position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

I thought this would be interesting for readers in the Cologne, Germany area. The Helvetica documentary will be showing at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Google Maps), on September 4th, at 19:00. Aside from the film, there will be a panel discussion with Lars Müller, a Q&A with director Gary Hustwit, and a rooftop after-party.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. I am definitely going, so let me know if you’ll be there.

SWFUpload is a flash-powered file-upload widget intended to replace the regular HTML file-upload form element. In their own words, SWFUpload is “a small javascript/flash library to get the best of both worlds - The great upload capabilities of flash and the accessibility and ease of html/css”. SWFUpload offers a number of usability and styling features the standard html version can’t offer, and for those who don’t have Flash/Javascript, SWFUpload degrades gracefully.

Update 2008-11-22: It appears SWFUpload has moved to a new domain in the meantime: www.swfupload.org. Thanks to readers Kooshal and Jigna for letting us know.

For all you typophiles out there, here’s a lovely little collaborative project. Get your daily typography fix on This Day in Type, a “designer generated” calender where every day is presented with a different typographic twist. Designers are invited to submit their own creations for a date of their choice. Since there are often numerous submissions per day, public voting decides which work will become part of the the calender. I like!

Wait, don’t hit that delete button just yet. Have a second look: your blurry and overexposed photo just might be material for Deleted Images, a website dedicated to sharing with the world what you might have deleted otherwise. One of those simple concepts I wish I had thought of. (Thanks, knufflebunneh)

The world works in funny ways. I was just fighting with a creativity problem when my friend told me that he was, by chance, writing about this very issue:

There are innumerable creative aids, and most of them require an ability to visualize. Some people aren’t good at visualizing, so imagining different colors or objects can become a daunting task. Forget about trying to visualize how a room should be arranged; that’s next to impossible.

Sound familiar? Excommunicate.Net offers up 10 ways to help you improve your visualization skills with a few established and a few very unconventional methods.

Liquidcity offers a set of 165 free vector icons in glossy-look, all in full .ai and .svg formats, in 5 color sets. A nice, clean collection and a good base to create further icons.

Hey everyone, I’ve got a few invites for Pownce, so if you’d like one, let me know in the comments. You can find my profile here. Thanks to Matthias for the initial invite.

Get ‘em while they’re hot.

You can never be too old for paper toys, especially when they are of the stylish designer type. I’ve scoured the web to find you some of the best free designer paper toys out there. Simply print ‘em, cut ‘em out, fold ‘em and glue ‘em together and you’ve got yourself some extremely cool little friends.

I’ve done my best to find only original paper toys… that is, these designs are original by their designers and not recreations of known characters.

Have fun with these and feel free to share photos of your completed paper toys with us!

Get your free paper toys right after the fold!