Business Card Inpirations

I was planning on designing a new business card this weekend ahead of the conferences and expos I’ll be attending in Sept… but after some googling around, I found so many sites featuring so many great designs, it was worthy of a post on it’s own. So without further ado, here’s some great monday morning inspiration:

18 Smokin’ Hot Business Card Designs

Flickr Set 1 - Business Cards

Flickr Set 2 - Business Cards

70 Amazing Business Cards

Creative Business Cards

Cool business card designs, Part 1 and Part 2

Weekender Linkfest!

Busy weekend here in Vancouver. Lots of coding and lots of coffee. This was my breakfast this morning:

Back to the weekender linkfest - I was checking out this Interesting Conference in New York happening on Saturday, September 13. I “may” go, since I’m in NYC around then anyway. Also, if you’re going to be in NYC, come hang out with us at the Web 2.0 Expo from Sept 16-19. Tim, myself and our crew will be there doing our usual antics.

If you enjoy looking at kaleidoscopic and geometric patterns (!) you will enjoy the work of Rochester, NY based illustrator Andy Gilmore.

Check out this cool online store that sells some very interesting and weird products. Explore away (and yes, they ship to the US).

Christoph Niemann on bathroom art.

Check out Flake.TV - an online television channel dedicated to broadcasting original programming about urban lifestyle, art, fashion, music and overall creative culture.

Just stumbled upon Sleevage - a blog dedicated to music cover art from the LP’s of the 60’s to the digital artworks of now.

And finally, you got to love the Japanese. Check out this video:

10 Useful Wordpress Plugins

If you’ve ever used Wordpress before to run a blog, you would know by now how many thousands of plugins exists out there to make your blogging experience better. What you may not know is that about half of them are poorly coded and almost surely slows down your site and/or exposes security flaws. I’ve been researching and testing a whole bunch of new plugins for the new upcoming TIM sites and thought maybe I should share some of the plugins we’re using. We use Wordpress MU over the original Wordpress - so this presents a little challenge by itself. But with a little trial and error and some code tweaking, I’ve managed to install the following 10 plugins successfully. If you run Wordpress, try installing these plugins if you haven’t already done so. It’ll go a long way in making your blog a little bit more efficient.

WP eCommerce

With our growing list of products for sale (alerts, dvd, book etc) and with the introduction of five additional products planned for fall, we needed an e-commerce site that could make shopping a little easier - and WP eCommerce is just the perfect plugin for that. Its Ajax powered and super easy to setup - and it integrates effortlessly with our new payment processing system. Download HERE.

AntiLeech

Ever did a google search and notice that your exact same blog post is on another ghost site competing for traffic hits with yours? AntiLeech helps prevent content theft by sploggers. It’s a clever little plugin that produces a fake set of content especially for sploggers that includes links back to your site. A must have to stay on top of google. Download HERE.

iWPhone

Here’s a neat plugin that automatically reformats the blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. Just tested it on my iPhone and it works like a charm. TIMAlerts members using iPhones will especially love it. Download HERE.

Sabre

Sabre - an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine is a lifesaver plugin that helps us manage our subscribers and prevents spambots from signing up. If you’ve ever tried registering for TIMalerts and had to answer a math question, it is Sabre doing it’s thing. Download HERE.

Lovin’ Tokyo

My business partner TIM is heading out to Japan today on a little business/holiday trip for the next 10 days, so I thought what better excuse to showcase some of my favorite Japanese designers and all things Japan (besides the insane street signs, which will be a post on its own):

PingMag - Great Japanese design mag, a must read if you want to keep up with the latest underground design culture in Japan.

Tokyo Cube - If you love Japan, you will love Tokyo Cube. It’s probably the only store outside of Japan where you can buy some of the coolest toys and tees straight from Tokyo.

Window Shopping In Tokyo - This is one of the neatest projects I’ve ever seen. Updated weekly, this website showcases some of the fascinating and shifting trends in Japanese high-end fashion.

Sexy Subaru - Not sure how many of you have seen these ad spots for Subaru - they air quite a bit in Canada. Check out their website to win a really neat Canon + Apple + Adobe prize pack for taking pics of Sumo wrestlers! Click HERE to view the ad on Youtube.

Toshiyuki Kuwabara - Real Raw Talent - check out his demo reel and his insane 3D animation portfolio.

Mitsuoka - The little car manufacturer that came up with the Orochi.

And finally, the Oscar winning Spirited Away - still one of my favorite animated movies. If you haven’t watched it yet - HERE’s a preview.

My New Favorite Font

I’m a font addict. New, old, sans, serif, script, pixel, symbol - you name it, I love it. I read blogs like I Love Typography and reference books like Font Book (no jokes)… so you can only imagine my excitement when I discovered this relatively unknown free font named Sketch Rockwell.

It’s a knock-off of the original Rockwell by Adobe (which btw is being used extensively on the new TIM sites), but the fact that is free just made it my new favorite font. You can expect to see a lot of this font pop up on the new TIM sites… I think it’ll compliment the existing Rockwell very well.

Some other free fonts I really like these days are Imitation (download HERE), Greg’s Other Hand (download HERE) and Romeral (leave a comment HERE to receive it via email).

And if you’re a real font nerd, you’ll definitely enjoy this little video by College Humor: