If you're a designer and love to put all things design-related in your home, then you might like Harmonie-interieure.com's cleverly designed decals for your walls. You can customize the size and color of whatever design you picked. The decals are great if you're looking for a more inexpensive alternative to decorate, rather than using wallpaper. 

The typography is great! Here are some designs I liked:

I love TED Talks. Every time I watch any of their videos, about any topic - whether it be about technology, education or design, I always get inspired in the end. There's just something invigorating about these talks, because they actually delve into ideas and issues that we creative people often think about. And it just feels so great when your thoughts and feelings are reaffirmed, or when the speakers seek to broaden your mind and perspective.

Here is one of my favourite episodes. From the site: "The legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames made films, houses, books and classic midcentury modern furniture. Eames Demetrios, their grandson, shows rarely seen films and archival footage in a lively, loving tribute to their creative process."

For a lot of us, graphic design means many things. Veerle Pieters sought to ask this question and held a competition over at Flickr two years ago, which brought forth a lot of creative answers. "The basic concept of this contest is to come up with something creative or witty that visualizes the question What is Graphic Design? It doesn't matter if you can't draw as it can be all type as well. Basically this is your one time chance to give total freedom a shot." View the winners here. Some of the entries that I liked below:

(Designers: kellia333, pmcruz, riz0)

Here are some interesting posts and links about design this week:

• Tips for Converting Your Freelance Operation Into a Business. "A freelance operation is no different from any other. Sitting down to plan out a marketing strategy, operation times, scheduled work, and other tasks is just the tip of the iceberg...Remember as well that all businesses in the digital realm will run off a similar structure. Whether this is freelance writing, web design, programming, animation, or anything else from a similar spectrum. All freelancers should consider some of the same points regarding invoicing and work structure."
• Beautiful Creative Typography Tuts from Vectortuts+. "Creative Typography is more than just a fancy font, it’s an expressive form of typography that transforms letters into works of art. Using the letter-forms as a medium for expression and storytelling, Creative Typography takes words or phrases and matches them with illustrative and artistic finishes that further enhance the mood of the design."
• Happy Walls. "Recently, I've been hit with the urge to turn the house upside down and start all over again. This is not exactly practical so I've been looking at ways to change things up without uprooting the entire family. What better place to start than the walls?"
• Art Blocks for Ghana. "There are numerous tragic situations around the globe today, some sudden and unexpected, some ongoing; you might think of them as acute and chronic. Art Blocks for Ghana addresses one of the latter, and though it may seem small in scope, it is with small direct actions that we most effectively make changes in the world."
• What Makes Good Design? "What I can tell you as one of the litmus tests is think if this object were not on earth. Would it be a pity? Would you miss it?"

I love this new shop I found via Poppytalk. It's very quaint yet classy, and I wouldn't mind hanging one (or two! or three!) in my living room.

You Sentimental Idiot is a project by the artist Rikkianne Van Kirk. According to her: "It is inspired by found materials that have a past. Antique diaries are the main medium. I hope to make the aged pages and forgotten words current with my illustrations. Some drawings are inspired by direct quotes from the diaries while others are what I imagine the writer would have seen. I create the works by drawing directly on top of the diary page with a Sharpie."

Here are some of the drawings that I liked:

Don't forget to visit the shop to buy prints!

Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was an American graphic designer and filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences. During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger,Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the text racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the United Nations building in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the disjointed text that raced together and was pulled apart for Psycho (1960). (via)

You can read more of his movie poster designs here.

Found these amazing movie posters by Saul Bass via Eye Magazine:

And here are a few more, just because I couldn't resist:

Via Contra: "Clients From Hell is a site filled with mind numbing requests, horror stories and endless face-palm one-liners designers stomach when dealing with clients."

Love this site!

Via Today and Tomorrow:

"Clement Valla asked 500 Amazon’s Mechanical Turk users to trace a line. The first user started with a straight line, the next user had to trace the previous user’s trace. I guess it’s no surprise that the last trace doesn’t remind you about the initial straight line. The result is “A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals”. The cool thing about this is the fact that Clement only payed $0.02 for every trace, so it has only cost him $10. You can still participate in Clement’s current project “Copy Images using a simple drawing tool“, you’ll get $0,04 per drawing."

Watch the video here:

I posted the other day some collages that I found fascinating via the Make Something Cool Everyday Flickr pool. I just think that there's something really curious about the process behind it - choosing what image goes with what, and then selecting a medium with which to interpret your vision. It's like painting, but with more tools. I also like how you can create something new and something "you" out of other people's works. I guess it's the closest to collaboration that you can get with that person, too. 

Anyway, I found One Little Bird Studio in Etsy, and gosh, how lovely are their prints? Here's a sample:

If you like these works, support the artist and buy from the store!