Video: Papyrus

"Papyrus" by Saturday Night Live

In the single funniest sketch Saturday Night Live has aired in the past five years, Ryan Gosling tears into the graphic design of Avatar's title.

Featured Site: Colormind & Fontjoy

"Colormind is a color scheme generator that uses deep learning. It can learn color styles from photographs, movies, and popular art."

Colormind and Fontjoy are a new set of sites custom taylored to goose the creative juices of graphic designers.  Both sites are powered by "neural nets" developed by one Jack Qiao.  One suggests unique pairings of fonts for your typography project.  The other suggests unique palettes.  They a huge help when you're experiencing creative writer's block or just new to graphic design.

Colormind generates five-color palettes with the click of a mouse using data drawn from Adobe Color.  Meanwhile, FontJoy analyzes letterforms to "systematically find fonts that share similarities but contrast in a key way" to match typefaces.  Yes, you might know that using a serif for a header with sans serifs for a subhead creates an eye-drawing visual contrast, but FontJoy goes deeper than that.  Fonts  chosen by this site might share a weight, slant, or other quality that makes them the perfect pair.

Both Colormind and Fontjoy are free to use.  Of course, whether or not you find them useful is another question entirely.

Humor: Lies Designers Tell

"Lies designers tell their clients" by Creative Market

Really, these could apply to anyone in the technology sector, but they're particularly accurate if you're a graphic designer.

Illustration: Star Wars: Icon Series

"Star Wars: Icon Series" by Madrid, Spain-based Angeloletra

Illustration: Force Awakens Icon Series

Star Wars The Flat Awakens Icons by Lisbon, Portugal-based Filipe de Carvalho

I'm a sucker for a good icon set, and with the next Star Wars film looming on the horizon, there could only be one choice!

Graphic Design: Modern Game of Thrones News

"Team Dragonstone + fake news sites" by Eva (Watson-sighs-and-tuts)

Inspired by Game of Thrones business AU

Imagine if Game of Thrones were re-shot in the style of NBC's Kings.  Classical plot, modern sensibilities.  That would be a show worth paying admission for.    

Graphic Design: Game of Thrones Business Logos

"Game of Thrones - Modern Logos" by Southampton, UK-based Ed Wain

What if the houses of Westeros were competing corporations in a dystopia future instead of medieval aristocracy?  Their branding might look a little something like this.

Featured Site: MyScriptFont

Makerbook is a hand-picked directory of the best free resources for creatives.

Posters: The Golden Ratio

"The Golden Ratio" by Daniel P. Cosgrove

Design: VHS movie redesigns

Awesome VHS Redesigns by Stan VHS

Golem13 created the Stan VHS Tumblr featuring a eighties-style VHS cover art for modern television series and movies as part of an April Fools' Day prank.  Personally, I think Game of Thrones would have gone over big in the eighties.  The entire series of VHS cover art can be seen on the Golem13 website and Stan VHS blog.

Design: Final Fantasy Gil Banknote

"Final Fantasy Gil Banknote Collection" by Donegal, Ireland-based Neil Donner

Prints and merchandise available for purchase from RedBubble.

Design: NES Adventure Time

Nintendo's Adventure Time by Jinn Devil

"Don’t you love when the coverarts back in the 80s have nothing to do with the game itself? Take a look into Megaman1 boxart for instance, I wonder who the heck draw megaman that way… he even have a pistol (not to mention those legs, man… those legs)!

This was a NES game idea that I had, it would be heavily “a boy and his blob” inspired. You would use Jake’s transformations to search for power ups and advance the levels, Jake would also be a weareble armor like he was once or twice in the show. Finn would play very megaman-zelda2-ish; walk, jump, slash, etc, all in 8bit goodness! I tried my best to mimic the NES limitations, using 4 colors per block and 5 colors max per sprite, and the color palette is fearelly the same."

Quick Pic: Pantone Eggs

Pantone Easter Eggs by Jessica Jones

"The graphic designer in me couldn't resist attempting faux Pantone Easter eggs.

