Howdy Smashing Friends,
Design often lives and evolves in our beloved design tools. But it also lives outside of it. On paper, in quick sketches and scribbles. In channel conversations on Teams or on Slack. Between emails, whiteboards and Zoom calls.
But sometimes design also lives outside of the specific problem we are trying to solve. Personally, whenever I feel stuck in any topic, and I just need a random something to distract or inspire me. It’s almost like a friendly reminder of the beauty that exists out there in remote parts of the world and history, waiting to be discovered and built upon.
If you are working on a project in a very unfamiliar domain, and perhaps have very little understanding yet about what it entails for your creative work, you can quickly explore the landscape of that domain and perhaps even find common themes and visual treatments for your design to make it appear more familiar, attractive, honest and perhaps slightly less average and generic.
In this newsletter, we’ve pulled together a few useful resources to inspire, excite and inform your design decisions — from visuals from public domain and book covers to Bulgarian art and Canadian typography archives. We hope there will be something for everyone in here!
In Smashing News, we are finalizing the last details for our upcoming Smashing conferences this year in Antwerp 🇧🇪, Freiburg 🇩🇪 and New York 🇺🇸 (finally on-site!). See you there?
In the upcoming weeks, we also have a few online friendly events coming up, and perhaps you’d love to join in as well:
Happy inspiration time, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. Public Work
Whenever you feel stuck and need some inspiration or a little distraction from your work on a design project, Public Work might be for you. The interactive search engine searches more than 100,000 public domain works such as scans, prints, images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources — historical creative work that is no longer protected by copyright and can be freely used, modified, and distributed.
But Public Work is more than a lovely source of historical artifacts. You can also use it to research themes, various points of view, and detailed drawings of objects, people, and nature, grouped by similarity and topic. Happy browsing! (cm)
2. Digital Archive Of Graphic Design
From type foundry specimens from the 1940s to the Apple Logo Standards from 1987, archives.design is a treasure chest for anyone who has a sweet spot for vintage graphic design.
Compiled and curated by Valery Marier, the archive includes artifacts from editorial design, branding, poster, information design, ephemera, type specimens, and much more. Each artifact comes with a short description and a link to the Internet Archives, where you can view the full version. Beautiful eye candy and a wonderful way to discover stellar pieces from the history of graphic design. (cm)
3. Book Cover Archive
Don’t judge a book by its cover. We all know the saying, but let’s be honest, when in a bookstore, it’s most often the book covers that catch our attention, right? They just have a special fascination, tickling our curiosity and waking expectations for what’s awaiting us on the inside. If you’re looking for some real cover design gems, Book Cover Archive is for you.
The Book Cover Archive is maintained by Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen as an attempt to appreciate and categorize outstanding book cover designs. There are hundreds of book covers waiting to be explored — novels and biographies just like non-fiction books. Each cover features design info like the name of the designer, art director, or illustrator, and sometimes even typeface identification. (cm)
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4. Houses Of The World
Sightseeing when traveling is nice, but don’t you just love to go for a walk to explore neighborhoods and contemplate houses to soak in the vibe of a place? Félix Péault and Shelby Kay certainly do. And well, their passion for travel, photography, and design resulted in a very special project: Houses Of.
Houses Of is a photography project showcasing charismatic houses from the places Félix and Shelby visited together. The collection currently features 324 homes from twelve places in six countries — from Brisbane to Toulouse, from Porto to Nottingham and Tbilisi. A beautiful virtual journey where colorful azulejo tiles, timeless facades, ornate gables, elegant brick patterns, and other architectonic details are just waiting to be discovered. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
6. Canadian Typography Archives
Who doesn’t love some good typography inspiration? A small but fine collection of curated typography goodies is Canadian Typography Archives. Dedicated to documenting and preserving typographic history, the archives showcase artifacts from every corner and community across Canada.
In the collection, you’ll find typographic examples covering everything from advertising and signage to books, newspapers, magazines, and artifacts from private presses and letters. The focus currently lies on the period between the first printing press arriving in Halifax in 1751 and the beginning of the digital era circa 1985. The collection is constantly growing, with plans to add French content and expand the timeline to include work through the 2000s. (cm)
7. Archive Of Bulgarian Art
Leaving the beaten tracks can be a wonderful way to find inspiration in places you might not have expected it. ABVA is such a place. The Archive Of Bulgarian Art collects pieces from the history of Bulgarian graphic design.
From vintage stamps to record cover art, travel brochures to matchboxes, beer labels, and lottery tickets, the archive explores even the most remote corners of Bulgarian graphic design, covering the complete 20th century. You can browse the collection by object or designer, or just scroll through the bold and colorful artifacts to experience a bit of everything. Beautiful inspiration that isn’t limited to the Latin writing system for a change. (cm)
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8. Music Tape Design
Do you remember the times when you wouldn’t compile your favorite songs in a Spotify playlist but on a physical mixtape? While music tapes have long disappeared, their design still wakes some sweet nostalgia today — and caters for some graphic design inspiration.
The Japanese blog Tapefan is entirely dedicated to the beauty of the old Sonys, TDKs, Fujis, Maxells, and their fellows. Even if you can’t read Japanese — or if you’re too young to remember music tapes — the blog offers an inspiring glance at consumer technology design before shiny pixels and UIs took over. (cm)
9. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
It’s here, and it’s shipping! Success At Scale, a new book by Addy Osmani. Get the book or browse the complete library.
10. Recent Smashing Articles
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf) and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.
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