We love pretty fonts. Most of the ones below are free and available at fontsquirrel.com, fontfabric.com or losttype.com – all fantastic sources for commerical fonts. Here are a few current favorites… { all backgrounds homemade by Anthem }.
Mutlu
Accent
Blanch
Museo Slab
Hagin Caps
Old Press
Carton
Weston Light
This is another fun tool to use with Instagram, upping the creativity factor. You can overlay images, use transparencies, add text then send it to another app for more fine tuning, or post it with Instagram.
The shape tool lets you select any simple shape to crop your image with, then you can post circles and rectangular shots instead of the standard Instagram square. Here’s a pretty example from my last adventure.
Buy it here: Montage App.
This is my new favorite photo editing app. It’s got some beautiful filters and the capability to adjust photos by saturation, contrast, brightness, filter intensity and so on.
I took these pictures the other day at sunrise with my iPhone then sent them through Snapseed to Instagram.
Different day, same mountain then a trip into the city… experimenting with the lime greens.
Find Snapseed here: www.snapseed.com.
Follow my Instagram feed: @emilyanthem.
3M, Google and others are well known for their 15% or 20% free time policy. A portion of each week is set aside for employees to work on their own projects. This free time has given the world Post-It Notes, Gmail, Google Earth and much more.
Feeling creatively drained the past little while I decided to give a whole day last week to making fish. I bought an old atlas for three dollars and cut out dozens and dozens of fish and strung them together to make mobiles. Being the owner of the company I was feeling a little guilty about directing my time at these fish, but ended up spending the afternoon in the equivalent of runner’s high for artists – that lovely space of creating where everything else disappears.
Freeing my brain of problems to solve and things to plan opened my mind enough that all of a sudden I knew exactly how to proceed on a couple of design projects. I also hatched a smart idea for a different angle for Anthem… and got several beautiful mobiles out of the process which I can give to friends’ new babies.
I would consider day one of the 15% project a success.
Unlike an employee my ‘free day’ isn’t a paid day however it may turn out to be well worth the time off for how many ideas it generates to be used during work time. I am curious to see what happens.
NY based designer Stefan Sagmeister takes one entire year off every seven years to nurture his own creative ideas. He claims that this year pays for itself above and beyond what he would have earned in the studio because of the innovative projects and ideas that come from it. You can watch his talk on TED about it here: www.ted.com.
I grew up in a tiny rural town and spent most of my time with my younger brother climbing trees and exploring the woods near our house. I had a little blue toy camera that traveled with us in my pocket. Over the years I’ve had a few other little plastic cameras, a Polaroid, and an old Brownie.
This app reminds me of those scratchy old pictures. It is has the ability for one tap focus, and double tap to adjust the exposure which I like. Not all of the camera styles are beautiful, but there’s lots of fun to be had with the fish eye lens and grungy film textures.
This one’s an odd combo of film reel meets digital ability place the entire image over top of the reel.
I really like the textures on this one. I can imagine this showing up in a design down the road.
Last night I tried an experiment to see how many of my favorite iPhone cameras I could combine into one image, and turns out you can use them all together. Take an image with Lemecam, bring it into Picframe, then publish with Instagram, adjusting colors along the way. A few experiments turned into a mess of too many filters on top of each other, but there were some really pretty combos.
Get Lemecam free here: www.itunes.apple.com.