Several design initiatives are taking advantage of the “global village” via the Web, and here’s a look at some of them. Perspectives that are completely different from your own—thousands of miles different—are just one way for you to grow as a designer, so take down some notes and get your passport stamped:
How would you illustrate your city?
CitID invites designers to honor their respective cities creating logos for them. Submission is by email and it’s a great way to get acquainted with design sensibilities from every corner of the world.
How would you create a charity site in 24 hours?
FullCodePress pits Australia, New Zealand, and the US against one another in a 24-hour race to build websites for charitable organizations. Last year’s teams designed for RainbowYouth (New Zealand) and NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre (Australia), with NZ coming out on top.
This year: Team USA members are already locked in, with no less than Jason Santa Maria at the helm, but applications for the Aussie and NZ teams are still open until May 5th. The showdown happens from June 19 to 20.
How would you build on an existing design?
The Exhibition Season of this year’s Layer Tennis is done, but if you missed all the live action this compilation video provides a great wrap-up. There were some interesting new matches this time, covering typography, motion graphics, photography, video editing, and the return of the 10-city tournament.
How does this color make you feel?
To wrap up this little excursion we’ve been on, here’s a golden resource for all the global designers out there: David McCandless and AlwaysWithHonor.com designed an infographic on What Colors Mean Across 10 Cultures.
Coming Together is a font consisting entirely of different ampersands designed created by 400 artists and designers to help the Haiti earthquake victims. It’s available for $20 from leading font distributors and all proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.
The “Coming Together” font contains over 400 glyphs and is supplied as a single, cross-platform OpenType font. All glyphs are accessible using OpenType-savvy applications, Unicode-savvy utilities, the Character Map utility on Windows, and FontBook on Mac OS X.
This is the fourth Font Aid initiative by the Society of Typographic Aficionados, the first one in 1999.
While it’s a bit late to write about this, it’s never too late to help Haiti out. What is unfortunate, however, is that another major earthquake has struck, this time in Chile. Tsunami warnings have been hoisted across the Pacific as well. I hope the Type Society and other groups extend their help for this particular disaster too.
Here’s a great deal you don’t see everyday: SitePoint is letting you purchase 5 e-books for the price of 1 (that’s $29.95) and one hundred percent of the proceeds will be donated to the victims of the bushfires in Australia.
So we’re taking one day, working around the clock to plan, package, and execute our best book deal ever in order to raise funds for the Red Cross as soon as possible. Our ambitious plan is to raise over US$50,000. Every single cent generated from this promotion will go directly to the bushfire relief effort—so if you spend $29.95 purchasing 5 books from SitePoint, the whole $29.95 will go directly to supporting this cause. We feel that’s the least we can do.
The bushfires have already taken hundreds of lives just these past few days. But admirably enough, the SitePoint folks have come up with this selfless deed and at the same time managed to reward others who contribute to it. All in record time—this promo launched only a few hours ago.
It helps that digital products like e-books (and other downloadbles like songs and movies) cost practically nothing to distrbute. Of course one would rather leaf through real paper in a book, but getting hold of the information contained in the book matters more.
More importantly you’re donating to charity and getting rewarded for it. And unlike other products, all of the proceeds go straight to the victims. Not just a fraction. Which means you don’t even have to be interested in the books they’re selling; you can always find someone else who is.
So the customers get books, the victims get help, and SitePoint gets what, exactly? The satisfaction that it’s helping people in deep trouble. And, eventually, the reputation that it’s that kind of company. And knowing that, wouldn’t you want to do business with them again?
The offer ends on February 13. Buy now!
(Disclaimer: I’m not being paid by SitePoint to write this.)
