In honor of the upcoming holiday weekend, I thought it’d be nice to put out a post on some fun online design applications I’ve found.
The great thing about these apps is that, although they may be time wasters, they’re actually relevant online design programs that help get those creative juices flowing through your veins. Some of them, like TypeNavigator, are extremely helpful. Others, like Ultimate Flash Face, are just plain fun! Look through the list and see if any tickle your fancy. 
Ultimate Flash Face
Ultimate Flash Face is a Flash program developed by Artem Brigert. You essentially “draw” a face on the canvas by selecting different features (hair, nose, eyes, glasses, beards, etc.) from the menu on the left side of the screen. The variations are endless, especially because you can resize each feature so it fits the specific face. You can also print, save, and load your creations.
Sumo Paint
Sumo Paint is by far the most extensive online paint program I’ve seen. There’s an arsenal of tools available, and you can create an account to have access to more features.
The skin bears an uncanny resemblance to another image editing program. Hmmm… look familiar?
The program has all the basic Photoshop capabilities like layer manipulation, photo editing, and brushes. Browse the galleries of user work—it’s well worth it.
TypeNavigator
TypeNavigator useful font identification tool developed by Hansjörg and Robert Stulle. It’s put out by FontShop, a digital type retailer established in 1989. When you want to know what font is used in a website or piece of work, just use TypeNavigator to find out. The TypeNavigator tool helps you narrow down the possibilities based on the characteristics of the font and then presents you with a list of fonts it could be. Granted, it doesn’t have every font known to mankind, but it’s got a lot.
Wordle
Wordle is a super fun type generator applet. Simply type in some words, hit Go, and you have a nifty font cloud. You can randomize the image or choose specific options to personalize the picture. Wordle can be used for all sorts of things—one of my friends is a teacher and she uses Wordle’s font clouds as a way of introducing new concepts and words to her kids. Much better than just writing on a blackboard!
Typographic Illustrations
Typographic Illustrations by Evan Roth. This guy is an awesome artist and developer. The typographic illustrations project integrates music, art, and typography in a way I’ve never seen before. It’s better that you check out the site instead of me (poorly) trying to describe it. Uber cool.
Here’s a sample:
typoGenerator
typoGenerator is another type generator, but this one creates colorful type posters. The program was created by Katharina Nussbaumer. You type in some text, then the program searches images.google.com for that text and an image is generated randomly from the found images and text. Pretty cool.
Scribbler
Scribbler is a pretty smart “generative illustration toy” by zefrank. You draw a quick littler sketch, tell the program to do it’s thing, and it makes your dinky little sketch look pretty. The image above was generated based on a super simple line drawing I did of a spider and it’s web.
So take a break and have some fun with these apps. And have a great holiday weekend!
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?