I was just surfing the web looking for new ideas to talk about and I came across Google’s SketchUp 7. It’s free software straight from Google that you can use to create things like a mock-up of a piece of furniture, a skatepark for your hometown, or you can get really creative and design an addition for your home. You can build models from scratch, or you can download what you need from Google 3D Warehouse. It’s a huge, searchable repository of models, and it’s all free!
Check out this promo video for Google SketchUp 7:
Being on twitter has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that you are easily distracted into venturing off onto a 3 hour hiatus and later realizing you didn’t even accomplish what you set out to do! The advantage, it’s all cool stuff I would’ve never found unless I spent 4 times the amount of hours searching google. One of the best things I have found is that there a ton of free fonts out there! For me, a new font gives me inspiration to create something around it and come up with something new and exciting. Typography has really taken off the past few years and has become such an inspiring art form.
In the design community there is a huge movement to get users that use the outdated browser to upgrade to a more modern browser. Why you ask? As a web designer, my personal experience with Internet Explorer 6 has been an utter nightmare. I have worked on projects where I had spent 8 to 16 hours trying to get a design to look right in IE 6 where as the same site looked fine in every other browser including IE 7! I would have nightmares and lose a tremendous amount of sleep over it. Most of the time these issues would cause a project to go over budget and still would not work as it should. Take my site for example, below are two screen shots of my portfolio page. One is how it looks in every browser and the other is IE 6.
