www.kneebouncers.com/kneebouncers.html

Kneebouncers is a fun site designed for young children to play on, it’s full of simple games where you press a button on the keyboard and some thing bright and colourful happens on screen. The site is really well designed, the designers have identified that there was a need for a site that very young children can use with their parents, where the games aren’t difficult or need any sort of hand eye coordination. I was first shown the website a couple of years ago but I’ve recently been working on a project at work where we wanted to build some simple games into it so I got in contact with the designers who built this site to fin out how they did it – here is the response I got from Jim Robinson of PUNCH

“Hi Danny, Thanks for the email! Yes kneebouncers is all flash -- Kurt Dommermuth (flash guru you may want to visit more stuff he has done -- kurtdommermuth.com or thetruthiswhatyoubelieve.com or the flash community organicflash.com) is my best friend and once I came up with the idea and drawings he brought it all to life.”

www.spimsonizeme.com - Simsonize Me!

I guess a lot of people will have already stumbled upon or been shown this website already but if you haven’t and you’ve got 10 minutes to spare it’s well worth a visit. www.spimsonizeme.com is a neat little micro site / marketing ploy set up as a joint venture between Burger King and the creators of the Simpson’s movie when they where launching it. Basically it allows anybody to up-load a photo of themselves which the site then ‘Simpsonizes’ you – creating a picture of what you would look like if you where a Simpson’s character. Once it has done this you can fine-tune your picture before adding a background and downloading it (or sending it to be printed on a mug, if you really want).

You can have some great fun with the site, last Christmas I got a photo of everybody in our office and spent an evening Simpsonizing them all for a big group portrait that I gave to the team for Christmas. The pictures that the site gives you aren’t good enough quality to print from so I had to re-draw each person in Adobe Illustrator (which was a bit of a pain) but the effect was well worth it as it made a pretty unique and amusing gift.

So, if the credit crunch has hit you hard and you’ve got a friend who likes the Simpson’s feel free to steal this idea at Christmas (and if you don’t have the design software to redraw your characters for printing you can get a whole evenings worth of work out of me for a box of Jaffa Cakes…).

How to loose a few hours - http://www.ffffound.com/

I was introduced to fffound.com by James Callahan (http://jamesandjoecreative.blogspot.com/) which is a website that works as an online collection of found images, illustrations, photos, logos, adverts and art from various other websites and blogs. By simply clicking on a picture the site then suggests several other photos that you might like or from the same user – the first time I visited the site I must have spent best part of an hour clicking around like a kid in an online sweet shop. Next time I’m struggling to find some inspiration I know which site to visit.

I’ve picked out a few found images, which I liked – as you can see from the Ikea coffin instructions some a pretty random. The polar bear made from the lines of a tube map I really clever as well.

Midland Signs Website

The Midlands Signs website is a brilliant example of what can be done with a creative imagination and a basic knowledge of Flash and a site that I think would deffentaly be worth looking at if you are starting out on a Graphic Design course. The website was created by a studio from Sheffield called ‘Something Somewhere’ who instead of throwing together the sort of website that you would expect for a signage company, they have created something unique, something that will really set Midland Signs out from other local signage companies. The site is easy to navigate and the portfolio is interesting to look at.

Visit the website at www.midlandsigns.co.uk

Design and build your own typeface for free - http://fontstruct.fontshop.com

This is a fantastic new website from FontShop which allows you to design and then build your own unique typeface. Once you have created it you can then download it (both for a Mac and a PC) and share it with other users of the site (you can also search and download theirs). This is a fantastic idea – if you are working on a logo you can create a really unique typeface for a client or if you want a typeface with a really specific look that you just cant find anywhere now you can just build it yourself (and name it after yourself, naturally). I can’t wait to use it in a project!

Visit http://fontstruct.fontshop.com

www.modernista.com - Website with a difference

We had a freelancer in at work yesterday who showed me this website for an American / Dutch design agency called Modernista that really caught my eye. Most agencies websites act as and online portfolio/list of famous clients/trophy cabinet – Modernista have on the other hand have created a website which is supposed to show what the internet thinks of their company. The best way to understand how it works is to visit the site for yourself - www.modernista.com - but it basically works by having a red navigation in the top left hand corner then when you click on one of the options the website behind the navigation changes, i.e. when you click ‘about’ it takes you to Wikipedia or ‘work’ it takes you to some Flickr pages that have examples of their work. I think it is a really clever idea and show that the agency do things differently and have original ideas – things that as a client you want from your design agency.

There are however a couple of issues with the site – when you go to ‘about’ and it takes you to the Wikipedia page there is a disclaimer at the top from Wikipedia that indicates that they aren’t best pleased about being used like this. I also don’t understand why they have used words like ‘ab.ou.t’, ‘wrk’ or ‘n3wz’. Also, allegedly, the idea isn’t even that original either – apparently it was done by another smaller agency first.

Tiger Shark Website – Watch the eye…

This is a website created by a web developer based in the same office as the design agency that I work for. He showed me the Tiger Shark website that he had worked on recently and pointed out a neat feature – if you watch carefully every 10 seconds or so the shark blinks its eye. He told me that is always worth the extra effort of putting extra details like this into a website as it show the client that you have really thought about a job and spent time on it – it also makes their site more interesting to browsers and the project more fun to work on.

http://www.tigershark.tv

Da Font – Free Typefaces

www.dafont.com is a website that is definitely well worth adding to your favourites bar – it is an online library of thousands of typefaces that you can search by name, author and most importantly style and then download for free. I have found it really useful – especially at the early stages of creating logos as it has a huge verity of unusual and unique faces. The site isn’t quite perfect though – I have found that some typefaces wont convert to PDF or cause your computer to crash if you try print a document with them in (although most of the time if you convert them to outlines you can get around this) so it is best to test them out before you use them on a job. Also as they are free to download from a public site it means anybody else can use them as well – which could be a problem in the case of a logo.

Subservient Graduate – Self promotion website

www.subservientgraduate.com is the online portfolio / self-promotional website of a fellow University of Leeds design student. I think it’s a great idea, instead of creating a fairly standard website with his portfolio on (as many students, and agencies, do) he created an amusing take on the Burger King website www.subservientchicken.com. The site uses Flash and allows you to ‘tell’ the graduate to do some thing – then he does it. It also plays on the idea that design students will do anything (well, just about anything – he wont do anything rude…) to get their first design job.