Great free web design tutorials

Teach yourself what you need to know, for free, with these online lessons. They start at the beginning and take you where you want to go.

Homeboy Industries and solar power - WSJ

We need a lot more people organizing like Homeboy Industries has, to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the new green businesses.

Make fonts from your own lettering

Interesting free online tool lets you make fonts from your own hand-drawn alphabets.

Thanks to Nowon for the tip

Table on trucks, $1700+

I'm sure you all can do better than this. It looks like a business opportunity.

via boingboing

HDR graffiti photos and HDR tutorial

I'm not sure how documentary it is, but HDR photos of graffiti sure are dramatic. The tutorial link is at the bottom of the page and it's aimed at typical cameras and hobby photographers.

Flickr has an HDR pool where you can see lots of interesting landscape and building HDR effects, also.

Making art *and* money

There are a lot of resources mentioned (and linked) in the article along with some inspiring success stories. Here's a taste:

Mr. Niles and Ms. Hellmuth have learned on their own what Elliot McGucken teaches in his course, Artist Entrepreneurs, which he developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a grant from the Kauffman Foundation. Mr. McGucken?s course, now taught at Pepperdine University, rests on the principle that those who create art should have the skills to own it, profit from it and protect it.

?It?s about how to make your passion your profession, your avocation your vocation, and to make this long-term sustainable,? he said.

Tristan Hummel, 22, a senior at the Art Institute of Chicago, said he wanted to help create a world where artists could do art as their primary practice and still make a living. Three years ago, after reading that Chicago?s El trains were available for rent, he got the idea to bring artists together to create an art show on wheels. This fall, his idea came to fruition with ?Art on Track,? an eight-train car on the orange line that traveled Chicago?s loop while displaying the work of more than 200 emerging artists.

[Photos ...]

Art schools, too, are starting to step in. At the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., students can now major or minor in a program called ?The Business of Art and Design.? Larry Thompson, the school?s dean, said he was inspired to create the program when he read about Dan Pink?s book, ?A Whole New Mind,? which popularized the notion that artists, especially those who can marry left and right brain skills, the analytical and the creative, will be in high demand in the coming years.

?I am committed to destroying the myth of the starving artist,? Mr. Thompson said.

There are more art-related and creative jobs now than ever before, because of computers and the Web. Also, running your own arts or crafts business is much easier now, for the same reasons. It takes only some skill and samples to get started in many cases, so educating yourself is the place to start.

10,000 hours = expertise

Malcolm Gladwell explains the relationship among effort, talent, and success. What looks like genius can be explained to some extent by practice. Early successes mean early parental support.

30 tutorials that will teach you Photoshop

Plus, they have Illustrator tutorials and soon Fireworks, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects and Flash. And the tutorials are from other sites ... that also have tutorials! Best of all, it's all free and at your own pace. (Actually, the best part is that if you take the time to sharpen your digital design skills, you'll have very well-paid work in your future if you want it.)

Tip: Students and teachers get amazing educational discounts on software.

Wikipedia vs Gilligan's Island: A sea change in human activity

... television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way ... that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is ....

We live in a disruptive time. As humans turn away from TV and begin to participate in making media, community, tools and meaning, we have a surplus of brainpower and time to apply to making a better world together. Viva la difference!

Good, cheap, software classes online

Here's a good place to get some training on lots of software and online topics. For $25 you can have a month of access to the entire 30,000+ library of online tutorials, or you can buy them one at a time on CD, and so on. For less money than one college course costs, you can have a full year of access to their courses. Become the Flash expert you want to be, learn 3d software, get some solid HTML training, and get yourself a better, more fun job. Education costs a little but pays back a lot more.

FontStruct

Create, share, hide, modify, and download TrueType fonts -- using this Web-based lettering tool.

Book publishing: the lowdown, by Mark Hurst

If you ever think about writing a book, know this first.

ZON

"Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

"By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way. Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China. Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

"The nice part about Zon is it is all browser based. No client applications are required, so you can log in and play from school, work or home. Zon is a persistant environment, so when you log off, the world still keeps going.

"As you progress through the game, your character graduates from the tourist class, to a resident of Zon and then finally a citizen, where you can own businesses and create new content for the world. "

[The website is coy about pricing, but it seems to be free for a while anyway. It's in beta still. A university project of some kind. - Susan]

Estria's skinny cap (stencil tip) tutorial [updated]

Correct info, from the site: "In 1986 Crayone TWS and Razor KTD first introduced Estria to the Skinny Cap. Razor was the first to conceive of it." (San Francisco Bay Area)

This type of detail cap has spread to Europe and beyond over the decades.

Here's the first public tutorial on home made skinny caps.

