I recently discovered Cufón a text replacement service that swaps out your normal HTML characters and replaces them with whatever custom font you choose (providing the license permits it). It is essentially an alternative to using sIFR which uses flash to replace the characters but can be a pain to set up and often has big delays when pages load creating a rather nasty jumping effect. Cufón I have to say was amazingly simple to use, took only a few minutes to set up and works a treat.  I highly recommend it to anyone else frustrated with being limited to web-safe fonts but reluctant to use lots of images on their site.

Kit Webster is a new media installation artist and composer from Melbourne, Australia.  His videos show incredible light and sound shows that play with perspective and illusion.  My personal favourite is Enigmatica shown below.  Check out more of his work on his website and on Vimeo.

I just love these crazy brightly coloured patterned vinyl records from AI.  The images below are from the anniversary special album When I Was Ten available to buy from Bleep. Beautiful.

Series of sound and visual code experiments.  A team of coders posted an experiment every day in September last year, each post was tagged with ‘hackpact‘, here are the results from Gabor Papp.

This is the experiment posted for day 22.  Check out the rest on his site.

I first saw the work of karlssonwilker several years ago and was especially taken aback with their orb identity for MTV. Unfortunately I forgot to bookmark it at the time and never managed to find the project again although the memory resonated with me and was one of the inspirations behind the logo I created for Nitro Digital. I restumbled across the project today and am pleased to be able to share it with you. Enjoy.

Welcome to our blog on the new draw() website. We’ll still be posting about exciting art, design and code that we’ve seen but now if you head over to the work area you can also see our latest projects.  If you want to know more about draw() or are interested in working with us please do get in touch.

For the past three years I’ve been heading up the creative department at digital marketing agency Nitro Digital, which has been exciting, challenging – a learning curve. However I will be waving a sad farewell to my colleagues at Nitro at the end of February and from the first of March will be starting my own design studio, draw().

Draw() will be specialising in creating innovative design with technology at its core. Programming and electronics will be used to create experiences that are interactive, exciting and highly visual.

A new website with details of past work will shortly be launching at www.designbydraw.com, and this blog will be moving address at the same time. In the meantime if you’d like to know more or receive a copy of my portfolio please drop me a line at hello@designbydraw.com.

I’ve been learning Processing on and off for a while now but were struggling to figure out what to create with it.  Then I discovered OpenProcessing a site that enables people to easily share their sketches and download others, which is helping me move away from tutorials and into something new.  What better way to share my experiments than to upload them back to OP.  The first of which is this little interactive sketch that draws randomly sized rectangles based on the position of the mouse.

It’s a new year and several designers whose work I love and follow are celebrating by producing a beautiful calendar for us.  Here are my favourites.

By This Studio

By Antonio Carusone

August page by Research Studios

During my recent holiday to India I was fortunate enough to be able to go to Chandigarh.  India’s first planned city, built to be the new capital of the Haryana and Punjab regions, although actually being apart of neither, when India gained it’s independence and was separated from Pakistan.

As the city would be planned rather than developed organically over centuries Jawaharlal Nehru India’s first prime minister saw that there was an opportunity to create something special and recruited the Swiss architect Le Corbusier to design a city that would be a symbol of hope and modern India.

The result is a place unlike anywhere else I have visited in India, the streets are wide and tree lined, traffic well organised and obeying the rules of the road, large parks and green spaces flow through the city allowing it to breathe and the grid system layout with numbering of each sector allows for easy navigation.  Key building are designed by Le Corbusier himself and have a wonderful sculptural yet functional form, this style however is not confined to a few key buildings an continues throughout the city.  The strong angular concrete buildings create an interesting contrast to the lush greenery that surrounds them.

For more photos see my flickr set.

I was delighted when Ask Magazine showed an interest in my Pentominoes game and asked if it could be included in their website to accompany an article in the September issue about Archimedes, who amongst other things created the mathematical puzzle Ostomachion.  The puzzle consists of 14 pieces dissected from a square that can then be rearranged to form a wide variety of other shapes and figures.   Naturally I was intrigued and you can now play the puzzle on their site here.

Stunning images of the everyday by Trentgbarker, more on his Flickr stream.  Great compositions and use of colour.