An Arch in Fayoum, Egypt

An inspirational photograph of an old house in the lake-side town of Fayoum, south west of the Egyptian capital.

Photograph by Nora Shalaby

You can visit Nora’s blog, or check out her photo stream on Flickr.

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Humble Inspiration

Sometimes the poorest neighborhoods can be the source of richest of inspirations. Many web designers lose touch with reality and design strictly “for the web”. The trick is to be able to look around and see the beauty around us, and then implement it one way or another when designing.

Photograph by Hossam el Hamalawy

You can view more inspiration from Cairo and Giza at Hamalawy’s Flickr page. Meanwhile, let’s see more designers integrate different aspects of their own culture in their work.

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Tori’s Eye: Yet Another View of Twitter

Yesterday I wrote about HootSuite 2.0 as yet another solution for managing and utilizing your Twitter account. Lesson 1 from any book on success with Web 2.0 says that when you set the stage, and let the open-source community and the user-base do the acting, you are inevitably bound for results that out-do your most optimistic of imagination. A working example of this is literally visible via Tori’s Eye, a “website” that displays the latest tweets in a visually pleasing and creative manner.

Catch the flying tweets with Tori's Eye

It might not be the most efficient method in which you can follow the tweets of a chosen hash tag or keyword, but it is not meant to be one. It is easier to look at it as a work of art, a visual presentation that adds a new perspective to something everything has been looking at very mathematically. I personally think it is entertaining to follow a subject of interest, but not of much importance. It could also be good exercise for reading random tweets without any bias towards images or tweet locations.

Very little is known of what the creators of Twitter wanted from it exactly (now it is clear that it is something special). Even if we were to use hindsight and say they wanted it to be the standard channel for millions of people to rapidly communicate worldwide, it would take too much bending-over backwards to believe that they knew such creative outputs would come out of it. But then again, that’s the beauty of the user-based content, and the collaboration of millions of people across space and time.

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Graphic Design in Political Propaganda

An interesting article by the Designer Daily revealed some of the artwork that was produced at the time of the Cold War to aid the propaganda of the US as well as the Soviet Union. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and at times of war, it is extremely important for governments to have strong visual campaigns to ensure the support of the public. The following is one of the most intruiging ones:

Jo Jo The Dove

This was a post created by Paix et Liberte (Peace and Liberty), which was a French anti-communist group from the times of the Cold War when the two schools of thought were battling it out. The idea is to depict Stalin as a fake who pretends like he is interested in peace, while he is actually looking to butcher the enemy and force his evil ways. It is safe to assume that today’s public are not as naive, and that it would be necessary to be a little more subtle about how “bad” the “baddies” are. But generally speaking, reading a pamphlet explaining the group’s manifesto would not have been anywhere as effective as a poster like this one.

On a design level, I personally think it would still compete with some of today’s products. With history repeating itself, there has been strong movements to go retro in the different areas of digital and print art. Add that to the relatively modern color scheme illustrated in the poster, and you can see how by changing the message, you can fit it right into today’s publications. It’s a true beauty and an inspiration to graphic designers, but hopefully not politicians!

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Live Colors In Macro Photography

You can never be too inspired. This image is from a collection by Joakim Kræmer of macro photographs revealing design aspects of the world around us that is extremely difficult to spot with the naked eye:

Photograph by Joakim Kræmer

Sometimes we get so caught up with designing for the web, that we forget that we can look beyond the digital world for inspiration. After all, life is a great source of design magic.

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