Be forewarned: Using these can be incredibly messy. You will get paint all over yourself until you get the hang of it. Wear gloves and trashed shoes. On the upside, you'll have plenty of loose paint for those nice splatter effects.

Apple photobooks 20% off until May 11 (USA only)

I've heard these are really nice looking, but I haven't made one yet. It's supposed to be super easy to make photobooks with iPhoto and there's a tutorial here on Apple.com

Factory 311 - Art and Design Dream Team

Check this out. Factory 311 has assembled an amazing group of artists into an international design team. Way to go.

How to create your own viral videos on YouTube

Wired how-to wiki has the nitty gritty.

Surveillance cameras: the simple approach

Headband restores anonymity on the street.

Cool Tools

The brilliant Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site has some great things on it. Recently I saw

Book on HDR photography
Motion Mountain Physics / Art book - free PDF download

He also has some interesting realtek on his Street Use site. Check out the painted trucks from Pakistan.

Why borrowing money for college makes sense

Especially if you will have to pay for it yourself, getting a college education is the smart thing to do. (See the link for a helpful illustration of why that's so.) Sure, some philosophy majors work in restaurants, but for most people, the difference in income and opportunity is almost immediate after they get a degree.

Education is your best chance to get out of poverty, both for you and your children. It was the best decision I ever made. Make a list of questions and an appointment to speak to someone at a university Admissions office to discuss your options and where to start.

In the USA and likely in other places too, if you're poor or smart or talented enough, the government or school will pay for some of your tuition. Every worthwhile school wants you to attend, so they are often helpful in making it possible.

If you are in the US and you think you might want to go to college this fall, you need to fill out the financial aid forms now, because they process the applications in the order they are received, starting January 1 each year. Don't wait.

USA: You can find out what your Pell Grant eligibility is at www.fafsa.ed.gov . They also have some other grant info there, but your school will have even more information about financial aid.

How to run a hacker space (PDF)

This is a funny-but-practical slide presentation (in PDF) on how to organize creative groups and spaces in order to make cool things together, by some hackers who have done it successfully. Almost every suggestion is applicable to anyone trying to set up and share studio or workspace.

[Thanks, Andy]

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists ? and Megastars

Types of music business deals today and what's good, bad, and ugly about them.

Midwest Teen Sex Show

Sex ed by and for teens. Video podcasts. Also available on iTunes. Watch theirs, make your own. Scholarship prizes.

"Young people (15 to 30) are invited to submit new digital videos showing how they envision the sex ed experience. The grand prize winner will receive a $3500 scholarship or cash equivalent."

Posters to download - Rezistr

Goin Nukuler is my fave.

24-h Galerie

Outdoor aerosol gallery, with construction details, in German. (English version coming soon.)

Fun things to do with stencils: print clothes

Diluted bleach in a spray bottle + your favorite stencils or interesting objects = custom clothing prints.

14 days to save Internet radio -- Raise hell or lose it

Problem in a nutshell: Internet radio is mostly done by people like you and me, with very limited $$ and a love for music. These DJs provide most of the public musical diversity now that big corporations own most of the analog radio stations. The music industry, now famous for shooting itself in the foot, wants to raise the fees on internet radio, which will put many, if not most of them, out of business immediately. Fees are retroactive. The day the music could die is May 15 because that's the day of the vote on H.R. 2060, The Internet Radio Equality Act, which was introduced by Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Donald Manzullo (R-IL ) to save the Internet radio industry.

What to do: call and write your congresscritters and tell them to support this bill.

If you are a musician, it is even more important for you to write now, if you want to save this outlet for your own business and creative interests, because both sides of the issue argue they are doing this for you.

A summary of the problem is at the link above, and there are links near the bottom of that page for writing and calling info. Here's the main site, to send your letter from:

savenetradio.org

Make Internet TV

Useful tutorial on do it yourself internet video equipment and processes.

via BoingBoing.net

Graffiti-printing bike misplaced by NYPD, rider arrested to prevent protest

It turns out that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, you can get arrested *before* you participate in a political protest. I feel safer already!

His bike's worth a look too. He converted it to use spray paint chalk to make dot-matrix lettering on the pavement.

The bike and the arrest are old news, but the extent to which the gov will go to prevent protesting is a story the media seems ready to start telling, finally. Too bad we can't seem to get a better gov instead, one we don't need to protest against all the time.

Until then, though, it's important to keep legal protests legal no matter where you live, because it's the governments you can't protest against that do the most damage. You'd think a unionized police force would already know that.

Make your own books and photobooks

Kevin Kelly on Cooltools explains the best options for printing your own books online.

The service he suggests for image and photo books is www.blurb.com

Blurb has a free downloadable
PDF file that teaches you how to make a book.

Poetic Terrorism

Hakim Bey, from TAZ

Bicycle Bombing

See it in action (Quicktime movie)