Fun Friday Resources

Today we have a grab bag of random websites that center vaguely around word things.

For example, here’s a helpful article on choosing the right note-taking app — if you’re going to use such a thing instead of a paper WASTE BOOK. And here’s an interesting recent entry into that race called Nebo.

Here’s a good article that talks about a decision matrix that might be more applicable to your creative process than the Eisenhower matrix. (The use of reversible/irreversible is intriguing.)

Got a design project but need some visual resources to STEAL FROM THE BEST? Typographic Work is stupid simple: just images of outstanding graphic design. Its interface is a bit… abstruse, shall we say? If you click on an image, it just lightboxes the image. If you hover on the image, though, a small white box/menu pops up in the upper right corner. The plus sign will give you some attribution and a link to the original image, but on the whole things are not documented well enough for my tastes. (There’s also a tiny gray plus sign in the lower left corner of the screen which gives you a couple more options.)

[The image up top, for example, is an art print, Abstract Composition 868, by Jesús Perea, but it took me clicking through to Tumblr, reactivating my account (that’s on me), and following the thread to Perea’s website. Too much work, although now I’m wanting art by Jesús Perea…]

FontJoy lets you randomly generate combinations of fonts that the developers claim an AI says go together. The algorithm gives you a head, a subhead, and text, each with a different font. The left sidebar allows you to lock in fonts you like or change the ones you don’t. On the whole, it would be a good tool to generate new ideas for you to develop even if it doesn’t literally solve your design problem.

Finally, if you need a website but maybe not one as solid or as expensive as this one, look at mmm.com. An account is free, although there are paid upgrades of course. The free account gets you three webpages and 30 “blocks” per page, which is minimal but may be sufficient to your needs. The æsthetic is a bit jumbly for my tastes, but you may be one of those young hippity-hop types and find it appealing. Here’s the page I set up to experiment: https://build.mmm.page/thelichtenbergian.main.

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