Culinary prettiness

A trip to the annual Tewkesbury food festival reminded me of artistically presented delights. At the food festival children were making creatures out of veg and toothpicks, though the food for sale was not particularly presented in an artistic way which was a pity. So what would I consider a truly artistic presentation of food? Bento box art of course! You have to see it to believe it so get to Google images and feast your eyes on some amazing culinary creations!

Visual inspiration

If you are visually minded like me then wherever you are you might see the most unlikely thing that gets your thoughts flowing. You immediately need to grab paper and a pen to sketch it out or write about it, and just get it out of your head.

A great book to inspire you, if you are a web designer or in need of some visual inspiration, is the annual publication of the Web Designer Index. The book is filled with photos of some of the most amazing websites around, and moves through them by colour categorisation. Once you've looked through one of these books there is nothing better to help you clear your 'designer's block' and get you set to complete your latest top class design!

Bringing Character Design to life

In 2010 Helen Frik's first solo exhibition took place at the Chapter Arts centre in Cardiff. One of her installations was based on her picture titled 'Higher up, where to'. To make this installation work members of the public were invited to submit their unusual handmade toys which would fill an entire room. You have never seen so many strange imaginative creatures in one place.

Taking it a step further and famous for her work, the Felt Mistress creates the most amazing characters out of felt, her talent is inspirational and makes you want to move away from pen and paper and onto needle and thread. http://www.flickr.com/people/feltmistress/

If you give it a go, what you create can be time consuming but you'll be extremely proud of your life like creature(s)!!

Art collection or addiction?

If you like character design then you are sure to know all about designer toys and, in particular, dunnys. These charming, small rabbit like characters - decorated by well known artists, make such a fun way to collect art.

Available to purchase in "blind" boxes from Kid Robot or the Forbidden Planet if you are down in London - the surprise of not knowing which one you will get is half the fun (or the fear). You have to be careful that you don't become addicted, however, as on eBay you can see exactly what you are getting and shop, or battle it out in bids, for the ones you've always wanted!

My ultimate dream is to have my own dunny design out there one day. So Kid Robot, please run a dunny design contest!

Content hat

Well, I've been so busy writing web content this evening I've barely had a spare 66 seconds for this. Now it's 23.27 and I'm exhausted so just thought I'd squeeze the last few seconds out that I have in me. Good night! :o) zzz

Top tools: TextWrangler

As a copywriter I find TextWrangler, for the Mac, is a great tool to use when writing for the web. Any content that you have written, or that you receive, that has been prepared in a Word doc for example, just by cutting and pasting it into TextWrangler will ensure that your copy is clean, removing all the bad code before you paste it into your CMS. Quick and easy to use it's a perfect text editor tool when writing copy. Take a look at it's general purpose capabilities.

Use graffiti for art not vandalism ...

...were the words sprayed on a bleak wall in Newport this morning. Though this artist's work seemed to be merely a couple of small stencils depicting field mice, with the "artist's" name scrawled much larger in pink. If you're ever near London's South Bank you should admire the graffiti there - legal, and some of which is very artistic. Perhaps there should be more areas like this to inspire us, and to discourage the "vandalism".

My favourite App this week

If there's one app I really love it's Photoshop Express. Although it offers basic functions like crop, rotate, add an effect or border, it's a very powerful tool when enhancing photos on your phone. The one thing I'd really like to see is the ability to combine two images. The app is free, so download it and have a play.

Why 66 Seconds?

I never seem to have enough hours in the day to keep a blog up and running, life just gets in the way, which is ironic seeing as a blog is often about life experiences. So I wondered if dedicating just 66 seconds a day to a blog post would be achiev .... oops - 66 seconds are up!