Designspiration is a project by photographer/designer Shelby White, the creator of the blog Walken. I love the gridded simplicity and the functionality of Designspiration that lets you sort images by various categories filters and even color. That’s why I was super excited when I got invited to join. Posting is amazingly easy which has allowed Designspiration to become populated by thousands upon thousands of images. Check out the site here.

This site and a few others I’ve seen recently has caused me to consider a grid like layout for the next Farmidable.

Please feel free to comment about the design. I’m interested to see how the Facebook commenting works for people, so please try that out if you have a Facebook account. I look forward to more posts.

Bob

Happy Easter everyone. Here in New England we’re getting some amazing spring weather today. I hope everyone enjoys the day.

Something I’m going to start doing a bit more is post some of my own work. This painting started as a sketch I did for Christianity Today Magazine about a man who died of throat cancer. The magazine went with another sketch that I equally liked but I thought it would a shame not to do a final for this image as well. Like I’ve mentioned in other posts I’ve been very interested in concentrating circles. One of the things I find fascinating about them is that they can be used to point to things. When adding color they can create an emotional and physical response like this one pinpointing the associated pain of the cancer or like in Luke Painter’s animation (see here) an emergence and build up of power. Another part of this paining that I enjoyed making were the cells. I looked at a lot of beautiful and grotesque images of cancer cells. They have an amazing motion that was fun to try and capture.

Luke Painter is a Toronto artist with some nice simply styled flash animations. I really liked the Fortress of Solitude animation. The green circles are great. I’ve been working with circles like that in my own art as of recent. See all of them and some wonderful drawing as well on his site.

Addition/Subtraction from flight404 on Vimeo.

Older Magnetosphere/Turbulence/Nebula render from flight404 on Vimeo.

Robert Hodgin is a Coder/Artist living in San Francisco and a founding partner of the Barbarian Group where he worked until late 2009. Robert’s work goes from simple 2D data visualizations to 3D terrain simulations. His about page states that he has interstes in theoretical physics, particle engines and audio visualizations. Seems like a pretty intelligent guy to me.

The first video above is a field simulation Robert created as an exercise to learn more about C++ vectors and lists. I really don’t know what that means. Here’s an excerpt from his explanation: “It involves 20,000 particles which react to external forces and can be reborn locally if they should happen to stray too far. Into this mess of particles, you can place either an attractive force (gravity) or a repulsive force (orbital). The attractive forces pull every particle towards it based on the laws of gravitation. The repulsive forces spin either clockwise or counterclockwise and any particles nearby would be thrown away from the center of the rotating force.” All in all it makes for a really interesting abstract video. Make sure you watch it in HD even though it takes some time to load. The second video is an audio simulation called Turbulence he created that is simply mesmerizing. You can see more of his work on his site.

I’ve always been a Mac fella. I’ve only owned one PC and the thing was such a pain to use I almost never touched the thing. The only problem I really hit with Macs is when I’m building web sites. On a Mac, if you don’t have VM Ware or Parallels or a PC kicking around (which I don’t any more) you don’t really know what your website is going to look liketo PC users. You could build out a great looking site only to find out that in IE6 and IE7 the layout completely breaks. I’ve tried using sites like Browser Shots but they have always been a pain. That’s where  Adobe Browserlab comes in. Not only can you tell what your site is going to look like on a PC, there are also other features like onion skinning that helps you see subtle spacing and font variations. I used Browserlabs while building Farmidable’s current layout and it was a dream come true. No more instant messaging friends on PCs asking them for screen shots or explanations on how the site looks.

It’s been a while but I finally got the iPhone and iPod Touch wallpaper portion of our desktop patterns back up. I’ll be converting more of the current patterns as time goes on so keep checking back. If you see a wallpaper in our gallery that doesn’t have an iphone/touch counterpart let me know in the comments and I’ll make it my number one priority for you. Go here to download them.

I have designed and am now implementing an improved, cleaner site layout that will incorporate larger images in posts, an updated gallery and improved side bar navigation. A lot of these changes will be made while the site is still live so please excuse the appearance as I browser test and set things up. Feel free to comment on the new layout too especially if you don’t like something about it or see something that looks broken. A little help can go a long way.