I was thinking about what kind of a post I’d put together before Christmas. I’d been wanting to do a full on post about Etsy for a while now. What with it being a major time for gift buying I thought I might highlight a few sellers who’ve helped me get the perfect gift.

If you don’t know Etsy its a website where people can buy and sell handmade goods. In some respects its a very american orientated site, however there are plenty of sellers from the UK and even from throughout Europe.
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As a frequenter of design based blogs I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about HTML 5.

Every few years theres an overhaul of web technologies or someone comes up with ‘the latest thing’ which will apparently exponentially improve our webby lives. So I often come at these things from an overly critical stance. Out there in the real world what’s it gonna do?
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I’ve bean meaning for a while to talk about some of my favourite artists and now is as good a time as any to begin. I’ll probably come back to this subject every now and then to add more to the list.

I’d like to start with a relatively unknown artist and illustrator Kit Williams. He’s probably most famous for a book entitled Masquerade.
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I’m a massive fan of Matthew Collings. He’s a British artist but more well known for his critiques of modern art. I first saw his series ‘This is modern art’ in 2000, it was so good he won a bafta for it. So, I was pleased to see a brief return on BBC2 in a show entitled ‘What is Beauty?’

‘What is Beauty?’ was a look at why we think some things are more beautiful than others. Thinking about beauty isn’t just important for artists its also is fundamental principle of design. Beauty is often subjective, not everyone likes the same colours for example. Stripping opinion away we are all hard wired to find certain things universally beautiful.
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I wanted to come back to an earlier post I made about symbols, icons and how we each interpret them differently.

I’m a big fan of the AIGA website, my only gripe is that because I don’t live in the US I can’t join. Anyway, their site is a great repository of articles about design. It’s not quite the same as a blog since blogs often intentionally choose topics that will raise their SEO.
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So a few weeks ago I was working on a landing page – for those who don’t know a landing page is used in online marketing. Its the page that you see when you click on a paid for banner ad or link in a search engine.

It allows the marketeer to target a specific market with a message tailored to that particular person. If your that interested in knowing more about landing pages you can find them on Wikipedia.
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Recently I’ve been reading Ways Of Seeing by John Berger, its a very short book containing essays on the subject of art criticism. Originally created from a TV series in 1972 it looks at contemporary opinions of the time about fine art.

Its one of those books that I’ve heard of but never actually read myself, and if your into art I would highly recommend it. Although not a light read it gives some interesting opinions about how even in the pre-internet days people were concerned about how images are reproduced and consumed.
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When I was doing my blog rounds the other day I came across an interesting article about how our eyes perceive colours.

I think the easiest way of describing the theory is that in our minds we see a shape and then the shape has a colour attached to it. So when we look at a post box we first see the shape of it as a object and then attach a colour to this object – which in this case is red.
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I was going to post something fun about Halloween, however I think I may leave that for a later point. I also realise that I often neglect to post to my own blog for one reason or another so its been some time since theres been anything new.

Part of that is being able to find suitable inspiration when it comes to writing these things and I’ve often been too busy to be ‘inspired’.
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With Halloween looming there is much talk about goolish fonts for use during the season. Personally I love halloween and scripted gothic fonts.

So with that in mind I’ve been thinking about fonts and font sites. One of my favorites is da fonts it offers a comprehensive list of fonts often getting new ones in weekly and they are often ‘on trend’. Its particularly handy if you’ve seen a font out and about and you want to try and get something similar. http://www.dafont.com/ Da fonts has both mac and windows fonts for free download.
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