position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

That’s a long title for such a simple thing. Left Logic has the last HTML Entity Character Lookup you’ll ever need. No more scrolling through entity lists looking for a tiny bit of code just to type a simple character. Search for entity characters based on how they look. So if you need some sort of dash, type a regular minus sign and you’ll get everything that even slightly looks like it. Need something that resembles a P? Good, type a p and you’re set (see screenshot above). It’s fast, and couldn’t be more intuitive. Available also as a OS X dashboard widget, Firefox extension and search plugin.
(Thanks for the tip, Jochen)

Those of you tired of hearing the same old arguments on why you’re too expensive and how your potential clients’ nephew and/or grandmother could do the same job for less pay will take solace in this designer’s rant. Godspeed.

(Thanks for the tip, Rob. Illustration by Ivan Raszl.)

Go check out
Visuals of the World,
which boasts
to be the longest
visual website
in the world.
It’s currently
23233.29 cm long,
which is pretty long.
And it keeps growing,
and inspiring,
because you,
the artist,
keep adding
on to it.

Who Knew is a design magazine taking on “difficult content” – ideas and issues that are commonly misunderstood and censored. Every 3 months, students graphically communicate texts considered complex, confusing and/or controversial – things that make us go, “Who knew?”. Who Knew studies the interpretive power of graphics and typography in the access, efficiency and transparency of information.

A few example questions that are discussed:

• Should work be abolished?
• Is your doctor killing you?
• Can a designer do good?
• Are you beautiful enough to survive?

All-in-all a great read for us “intellectual designers”. ;)

No problem, try the TDB Special Projects Idea Generator on for size. Hooray for randomness. This two-liner looked silly next to the thumbnail, but there’s really nothing else to say, so I’m filling this up with random text. Excuse me, I’m off to create an “exclusive shrinking apparatus”. Oh yes I am.

Do you have a secret you need to get off your chest, but just can’t tell anyone? Well, here’s a solution: PostSecret. Completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they have never before revealed. Some revelations are funny, while others are just plain shocking or sad. What amazes me is how artistic these cards are. But hey, since pictures say more than a thousand words, just have a look at this goosebump-inducing trailer:

Nice to see such a display of humanity and art combined. PostSecret.com initiator Frank Warren has published a number of books full of these amazing postcards:

• PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives
• My Secret: A PostSecret Book
• The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book
• A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book

For those wondering, the song featured in the video is “Breathe Me” by Sia, found on the album Colour the Small One.

Nikon’s Universcale puts the universe in perspective, showing us all kinds of objects in relation to each other. Explore objects from the smallest of sizes to the largest known to man, from tiny protons all the way up to the outer limits of the universe. Universcale is an eye-opening Flash visualization and I actually wish school had been more like this. Try it out if you want to feel like a giant and a microbe all at the same time.

Communist-era propaganda posters have always been a great source of inspiration for designers, with their bold character, aggressive colors and unmistakable qualities in conveying a message. As a piece of propaganda, each of these posters has a history of its own. A Soviet Poster A Day shows us these pieces of art and helps us understand them by telling each poster’s background story. (Thanks for the tip, neck)

Nice little discovery by Oyayubizoku: there is some striking similarity between the iPhone’s calculator app and Braun’s 1970s-era calculators. Before someone accuses Apple of design theft, however, it appears that this calculator is actually a part of Apple’s own history: the Apple Collection shows an almost identical, co-branded calculator.

Erik Spiekermann, in his own words a Braun collector, puts up a few images of a 1962 Braun T100 world receiver that clearly appears to have inspired Apple’s design style. For the type geeks among us, he also notes that the iPhone version uses Helvetica for its buttons, while the Braun calculator uses its older sister Akzidenz Grotesk.

Poly9 FreeEarth is a free Flash application that offers you a 3-dimensional globe to include on your website. FreeEarth supports superimposing of metadata (such as weather data or Flickr geodata), animation (such as flight routes), combination with 2D mapping tools, satellite image tiling, numerous celestial bodies (the solar system planets, moons and the sun), and some more Web2.0 gimmickry. Check out the FreeEarth website to see some of the neat applications it can be used for.