elbowruminations | Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews

Living, working and blogging in Toronto, Ontario, the author of this blog we know is an award winning Art Director and Designer. Frederik Samuel’s Ad Goodness is a black and white diorama of good and bad of advertising from around the world.

One of the most notable aspects of this popular blog is the masterful implementation of advertising into the layout and theme of the site. Although at times it’s somewhat difficult differentiating between navigational links and adverts, the pay-per-click-ability of this blog is impressive. Anyone looking to make money online could learn valuable lessons in advertising optimization by studying Samuel’s work carefully.

Ironically, this blog, in which good advertising is well executed online, also highlights the best of advertising in the real world. Here are few interesting links to check out.

Our post on April 12, called Designing for the Wacky New Frontier, discussed some of the ways Web 2.0 is changing our language and presenting new challenges for designers. The Name Inspector is a blog that specializes in keeping up with these trends.

Christopher Johnson is his real name. He’s a self-proclaimed wordavor* with a PhD who has worked as a linguist and language technologist for over 15 years. His experience is vast and his education reputable. His blog discusses the linguistic meaning of words and brand names, defines their verbal harmonies, and describes their visual connotations. His posts are intelligent and interesting with phonetic representations accompanying most words being analyzed.

The site itself takes some time to understand and navigate but once you figure out what it’s all about, it makes for an interesting read. To get you started, here is a post about Liftport, a company that is building an elevator to space.

*a wordavor is a person or animal that eats words (I don’t think it’s in the dictionary yet).

Canadian Design Resource is a project that seeks to document classic and original Canadian design work by bringing it to the web. The CDR doesn’t restrict itself to Graphic Design, but also features fashion artifacts, sporting gear and product packaging, just to name a few categories. Our favourites are the Expo 67 features (an incredibly modern design look for the 60s), and the longstanding Canadian classic, the Canada wordmark. (PS: Did you know that Canada’s logo is one of the featured examples of a wordmark for Wikipedia’s definition?)

As you can clearly see for yourself, the Canadian Design Resource is not only helping bring signature Canadian design ephemera to light, but is also helping bring out the brilliance of the Canadian design industry. Designed by Spacecadet Design and operated by Motherbrand, the CDR is one of our favourite sites to check out regularly.