FPO Online can be your first stop to a world of resources. We’ve checked out hundreds of sites covering the world of design, illustration, photography and typography, plus fun sites to stimulate your creativity. Start at FPO and you could wind up anywhere. Hold your mouse over the thumbnails for more information about each link. Click to proceed to the site.
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www.workbook.com: Connecting designers with illustrators and photographers
www.smashingmagazine.com: Information for designers/web developers
www.allgraphicdesign.com: Comprehensive design resource for everyday
www.designaddict.com: A great source for links, interviews, news, forums and more
www.designtaxi.com: Forums, articles and helpful hints
www.icograda.org: Design events and community around the world
www.dexigner.com: Design news, events, and resources
www.winterhouse.com/editions: Limited/trade edition design books
www.colourlovers.com: Creative color inspiration
www.youthedesigner.com: Blogs with tips, news and resources
www.bittbox.com: Design miscellany, lots of freeware
www.creativepro.com: Creative community and marketplace
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www.lingo2word.com: Emoticons, acronym, and txt lingo
http://publicationcoach.com/free-articles.php: Articles about writing
http://bartleby.com: Reference site for literature
www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors: Common errors in English usage
www.askoxford.com/betterwriting: Spelling and grammar tips
http://alphabetizer.flap.tv: Enter your list, have it automatically alphabetized
www.altavista.com/help/search/calculator: Conversions for common variables
http://babelfish.altavista.com: Foreign language translation
www.editred.com: Peer critiques and publishing tips
http://pubrants.blogspot.com: Polite rants about the publishing industry
http://books.google.com: Search full text of books in this extensive index
www.mediabistro.com: Jobs, classes, community and news for media professionals
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www.quark.com/service: Help with Quark XPress (official site)
www.adobe.com/support/indesign: Help with InDesign (official site)
www.adobe.com/support/photoshop: Help with Photoshop (official site)
www.adobe.com/support/illustrator: Help with Illustrator (official site)
www.adobe.com/support/Dreamweaver: Help with Dreamweaver (official site)
www.adobe.com/support/acrobat: Help with Acrobat (official site)
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help: Help with Microsoft Word (official site)
www.indesignsecrets.com: Reliable information about InDesign
http://desktoppublishingforum.com/bb: Forums on software, hardware, and more
www.vectormagic.com: If you don't have Illustrator...
www.melissaclifton.com/tutorials.html: Cool photoshop techniques
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www.oddpodz.com: Place for unique, independent thinkers
www.masternewmedia.org: Smart inspiration from media experts
www.netdiver.net: Devoted to tutoring, empowering and stimulating creativity
www.last.fm: Music to work by
www.stumbleupon.com: Discover new sites
www.thecoolhunter.net: All that is cool
www.lynnster.com/saints.html: The Patron Saints of Graphic Design
www.designobserver.com: Writings on design and culture
www.nmag.cn: Magazines from around the world
www.bornmagazine.org: Art and literature, together
www.accidentalcreative.com: Podcasts, blogs, and resources to battle creative block.
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www.thinkingwithtype.com: From the popular book of the same name
www.identifont.com: Search and identify fonts with this independent directory
www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont: Upload image of a font, find out what it is
www.fontleech.com: List of free font sites
www.typographica.org: Typography journal with news, observations, commentary
www.acejet170.typepad.com: Found type from anywhere & everywhere
www.typeradio.org: Interviews and podcasts on type
www.typophile.com: Community for type lovers
www.fontlover.com: Showcases current trends in typography
http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/fonts.html: Links from a typography enthusiast
www.37signals.com: Project management for all business
www.magazinelaunch.com: Resources for launching new titles.
You gotta take a look at these places:
Printing on paper is so ingrained into our senses, it’s a good idea to take a break and see what else can happen to a blank sheet of paper. The work of Danish artist Peter Callesen is simply stunning. It’s mostly paper construction through cut-out and glue, and it’s supposed to be Art. But it’s a great reminder of what can be done to communicate ideas without spilling a drop of ink.
“Wolfgang” was the real first name of rock impresario Bill Graham, and his audio, print and photography archives are stored at this site. The poster art is a treasure trove of ’60s psychedelica, but the star of the site is the huge collection of live concerts, mostly soundboard recordings from performances at Graham’s venues from the mid-sixties through the early nineties, plus lots more. After all, you need great tunes to make great design.
Stuck in the world of old-fashioned two-dimensional static communication? Think outside the page and look at this site, a collection of experimental programs that take advantage of the interactive qualities of Flash. The site’s navigation alone is worth the trip, but take a look at Amaztype, a program that data-mines Amazon to create a pictorial representation of an artist’s name using the book and CD cover images on Amazon — and then allows the user to search for information by clicking on individual images.
Ze Frank is a Brooklyn-based humorist and performance artist. His site is a hodgepodge of interactive projects, short films and animations, but the most popular part is the daily “The Show with Zefrank,” a video blog that launched in 2006 and ran for a year. Time included this site as one of its “50 Coolest Websites” in 2005, and while that's an eon ago in the Web world, the site is still a ton ’o fun.
This is the website for Technology Entertainment Design (TED), an annual conference that defines its mission as “ideas worth spreading.” TED talks are available here, and more than 50 million viewings have occurred as of June 2008. Its lectures cover a broad set of topics from a wide variety of people, including such people as former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The conference is expensive to attend — it requires a $6,000 membership — but the content on the site contains a wealth of interesting and varied thought and ideas.
www.cloudappreciationsociety.org
When you’re really ready to take it easy after a long day, this site will remind you of lazy summer days staring at the sky and finding visual Easter eggs in the wisps that float by. Only on steroids. As the site says, “We’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them. See how we are fighting the banality of ‘blue-sky thinking.’ ”
http://labs.live.com/photosynth
Is this the future we’re looking at? Currently, the “try it” only runs on the latest Windows platforms, but anyone can watch a presentation at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/blogs and scroll to Photosynth at TED Comference. Photosynth may come from Microsoft (the video presenter can’t quite believe it either), but this demonstration of new visualization software and image recognition is truly mind-blowing in its implications.
www.aiga.org/content.cfm/redesigning-the-new-yorker-part-one
Who would dare present an unsolicited redesign of one of the most venerable American magazines? KT Meaney would, and it’s a fascinating argument that combines a history of publishing design and practical visual ideas that can benefit any magazine.
In the tradition of alphabet bestiaries that date back to the Middle Ages, this creative Flash™ show manipulates the name of an animal into a picture of the animal — all in characters from the Bembo family. Really fun.