Any type heads should head over to Fontshop and investigate their new online font creation software — Fontstruct. The application enables you to create fonts entirely online in a simple yet flexible environment. It gets better though — the range of elements to help you create the fonts is massive allowing for a huge degree of flexibility and scope to create truly unique typefaces. Read on to see some samples demonstrating what can be acheived. All the fonts created by users are free to download which is the icing on the cake. Link of the year for me so far.
I'm going to set our design team a challenge to create a font with this application and will post on Flim Flam very soon.
This website has very thoughtfully gathered together a collection of over 30 well designed free icon sets for you to snag and use. A great collection which can potentially save a lot of time when working on projects where the budgets don't stretch to a custom icon set. Sweet.
This is a bit of a weird one — the site is all in Japanese but from what I can gather it looks like MotionPortrait are selling an avatar creation service from just a photo(?). Either way it’s quite fantasticly clever and freakish all at the same time. The montaged image below looks normal enough but follow the link and see the lady in motion.
(Thanks to G-Pop for the link. PS: Nice studio, go check the work for some inspiration)
I was recently informed of a website using copy from our site to promote theirs. Naturally we were a bit pissed but intruigued how the informant knew our words were being used elsewhere because that’s like matching 2 needles in a haystack. They told me about Copyscape and I have to say, I’m very impressed. What happens is this, you insert your site’s URL into their search and they then search the web finding websites with text that matches yours. In other words finding people too lazy to write their own copy.
We found several sites that have ripped parts of our ‘Things we do’ page — word for word. I contacted all biters involved and whilst one was deeply apologetic explaining they’d hired a copywriter and hadn't realised he’d stolen our text and passed it off for his. The 2nd thief was quite arrogant assuming we’d made a mistake. The final stealer justsimply ignored my emails.
Bunch of dirty thieves — it took me ages to write our website copy so this is why I’ve created a new blog category called Rants, you are reading the 1st of many ;)
Thanks to GrafixGirl for the heads up.
Edit 10.08.07: Still no word from the two companies who haven't amended their sites. I just ran both these sites through Copyscape to see if they had used anyone elses copy words. Turns out Squared Designs also steals copy from Good (who have just been informed). Yay for Copyscape!!
Edit 10.08.02: Another email back from one of the culprits. They apologised and have agreed to remove the text. So, just one more to go.
If you're anything like me, your desktop is a fairly accurare reflection your life at any given moment. Most days it’s semi-tidy—a few files scattered here and there—nothing to worry about.
On other days however—when the isht's hitting the fan—it’s a war zone. Usually those days precede important meetings where a clean desktop is required. This usually results in a frantic clean up of all the loose files. My trick is to create a folder called ‘To Sort’ and whack everything in that. It’s the equivalent of brushing everything under the carpet. It’s a dirty solution and after a while those stale files start to smell. Not anymore.