The web WOTW this week is none other than DesignerTechniques.com, the website devoted to sketching, modeling, and well, techniques Designers need to have.  While it hasn’t been updated since April, the site is still a valuable asset to Designers, featuring sketching & modeling tutorials, downloads, interviews with Designers, and more.  Especially helpful is the litter of step-by-step tutorials on sketching.  Take a look, and bask in the techniquey-ness of it all.

Ah, Wednesdays Thursdays.  The perfect day smack dab in the middl(ish) of the week, designed to let you unwind from the manic Mondays and terrible Tuesdays of corporate life before you begin to snowball towards the weekend.  And what better way to celebrate than to visit this week’s WOTW, Serious Wheels.

If you, like us, love automobiles from every era possible than you are always looking for images of the 4-wheeled machines, whether for reference or for artwork to hang on a wall (or a desktop).  Serious Wheels comes to the rescue with some of the most stunning images of automobiles that you can find, from classics to new debuts.  Now couple that with videos, classifieds, and some auto news and you have enough virtual eye candy to occupy an entire afternoon.  And the best part is that its all free, so hunting for images won’t cost you a penny.

Although the site is a little difficult to get around at times (and definitely not the prettiest site out there) it is a gold mine for images.  Check them out at SeriousWheels.com

industrial design today: courses, education, competitions, history and contemporary, shop, interviews, snapshots, design-aerobics, art basel: art unlimited 08 snapshots

The WotW this week brings you designboom, the online product design web supersite, offering design mini-courses, feature articles, competitions, and more.

The focused portion of the website is its offering of online product design courses, which it labels as “aerobics”: thought-provoking design excercises that are created by designboom’s own Editor-in-Chief Birgit Lohmann to flex and stretch the ideation muscles in our brains.  While not focused on developing vis com, the courses help balance the left-brain / right-brain management of creativity.

A second key element of the site is the plethora of competitions that are held, often in cooperation with other companies, to develop concepts as far-reaching as possible.  Several competitions have already drawn in thousands of applicants.

designboom is a great site for those in need of excersising their creativity, and we at CDf highly recommend you check them out.  Find them at designboom.com

This weeks WOTB is a site we just came across when looking for business card ideas: Inspiredology.  Although the site is mainly Graphic Communications focused, it does offer up emerging trends in human interface, visuals, and aesthetics.

Inspiredology is essentially a collection of “Best Of’s” in the world of Graphic Communications, from web design to promotional work, much in the same way as our current favorite site Smashing Magazine is, although more focused on emerging visual trends.

In their own words:

Inspiredology is a new resource that covers everything that inspires us.

It’s definitely a great site to get some inspiration from, whether to switch to the right brain of thinking or to look at great presentation possibilities.

Check it out at Inspiredology.com

For this week’s Web of the Week  we take a gander at Geekologie.com, a website devoted to “the scientific study of Gadgets, Gizmo, and Awesome”.  It’s essentially your standard geek-tech blog, but not the run-of-the-mill computer tech kind.

Focusing on geek-chic products (solar-powered speedboats, anyone?) with cool design possibilities, and a sprinkling of other geek-memes (videos, games, etc) the site is easy to get immersed in on your average Monday morning.  The design-related products are often as impractical as a flux capacitor, and yet we can’t stop staring at them like 3-yr olds in a Kay Bee toy store.  And with a Top 8 list of “So Cool” things to see on their site (and their sister site, I Watch Stuff) it can be easy to forget to work on that TPS report today.

Geekologie.com… Check it out, and bring on your inner geek.

PadStyle is a decor blog with posts on stylish furnishings for your home.

That’s what the site’s brief one-liner states. As part of our new regular weekly feature, we will dive headfirst into the interwebs and bring you a new design-related site to enjoy every Wednesday. This first week we ask you to turn your attention to PadStyle.com, a modern furniture website, hosted by furniture shop Prime-Furniture-Source.

PadStyle looks at affordable modern furniture that you can buy for your home, as opposed to the oft-maligned sites that dangle a design carrot in front of you in the form of a product that will never escape from concept phase.  Just about everything on PadStyle can be bought online or in stores.  The other neat feature about the site is that it looks at what makes a product special, such as its materials or its assembly, instead of just aesthetics.  Think of it as a blog version of Wallpaper magazine, with products that won’t necessarily empty your wallet.

Overall, it’s a pretty good site to draw some inspiration from.

(Thanks for the link, John!)

If you’d like to send us a link to one of your favorite design sites, email us at cardesignfetish at gmail dot com.

 

Recently, we at CDf  have been making the rounds at various art & design schools for their annual shows, often fondly remembering the days when we “used to design cool cars”.  We’ve been ogling vehicle designs, sketches, models… secretly critiquing, and always wondering if the student concepts could foretell the future design direction of some giant automotive OEM.

While not a said gaint OEM, Local Motors has emerged as a way for students, designers, and enthusiasts to create compelling vehicle designs that may one day actually make it to market as an LM product.  Utlizing a crowd-sourcing concept, LM has created a community (heavily designer-centered… yay!) where individuals submit work to their pre-defined competitions (such as the recently completed California Off Road Machine).  The winning design receives a monetary award, with the possibility to sell the concept to LM for an additional sum.  We will do a full deep-dive of Local Motors very soon.

To find out how you can enter the latest competition, and to see entries from the previous competiton, read on!

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