniques for how to achieve the same kind of graphic effects yourself. Brilliant.

Design Resources

16 Free Hand-Dyed Paper Textures – Lost And Taken

I love playing with textures in design, and Lost and Taken often has good selections. This is a particularly good one though, some really cool effects from dyed paper, with water, color and even tea stains.

SEO And Social Media

How To Compete With Yourself In The Search Engines And Win – SEJ

This was a really interesting piece. Explains how expanding a single site so that it covers lots of different topics might not be the best idea. Instead search engines might rank you more highly if you keep sites to very specific niches, and expand the number of sites rather than the size of a single sight. Thought provoking.

10 Social Media Campaigns That Rock – Thoughtpick

Good overview of how social media and viral marketing can have a real impact on products. Much of the corporate world still hasn’t really caught on to how they can use social media, but these are some great examples of companies who seem to have worked it out.

Popular Design Blogs Share Their Stats – Lee Munroe

Useful statistics overview here. Covering a good number of design blogs from the well to the lesser known. Examining how user numbers change depending on the day of the week, popular resolutions, popular blog posts and unusual keyword searchs. It’s a great sample of the kind of helpful data you can get from analytics software.

Design Technique

Flash #FAIL – The Design O’Blog

Why Flash is useless as a foundation of web design. Pretty much fully in agreement with this article, which points out the negative factors of basing a website off Flash. Seven reasons why people should be looking away from Flash for website design.

5 Disciplines Of Successful Design – This Is Aaron’s Life

Sensible and informative article on some best practices, useful for any designer. Disciplines to follow to ensure that you’re always producing your best work, tailored to a client, and that you know when to stop.

Behance Portfolio Highlights

Simple Girl – Natalia Pokrovskaya

This is such a fun photography collection.  In some ways very simple, but I imagine it must have been hard work for the model! But it comes together brilliantly in concept, and I found it fascinating.

Bodies Of Work Series 2 – Brian Cummings

This was gorgeous. I’m a big fan of good tattoo art in general. This took a really original slant though, using tattoo art but also trying to use the lighting effects used by Rembrandt. Combining an old master’s techniques with something more edgy like tattoo art works great.

Just Great Sites

“I Shot Him Because I Loved Him, Damn Him”

Of course, having highlighted the ‘Flash #Fail’ article, now I end up showcasing a Flash based site. Proves there’s an exception to every rule. What a great name for a design agency (…or any company) – I visited this site purely because I was fascinated by the name. The site itself is also great fun, with a lovely vintage look, simple and informative about the company and its services. Well worth a look.

From The Couch

I’ve talked about From The Couch before, but I’ll highlight it again. And it’s another exception to a rule (for me at least), because I don’t like video blogs. From The Couch is just awesome though, and consistently so. Posts that are just long enough to cover a topic in a worthwhile way, but not too long as to get boring. I feel almost fanboyish, definitely my favorite blog these days.

In addition to all the web pages linked to here, I’m choosing one of my favourite Flickr images from the past week available under Creative Commons. This week’s original image is by Flickr user whoALSE.