Monthly Archives: September 2009

Go Wordle Crazy!

Screen shot 2009-09-21 at 9.07.17 AM

Here’s a little something for all you graphic design/typography/font junkies.

I stumbled across this wonderful site called Wordle. Engineered, designed, and created by Jonathan Feinberg- he developed core algorithms for laying out and displaying random words. Here’s how it works:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

http://www.wordle.net

Death of the Morning Paper with Fresh Sliced News

freshslicednews

Are we one step closer to the death of news print journalism? Some say “yes- its inevitable!”, while others, still like the feel of a “real” newspaper and freshly squeezed analysis first thing in the morning. I’m not prepared to write a long winded debate on the future of newspapers. Why? Because its a cumbersome debate I’ve heard all before.

Internet start-up aficionados at Fresh Sliced News Inc. launched a free Adobe Air powered-desktop application that lets you to build a personalized newspaper from your favorite news sources on the web.

I had the opportunity to download and try the application. All things considered, it’s still a work in progress. But what I liked about it is you can create personalized sections on the applications within each file folder and its lets you pull in the RSS feeds of news sites and blogs. Here, the content is automatically added to the application and news stories are given more visual prominence corresponding to their importance.

Is this end of newspapers? I don’t believe so. Download the application and give it a try. Let me know what you think.

http://www.freshslicednews.com/

Art Spiegelman on 9/11

I wanted to post this last week but I was in-flight from Toronto, Canada back to Melbourne. Here’s a two-minute excerpt of political cartoonist/illustrator Art Spiegelman talking about his personal memory of surviving the 9/11 terrorist attack.

I had the pleasure of producing the entire profile segment with my former co-producer, Carolynne Hew, for CBC News: Sunday. Original broadcast date: April 6, 2008.

You can watch the profile segment in its entirety at CBC website and read what viewers had to say.

http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2008/04/040608_1.html#comments

bracelets made from forks @ Rose Street Artists Market

In Melbourne today- rain, rain, and more rain. But the weekend is just around the corner and the weather forecast calls for plenty of sunshine… So If you haven’t already penciled yourself in for the weekend and you’re looking for something do to- here’s my suggestion for Saturday/Sunday. Visit the Rose Street Artists Market in Fitzroy and make sure you check out Greg’s concession- he designs jewelery with materials used from cutlery, forks and tea spoons.

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