This is only 2 minutes work, done in Adobe Fireworks.

If you’d like to see a bit more serious design/illustration work, done in Fireworks, feel free to check my latest Smashing Magazine article!

(@zeldman: thanks for the re-tweet! and, errm… glad you liked it so much!;-)

1. Prospective client: $400 for a logo?! Why are you so expensive? My nephew has Photoshop—I can just get him to do it.
2. Me: Does your nephew have Microsoft Word?
3. Prospective client: Yes.
4. Me: Then have him write you a novel while he’s at it.

Well said! :-)

(via #)

To which I replied: @zeldman I bet it smells like a good cup of coffee! ;-)

And Jeffrey replied: @optimiced How right you are.

This inspired me to quickly create the following illustration in Fireworks:

(NOTE: Coffee cup is re-created from scratch in Fireworks, although it looks like this illustration. The final appearance of my little drawing was also inspired by @molif, for which I’d like to thank her!:-)

We wondered what gift to invent for him. We wanted the gift to be original, technological, funny, and, if possible, geeky.

Well, Ani had a bright idea! We must make a… robot from old computer parts!

We disasembled an old Pentium II based computer (and old “Fujitsu”, which was lying around for ages, and didn’t work at all), and 8 hours of hard work later, one two robots were born.

The smaller one was Ani’s personal invention (he is now standing proudly in one corner of our room, btw.)

“Robi 2″ was nice, had cute little head and curious, questioning gaze.

But his elder brother is the one that I’d like to present to you in more detail (that was the one which we gave as present to our friend).

He’s name is VKDE-T1000/Y2009.

Here are a few photographs:

If you look closely at the details in the photos, you’ll probably recognize common computers parts, such as:

• a lot of electric capacitors, removed from the Pentium II motherboard,
• parts of a 1.44″ floppy drive,
• parts of a standard CD-ROM,
• a few motors, including a CD-ROM tray motor, CD-ROM motor for moving the laser beam, and a few others,
• LEDs which indicate ‘ON’, ‘Stand-By’, ‘HDD activity’,
• cam-gear wheels,
• large power supply capacitors,
• a small heatsink which was cooling some microchip on the motherboard,
• RAM modules holders,
• etc.

Most of the parts were glued together with epoxy resin. The design of the robot is the result of our combined efforts. And if you’d like to know more details, I would gladly answer your questions here!

As a final note, I’d like to add that the base of the robot rotates 360 degrees, his head, too, as well as his nose, and that at the tip of his head, where the hat ends, you can screw in some optional accessories via a standard screw:-)

And you can also remove the robot from his rotating base, as it is kept there by the force of a hidden 1.44 Floppy magnet!

The VKDE-T1000 is the only existing prototype for now, and he is unique in the whole world, but who knows? If we can get hold of more old Pentium II computers in the future, maybe we’ll be able to create a few brothers and sisters for him? ;-)

This man is unique with this — he can sing in three voices, simultaneously (beat box, but in three voices!).

Two years ago I’ve found a video with him; the video was on YouTube and later I have found that it is deleted (possibly a problem with copyright).

But these days, by accident, I have discovered another recording with him:

I hope that YouTube won’t delete the video this time — watch it, while it is possible! :-)

I think that since Tom and Jerry there were not invented better cartoons than Courage! :-)

Here I will show you one of the series, chosen at random:

[Flash player with embedded Video/Audio]

…and not only because Courage the cowardly dog is a funny dog, but also to make a proof that you can obtain a much better audio/video quailty, encoding your movies yourself, compared to the crappy quaility of YouTube:)))

Enjoy the movie! :)

PS And don’t forget to search for all the other Courage series — your invested time will be worth it! ;-)

In this case, the discovery was made by Ani, who just found Mikael Wulff & Anders Morgenthaler.

The comic strips are short, funny, often kinda stupid, and even more often — with absolutely inimitable dark sense of humour, which I can compare only to the sense of humour of reodorant.com. Here I present to you just a few examples (the images are linked to the originals):

“Have you seen the kids?”

How toilet paper is made…

The true version of “Imagine”

[All images © by Anders Morgenthaler & Mikael Wulff, used with permission]

The comic strips are thousands and most of them are very original and funny (although a bit dark as humour, sometimes). If you have some free time to spend, and love comic strips, I recommend to you to browse the archives! :-)

* * *

Last (but not least) — it’s sad, when some good things sometimes disappear from our virtual world (Internet). For example, it looks like www.reodorant.com will disappear soon, and there were hundreds of good comic strips, which were very crazy and funny at the same time… I’ve found some of them in this archive, but only 20 strips or so can be found there, but they were at least 100 or more… We tried to contact the author, with no reply for now. Good things should not disappear and if just a small sum should be paid for hosting/domain, probably it could be raised by donating… :)

PS Thanks to the authors, who gave me the permission to use three of their comic strips in my posting! :-)
PPS This posting is a translation.

(Of course, the image came via twitter (not sure to whom belongs the original) :-)

Quick, quick, designers and developers need a hug, help!!! :-)

(#via Iffi: http://twitter.com/if__fi/statuses/902676592)

From his short posting, written with a lot of humour, I jumped to his photos from the conference. And this particular photo:

[(CC)2008 by Dan Cederholm]

…made me laugh a lot:)

I want one of these T-shirts, too! :-D