Archive for category General Design

From mid October until mid November Hindu’s, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists celebrate a festival called Diwali, where they will light up small clay lamps to signify good over evil. The festival is always a very bright and colourful time with celebrants wearing new cloths, sharing sweets with friends and family and lots of people decorate and light up their houses in a similar way that western cultures have big decorations for holidays such as Christmas.

Called ‘the festival of lights’ people also make symbolic diyas or kandils, which are colourful paper lanterns. It is a very bright and colourful time of the year and is spectacular to witness first hand.

Coutts, who normally turn their attention to private banking and wealth management, have decided they will do their part for the festival in London this year and have decorated their Strand Office with an intricate Diwali window dressing. They made a video showing a time lapse of how they did it as well.

This is something I haven’t played around with for a long time until I saw someone do one recently and found the site again. For anyone who loves to quickly and easily mess about with how something looks and they don’t have the time, patience or skill to alter things in Photoshop, a very cool site called Volkswarenhaus made two simple programs called Bus Selecta and Bug Selecta that let you take a base Volkswagen Camper Van  or Volkswagen Beetle and then customise it using a series of preset options, the Beetle version has more options but both allow you to make some pretty cool designs very easily.

They were made a long time ago (Bus Selecta says est. 2001!) but they were probably the first flash based design game I ever came across and I loved them at the time. Finding them again has shown I haven’t changed much and could still mess about on them making different types of van or Bug for a long time! However it does also reignite my want for a real VW camper and I now have to check out some vans for sale, so while I do that check out the two designs I created.

How many of these do you stare at daily? The Default Avatar’s are probably the most viewed images in the online world, but how much do you actually look at them, or take notice?

This compilation of anon avatars was found here