graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

A little while ago I came across a small paper back book in our local bookshop called The Graphic Design Cookbook, with a slogan - mix and max recipes for faster, better layouts, sounded interesting so I bought it. Essentially what the book does is picks and element of a design layout for example page folios and then shows you numerous page folio examples, just as simple black and white diagrams. The idea being I guess that if you are stuck for an idea for layout you flick to an element of the book to inspire you. Some of you may disagree but I think the premise of this book is very good. I would never create a mix and match design but sometimes you do think - what could I do with that page folio to make it look a bit more interesting and anything to help spur an idea is always welcome.

The downside of this book is, in my opinion it is badly executed. I decided to give it a go when I was stuck once for a straight piece of layout design.When I have a concept within a design I find the layout easily evolves around it, but for me if I am just given a photograph and text and told to make them look nice its a lot more difficult to pull something interesting out of the hat. So did the book work, for me, no, the graphics deliberately made stark/diagramatic did not inspire me at all, and so I did my usual flicking through my scrap books and magazines for inspiration and scribbling on a layout pad. What it did do was make me think this could work if was done better.

Maybe there is a way we could all start a shared design elements gallery on Flickr or similar image gallery (cool headings, navigation, folios etc) ? I rarely use Flickr so am not sure if this is possible for people to group their images together, or do you prefer to have your own personal resource? What do you think?

I love modern character design, and I stumbled upon a site called www.toypaper.co.uk/ which combines character design with origami. There are little characters, monsters and other items which you can print out and make up into 3D pieces. Some are even left blank so you can customise them yourself. What a fun idea, great for big kids and little ones too. The site looks really cool as well.

I came across the www.duboismeetsfugger.com which is a flash based site, that takes a few minutes to load but to me it looks great. It is features kind of qwirky simple cartoons, with a little character thats goes with you through the website. The navigation is totally different too - you click on a part of the menu and something happens to the character, he gets pulled up by a man on the rope, he gets kidnapped by two tribal men or other amazing things. For some reason it reminds me of the pink panther cartoon though I am not quite sure why.

In my opinion everything about the site looks fantastic and obviously a lot of creativity and time has been put into the site, but I couldn’t actually tell for a while what the company does. Are they a graphics company, or animation, or TV production or maybe all three. Maybe this is intentional, so as to not put any limitations on what they do, or to make the viewer think, but it made me think, how straight forward should a site be? Should you immediately be able to tell what a company does, or should the viewer be made to explore?