- blogof.francescomugnai

If you’re still reading, Hi!
This blog is an absolute must bookmark - or subscibe to the feed. The posts are genius and well researched, archiving brilliant or creative design; links to personally researched Photoshop and Illustrator files (which are free). Fonts, brushes, icons the list goes on and on.
Have a gander and thank me later.

The online portfolio of Dean Oakley [deanoakley.com], a really simple design - beautifully done.

LogoPond, a place to fish for ideas, Brand and Identity showcase. Not only is their site quite something, the showcase of logo work is more than enough to get the juices flowing.

Let me tell you a tale … Excuse my ignorance but the site is in a language I am yet to master. Never mind that, you don’t need to read to appreciate the design, cool, clean and a great character.

And the final one for today is Veerle’s Blog. Any and every designer should take a look and a read through this site - great articles and a great look.

Enjoy.

So for your pleasure a few sites with useful content and superbly wicked design.

First up, Vista Icons. [www.vistaicons.com]

VistaIcons.com is a collection of free Vista Style icon sets of over 2500 high quality icons in png and ico format. From VistaIcons.com you can freely download 256×256 PNG icons for Windows Vista.

That’s pretty much what the site does. The design is pretty darn funky, from the items jumping out the box to the beautiful and hidden footer.

YoDiv [www.yodiv.com]. A Design Agency from the Isle of Wight with a spunktastic website. Very cartoon based, but still fresh with plenty of white space. Check it out - click click.

And the final one for today, Carsten Mell’s illustration portfolio [www.carstenmell.com]. Not so much for the website, but the illustration work is jaw droppingly awe inspiring.

MY NAME IS IAN USHER, MY WHOLE LIFE IS FOR SALE!

Everything is included in the sale. Yes! absolutely EVERYTHING! Upon completion and settlement I will walk out of my home for the last time in just the clothes I am wearing, and carrying only my wallet and passport. Everything else is part of the auction and will be yours if you are the successful bidder.

Everything: Lifestyle. House. Car. Motorbike. Job. Friends. Everything that I own, and all of the things that I don’t own, but that are still an important part of my life!

For Sale on eBay right now

Other sites of interest which i’ve dug out from my cave of favourites include:

- Goofbay.com
Which has a load of eBay tools on it, some useful, some not so, but if you are an avid eBay user it is worth having this site in your bookmarks.

- 10MinuteMail
PRetty much like it says in the URL, you get a temporary 10 minute email address (which you can extend for longer if need be). Excellent if you don’t want to share your real email.

- Photoshop Disasters
Amusing site showcasing, you guessed it, Photoshop Disasters (in published media). Every other blog seems to have linked to it, so i’m joining in.

Peace and love.

First up, VLC player. I’ve been using this player for years, and love it. It plays everything under the sun, video and audio and doesn’t drain the system anywhere near as much as media player. The playlist makes listening to music a little hard work, but for watching video it can’t be beaten!

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Next on the get list, ObjectDock. It’s a quick launch bar like that of a mac for windows. Looks great. Works Great. Thanks to Dave for pointing me in it’s direction.

ObjectDock™ is a program that enables users to organize their shortcuts, programs and running tasks into an attractive and fun animated Dock. By allowing users to have more control over how they organize their desktop, users can take control of their desktop icons and shortcuts to have them be available when where and how they need them.

Re-size a folder full of images instantly with PhotoGadget. A very useful and time saving tool if you ever need to mass edit images.

Photo Gadget Pro is a shell extension that adds image editing options to Windows Explorer. It can rotate, resize, crop and rename images, add a caption and/or frame, apply different effects and filters (grayscale, invert colors, sepia, flip horizontal/vertical) and carry out format conversions.

Other quick bits worth a mention whilst i’m here.

• AVG Free AntiVirus - It’s free! And doesn’t drain the system like most others.
• EditPad Lite - General-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor.
• Opera Web Browser - The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser available. I’ve nothing against firefox so use that too!
• Open Office - OpenOffice.org 2 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. And it’s free.

That’s enough downloading for one day.

It’s more for my own amusement, and to share with anyone who cares to look the golden wonders I find in the world. Such as?

Well, like really cool free software, or really really cool not free software. Strange, wonderful, amazing and funny websites. Articles I might write, which to someone somewhere, might be interesting, and general other stuff which although might be a lot of things, wont be boring.

So that’s it for now and incase you are wondering, today I mostly worked on this here website.