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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It’s Finally Here: Open-Source Hardware

The optimistic crowd that form the borderless and limitless open-source community world-wide have finally been rewarded a long sought-after dream: taking the beautiful concept of open-source beyond software, and into the hardware division.

A group of scientists from Standford University have succeeded in putting together a programmable digital camera that allows anyone to write the software to achieve any feature your imagination can come up with. This results in a digital camera made of extremely cheap components, offering features that no other proprietary manufacturer does. You’ll be paying for the dirt-cheap components, and just as they’ve always taught us, the best things in life are free (open-source software included).

This is a brief look at the Frankencamera by the scientists themselves:

It currently not the sexiest of cameras, but how charismatic was the first GUI for Linux? What matters is not the current product, but the potential results. And from what we can tell from this revolutionary innovation, the sky is the limit, and the users from every corner of the globe will inevitably be the ones who most benefit.

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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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