etc.

I’ve had my mind on all things retro lately: the arts & crafts movement, art deco design & architecture, mid-20th Century pop-culture iconography. I’m not sure how this current preoccupation got started, all I know is that lately I find myself drawn to intense colours (teals, oranges, reds), clean lines, and wacky retro icons, like circles and sprockets. This is a first for me!

In the spirit of all things retro, I spent hours in Photoshop last night, installing fonts, playing with dingbats, designing suitably retro headers, and working out a colour scheme, the results of which are here. It feels ever so old school to me, as far as blog design goes that is, no drop-shadows, no rounded corners, and dotted borders even, how very 2002! I can’t stop looking at it at the moment but I know it’s one of those designs that I will become weary of quickly, so I will probably just revert back to the previous design with nary a word (this is actually the same theme, I simply updated the colours, images, and a few other CSS elements; this theme has good bones, which makes it pretty easy to tweak).

Here are a few places that provided inspiration and assistance by way of ideas, fonts and eye-candy:

• font diner (some excellent free fonts here)
• Fullmoon Graphics (great for web/graphic design resources)
• Misprinted Type
• Tack-O-Rama (a staple for free retro web design resources. Their dingbats rock my socks. And you don’t want to miss their design page.)
• Retrolounge (warning: time suck. Don’t visit unless you have a few hours to kill.)