I am feeling very lazy, so I am sitting around playing with some of my old toys. And an all time favorite is the one which creates these 3D shapes, which are apparently called “strange attractors”: Chaoscope!

This is freeware, has a very bare bones interface and is totally vexatious because it doesn’t allow you to save your gradients and other settings. So every time you change a value you lose the previous one forever. But! Vexatious or not - it is wonderful! Totally! So, if you are running a PC, go get one – like pretty much now, I would say!

…

I have started to collect my bookmarks and other weird/maybe useful stuff which I find in my online travels under a separate blog. Reason is that I simply cannot remember what the stuff that I bookmark relates to unless I have an image to look at. This is a personal collection and as such also includes things like boots that I want to buy and funny cat videos. However, there is quite a bit that relates to art and design as well, so some of you may find the stuff that I collect useful. The sequence of the posts is totally random. I am however, attempting to bring some kind of a method to madness by setting up hierarchical categories and tagging stuff.

http://justforbookmarks.wordpress.com/

;-)

(That is actually written with that specific purpose in mind, that is)…

Would be the layout of this page itself! I was moaning just now about how my favorite wordpress theme mnml does not support category hierarchies. So, I went looking for some more themes and stumbled upon this one that I am using right here, right now. It is called Piano Black, designed by mono-lab, who are actually the people who also designed the one called monochrome which I had on this blog for a very long time, and which is now also available as a regular wordpress.com theme.

I did noodle around a bit with this. Changed the background to a damask texture for one thing. Love it when minimalism meets rococo somehow. It is a bit like Freud’s description of the joke as the priest who weds the most unlikeliest of couples, particularly those whose relatives do not condone the union. I know that I did not quote this correctly, but I am sure that you are getting the general idea anyway.  So yes, I really do like these strange unions in graphic design. In life too, for that matter.

And for those who are in search of nice seamless fabric textures, here would be where to look for them: http://www.theinspirationgallery.com/. I have gotten a lot of mileage out of this place, I must say. Although, I hardly ever use them in their actual colors. Like this one in the background for instance. Was this rather insipid blue to begin with. Took care of that before the poor thing had time to hit the surface of the desktop!

So, about the piano theme? If I have to be totally honest I would have twiddled around a bit more with some of the design components, had I been it’s designer. Like that search box. That could certainly use some alignment. The category tabs up top. Not sure if I would place them there or to the left – or even maybe the middle. And then the blog title. I actually changed that. That was bigger and brighter. And if I knew my way around CSS some more I would certainly have a go at said search box and those category tabs. But, one cannot have everything and I am perfectly content to have it the way it is! In fact it is totally gorgeous – unaligned search box and all!… ;-)

*sniffle/sneeze*…