www Bridgeman Art

I found another good stock image website for people looking for full quality images of fine art  - this one is a better website so its probably worthwhile to use this one instead of the previous site I posted about.

http://www.bridgemanart.com/Default.aspx

Adobe tutorials

www.deke.com/

What a life saver this guy is. You can find loads of Photoshop video series by him on Lynda.com but his website has lots of good free info on it for anyone who uses Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator.

NBA design

www.nba.com

I used to play basketball quite a lot as a kid and ever since then I've been fascinated by the visual side of the NBA - the logos are obviously central to each team's 'look' and you can see, on the website above, how cleverly the designers have 'padded out' each logo to create a uniquely styled website for each team.

I think the site is a great example of how many different ways you can make what is essentially the same content look using a good template. If you go to the 'teams' tab at the top left of the page and click on each to cycle through,  you can see what I mean. Nothing too complex either - just loads of strokes, upon strokes for the type, some drop shadows here and there, and lots of colour/colour gradients or a textured background.

If there's one reason I'd love to live in America, it's so I could go to basketball games! It's one of the few things from my childhood that I still find exciting today. The worst part about it is that my favourite team, Settle Sonics (Shawn Kemp was awesome!), were disbanded for whatever reason years ago.

New typefaces

In my (very) tentative approach to starting my book I've been looking at typefaces I could use for it. I'm also looking for a good site to buy stock images relating to the Italian Renaissance but have only found one or two so far:

www.artres.com/

www.superstock.com

Definitely have a look at the second link - some nice photography in there but there's also a lot of fine art images that you don't find in the more popular stock photo websites.

Back to type though! I'm a fan of Garamond, but I always found it a little soft edged and really wanted something more refined so that I could set large headings with more confidence. Galliard is ideal for this - the 'ITC Galliard' version that I got has 4 weights which also makes it great for general use. 

Cut by Robert Granjon in the 16th Century, Galliard is very similar to Garamond but appears to have a more deliberate shape to it. I've made the two faces visually equal in size, below, to more clearly show the differences.

I also got Stymie because I wanted a nice rounded sans but Mrs Eaves sans was too expensive...  Still, I like slab serifs so Stymie is a good'n. Only thing I've noticed is that its default kerning attributes will usually need some attention.