Abandoned London

Trafalgar Square, originally uploaded by IanVisits.

Just catching up on my blog reader post-Christmas and came across these brilliant photos of London, taken early Christmas morning when hardly anyone was around. Calm and a bit spooky at the same time. Check out the Flickr set and Ian's blog for more.

Collective Christmas

There's been a slew of creative agency Christmas cards this year, with most opting (appropriately) to do an interactive online version.



I have to give honourable mention to my agency Collective's effort, especially as I drew all the tasteful neon lights. Turn up your sound and check it out.



I'm also pretty fond of de-construct's effort which instead of going for the festive angle, is a retrospective of 2008 from various viewpoints including photos, office webcam and newspaper covers. Innovative, engaging and a LOT of work and forward planning! Nice one.

Other cute festive offerings include Special Moves' clever webcam-based toy and Blenderbox's Gingerbread Maker. Really, who ever needs old-fashioned paper cards now anyway?

Multicolr

What a fun little tool from Idée Inc -Multicolr extracts the colours from popular Flickr images. You can then navigate the images by colour using some fancy visual similarity technology. Hours of fun combining colours and seeing what comes up for now, but this visual similarity searching could really take off soon and make searching for stock imagery a much easier process.

Oaththreadline t-shirts

I'm not straight-edge by any stretch of the imagination, but I love these shirts from new clothing line Oaththreadline. Lovely typography and colour choices, and some of the slogans aren't so overtly straight-edge; more just good mottoes to live by.



via cottonable

Delaunay Raster

I love these images created using a custom Illustrator script, by Jonathan Puckey. A bit Picasso, a bit Pop art.

Swapping is the new shopping...

...It's true, and couldn't have come at a better time since all my money is going on Christmas presents and a new flat deposit this month. On Sunday I went swishing, which basically involves bringing a bag of your unwanted clothes and swapping them for someone else's cast-offs. I got 4 lovely new tops, some tea and cake, and had a spring clean while I was at it. Very productive way to spend a Sunday.



This Thursday, in a similar vein, is the Lady Luck Swap til you Drop. I've got so much old/broken jewellery so this is an excellent idea.

We Make Christmas - tomorrow!

A final reminder that the We Make Christmas craft fair is tomorrow (Saturday) at the American Church on Tottenham Court Road. Check out the lovely things on sale on the flickr group. It's going to be a great day.

If You Could print set

I can't seem to stop buying art at the moment. Just purchased this set of 24 (! they'll need a whole room to themselves) prints from the If You Could series. I especially like the Hellovon and Rob Ryan ones. Get a set for yourself from their shop, but be quick, they're limited to 1500.

Aoyama Hina papercuts

Wow is the only word - stunning papercuts by Aoyama Hina, a French/Japanese artist. Visit her flickr and website to see more.

Smirnoff Matrioshka video

My love of nesting/Russian/Matryoshka dolls (whatever you want to call them) is well documented - and I'm partial to a bit of Smirnoff - so of course I love this video by the young UK-based motionographer Koba Yashi.


Smirnoff Black - Matrioska Invaders - SPEC from Director Kobayashi on Vimeo.

Audrey Kawasaki 'Sisters' print

I don't think I will be able to resist buying this gorgeous print by Audrey Kawasaki when it goes on sale on Saturday (8-9pm for those in the UK). A little Christmas gift to myself...