I dyed these boiled eggs by standing them vertically in small cups of dye. Then I typed up the labels and printed them on ink jet temporary tattoo paper. Remember to print the words backwards! I used Silhouette brand tattoo paper I bought at my local PaperSource, but you can also get similar stuff from DecalPaper.com. I matched the color numbers using my chip book. Knowing they were correct gave me great inner satisfaction."

Graphic Design: Brands vs Zombies

"Brands vs Zombies" by Josh Namdar and Aditya Hariharan

A pair of Miami Ad School students have launched a fantastic Tumblr dedicated to re-imagine big brand marketing for the zombie apocalypse.  The friends were inspired by the television series The Walking Dead.

"So one day, while watching another tastefully graphic installment of the Walking Dead series, Adi turned to Josh and asked, “Ever wonder what would happen if brands could use their existing resources and influence to help mankind survive? Also, wouldn’t it be a cool way to get a potential employer to see how clever and insightful we are?”"

Some examples of their work include ads for an IKEA line of furniture that keeps your home safe from zombies and an Airbnb that lists safe accommodations for people to take refuge from wondering hordes at night.

We've included a few examples of their best work below, but you really need to click through to see the site.  It's quickly growing into the kind of Tumblr that you can loose track of time browsing.

Featured Site: MyScriptFont

MyScriptFont is a free online tool that helps you to create a vector font from your handwriting. All you have to do is download the provided template in PDF or PNG, fill out the squares with a marker before scanning it at 150 or 300dpi in grayscale. After uploading it, you’re then able to download the resulting font as a TTF or OTF file.  Check out how to install and use your exclusively created font here.

Featured Site: Metaflop

Metaflop by Swiss designers Marco Müller and Alexis Reigel

Metaflop is an easy-to-use web app that lets users design their own fonts without the expense of typography software or the hassle of dealing with the technical aspects of design, like programming language and coding.

Metaflop makes designing your own fonts as simple as adjusting a the app’s sliders to adjust a typeface's characteristics, such as cap height and ascenders, in real time.   Once you're satisfied with your font design, you can easily download it as a .otf font for free.  It's also a great way for new graphic designers to learn the terminology surrounding type design.  If you've ever read about typeface terms like ascenders, cap heights, overshoot, descenders, and contrasts, there's no better way to figure out what these terms mean than by using a slider to change their variables and see how it changes a typeface in real time.

In an interview with It’s Nice That, designers Marco Müller and Alexis Reigel said: "We are aware that it is difficult to produce subtle and refined typographical fonts (in the classical meaning)… Nevertheless we believe there is a undeniable quality in parametric font design and we try to bring it closer to the world of the designers."

Featured Site: DIY

DIY is a new educational site that specializes in enabling kids to learn a wide variety of skills on their own through the use of online web tutorials.  It doesn't just offer the common Boy Scout skillset like building fires or tying knots.  The merit badges kids earn through this site, which have been designed by Isaiah Saxon, commemorate achievements like backyard farming, engineering darkness, creative use of tape, and even being a Yeti. This could even be better than becoming one of NightVale's Eternal Scouts.  I mean, there's so much less blood involved.

Merchandise: 8-Bit Willow

8-Bit Willow Pattern Plates by UK-based artist Olly Moss

These aren’t your grandmother’s Willow pattern plates.  Moss designed these awesome bone china plates that incorporate graphics from classic Game Boy versions of Legend of Zelda and Pokémon into classic China Willow patterns.  He's dubbed the style "8-Bit Willow."

Design: Helvetica Strikes Back

"Helvetica Strikes Back" by Fernando de Carabassa

Prints available for purchase from RedBubble.

Design: Dagobah Snake Soup

Dagobah Snake Soup Can Design by PAL Graphics

Ever wondered what soup labels might look like in the Star Wars universe?  Yeah, me neither, but someone did.  I guess it takes all types.  Even