Inspired everyday…

Saw the cartoon above on College Humor.com the other day. I chuckled. But really, why did John Hancock sign his name in so large a fashion? Regardless, it’s one of the nicest signatures I’ve seen and arguably the most decorative of all the signatures on our nation’s most treasured document – the Declaration of Independence.

As someone who really enjoys and appreciates good hand lettering, I think it would be neat if a journal of his existed. I’m sure a search on Amazon.com would turn something up. I wouldn’t even mind checking out his grocery list – if he had such a thing.

I wish we all still wrote like that. There was almost no such thing as “writing in print” in the olden days. Methinks great pride and care was taken in ones handwriting. Today, we can barely be fussed with using proper punctuation in everyday written communicae, (I’m guilty of this).

It probably has much to do with the rise of things like text messaging, and the internet. In any case, it’s a shame we don’t practice this art anymore. For it was surely that.

However, it’s not lost by any means. We’re just out of practice and the need for this skill is unfortunately no longer necessary. But, I’ve found some fellow designers that still take time to hone their skills in hand lettering – not just fancy script either.

In turn I’ve put together a little showcase of some of my favorites. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

I think Wordle.net is my favorite website, of the day atleast. If you’re familiar with word clouds or tag clouds then you might’ve seen this. If not, basically what it does is take all of the content from a blog feed or a selection of text and organizes the words going from most used to least, but in the most beautiful way ever. Here’s what I got when I ran heymarv.com through the cloud generator.

Along with being neat to look at, it actually can be useful to see what it is that you’re talking about in your blog, or maybe you’re writing an essay or thesis. In any case, if you’ve got some free time it’s fun to play with.

I found a really neat word cloud website at one point that displayed world news using a word cloud but I forgot what it was. Newzingo is pretty close though.

Not so unrelated is a website I meant to share the other day but also forgot. Doodlebuzz calls itself the “typographic news explorer”. Just enter your search term and doodlebuzz will display the results in a pretty interesting way. Try it out.

If you know of any other similar sites or likewise any interesting or neat ways to get news I’d love to see ‘em.

[kom-uh n sens-oh-krat-i-kuh n] noun: A person whose political affilitation is based on common sense ideologies

I believe I made up a new word today – which automatically makes it a good day. Atleast I think I did, I googled it and nothing came up and since google is the most definitive thing ever created it must be true.

The word came about the other day after a conversation I had with someone regarding politics, this years election and an inquiry as to what party I belonged to.

Maybe it’s me wanting to not be labeled, when, really it doesn’t matter. As silly as it may be I have a hard time picking one thing, so when people ask I usually say conservative, which is about 95% accurate. But I never feel convincing when I say it, and I certainly have found myself struggling a few times to give an accurate description of the side I claim to be a part of. It’s one of those things where you know it when you see it but it’s hard to explain what it is. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey all, quick update on security related thangs. Thought I’d fixed the problem regarding the code that kept popping up in random posts causing people’s anti-virus to perk up and/or google to say my site sucked for security reasons. I think I’ve finally fixed it, tweaked a few files and upgraded my wordpress version to the latest so that should take care of it, if it doesn’t…woe as my blog.

Anyway, moving on. It’s Thursday, not a lot of new stuff but I figured I’d post the front page layouts I mentioned in this blog.

Not that I want a hurricane, I just want a little rain. So it goes…

Greetings, it’s Wednesday. Slacked a bit at the beginning of this week, but I’m trying to get the blog back in order and back on track for the remainder of the week.

Also, I was informed on Sunday that this blog was summoning a few folks’ anti-virus software. I dug around and found a string of “malicious” code and removed it so all should be well. Not sure how it got in there or why, but I’ll keep my eyes open to try and prevent that from happening in the future as well as see what other types of security options I can implement on my end. Otherwise, if it does happen again, please don’t hesitate to send an e-mail to marvin (at) heymarv.com and let me know. Gracias.

Now for something unrelated. Read the rest of this entry »