Okay, so I'm a few months late posting this, but here it is nonetheless. The 2008 version of TheBrainDesign's Publikum Calendar is a socialist nightmare of graphic design and visual anarchy somehow corralled into a website, downloadable calendar and video documentary--just to name a few of the outlets for this inspiring international effort. The designers and artist represented hail from all over Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. If nothing else, it's visually interesting stuff. And, yes, these images to the right are each different months of the Publikum Calendar.

Labels: Art, Drawing, graphic design, self-publishing, Typography

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By now you've surely been handed one of those sleek, satin-finished mini-cards with full-bleed photos or graphics on one side and contact info on the other. And, surely, you've wondered where they come from and have yet to attempt to Google "narrow business cards" for fear of the 600,000 search results you would receive. Well, here's the skinny on those slim biz cards: Moo. I've made a slew of these for NoRelevance.com and was pleased by the idiot-proof step-by-step process it took to produce 100 cards from a Flickr set. Oh, did I mention that? You can access your photos and sets from such popular sites as Flickr, Facebook, LiveJournal and more. All this for $19.99 plus shipping. Surely there's a better deal on the web, no? Perhaps, but the ability to spread those 100 cards over several different photos was the hook for me. I upload ten different photos and get ten cards each. You can only have one version of the flip-side, but that's hardly a down-side.

Labels: printing, self-publishing

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Dubbed "Space Art in Children's Books," this very simply presented website is a treasure trove of pre-space era through post-Apollo mission illustrations which appeared in astronomy and science books beginning as far back as 1883 with Agnes Giberne's romantic visions in Sun, Moon and Stars : A Book for Beginners. As a child of the Apollo era, just barely old enough to remember the famous lunar touchdown, I'm thrilled to see such a collection of wondrous images available online. To the moon...and beyond!

Labels: Art, Drawing, ephemera, space

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Ever been read the Riot Act? Now you can make that dream a reality with the help of LibriVox, a massive online archive of public domain literary works made available as free downloadable audio books. The site, which claims to be "open source" and completely volunteer-run, contains a plethora of audible classics such as the likes of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jack London's White Fang, and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. If you can deal with the occasional changing of reader voices (sometimes male, sometimes female) and varying audio quality (all pretty much good enough), there are numerous audio formats to choose from, feeds for podcasts, links to text versions of most books, and material available in nine different languages. Time to catch up on those classics!

Labels: audio books, ephemera

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