All developer/designer types have a myriad of applications in their arsenal that they cannot live without. I am going to skip over the obvious ones: Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and focus on a few deeper tracks that you may or may not have heard of.
Textmateby Macromates http://macromates.com
In it’s simplest form, Textmate is a plain text editor. It’s a no frills way to get characters on a page. I’m using it right now to draft this blog post. But if you look deeper, Textmate is so much more. I primarily use it for Actionscript development. Textmate uses snippets and macros to turn itself into the perfect development tool. It highlights syntax for you, it helps write commonly repeated code with predetermined or user generated snippets, it even lets you select a column of text instead of just a row! We have even set up our latest Textmate bundle to create and scaffold your entire flash project for you, including the FLA and put everything in the right place. Textmate is completely extendable so anyone can write plug-ins or templates for it. I do not go a day in the office without opening up Textmate. Read More…
Muchos grandes to Chris (who is not legally affiliated with Chop Shop in any way) for articulately photographing what we could not say. I like the photo very much.
It so hard for Chop Shop to resist pop-culture references. Our best received designs thus far have been our “weRobot” and “rockStar” tees which contain about 80+ pop-icon references just between the two. So when we came across this image by Richard Miske on flickr, it was like the gods sending us a signal.
Naturally, if robots ruled the world in 1979 instead of 2020… we believe they still would have been inclined to grab the nearest axe and start smashing. You can get the tshirt now from chopshopstore so that when the robot overlords look you over they will know who’s side you are on. Listen as your robot leader speaks, “Male humans go here and female humans go here”. Read More…
The hottest ticket in town this week is the SVA’s Illustration as Visual Essay Thesis Show. We are consistently humbled by one of the most unique visual arts graduate programs in the world. Twenty amazingly talented illustrators, with confident, figurative drawing and painting skills, present their personal visions this week in Chelsea. See you at the opening tonight!
Exhibition: May 1 – 16, 2009
Reception: Tuesday, May 5, 6pm-8pm
Visual Arts Gallery: 601 West 26 Street [15th Floor], New York, NY
There is something I just love about Supermarkethq. I would never do anything to hurt Etsy’s feelings, but Supermarkethq is the newest kid on the block and we think its got legs. Big, long, lanky designer legs.
One of the best things you can find there are various hand letter-pressed products (L2 Design Collective shown above for example). Who would have thought that in the year 2009 the art of letterpress printing would find itself a way back into the marketplace? Read More…
For the third installment of Robot stuff on Etsy I present the Silver Robot of Love with a Turquoise Heart pendant. This is for all the Robot lovin’ ladies in the house. This pendant is handmade of sealed plastic. Although it doesn’t come with the chain, it has a jump ring that you can either string onto a chain or stick onto a keychain. I would totally sport one of these to a Flash Meetup or social networking event.
This pendant is a total bargain at $5 with only $1 for shipping. Get it at steffffff’s store on Etsy.
Some years ago when Chopping Block was just a baby… about 95% of all the work we did was either Tor Books dust jacket designs or web banner ads for iTraffic. We would pretty much clear about 4-6 banner campaigns a week and some of the best feedback for revisions EVER would come from this work. It was eternally frustrating to work for the better part of your days on a single image that was about 468×60 and had to come in under 8k as a rule. Added to the mix was any given client’s insistence that you had to animate the shit out of every concept which would immediately bloat the file size to 9k with the addition of frame #2. Read More…
Yesterday the kindly postman brought me another dose of design inspiration. A hot off the presses copy of It’s Nice That‘s first print issue. It’s Nice that calls it self a “online archive” of “cutting edge creative work from all over the world”. I’ve been a fan of their daily doses of diverse art and design related content for a while now. When they announced that they were producing a print version of their best content, I feverishly clicked the pre-order button.
The zine, like the site, is simple and elegantly designed. It arrived with a silk screened poster and a handwritten thank you note from It’s Nice That‘s creators Will and Alex. While Flipping through the photo filled pages and reading over the text I was struck by the zine’s success at transferring what had been online content to print (check out the process on their flickr page). After a solid day of designing on a backlit screen, it’s refreshing to be able to look at and touch some physically tangible design.
Issue No 1 is a beautiful success. I highly recommend this publication which can be purchased directly from It’s Nice That for a steal. I’ll be anxiously awaiting the next installment coming this October.
Since being reincarnated as a designer (I was a hummingbird in my previous life, and Houdini the life before that), every night before going to bed I develop an insatiable appetite for design inspiration, so I prowl the interwebs for the life-blood… mainly in screenprinted form. For the time being, Good Ole Jesse, Billy Badass Perkins, Dirky Boy, JP and Nathan “The Fox” Fox are satisfying my thirst. I carefully selected these few favorites so that you may peruse them at your immediate leisure.
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