Rust, Film, and Pixel-Peepin’
Plus some more half-toning and space.
Hello again, and a warm welcome if you’re new 👋
Here are the cool things I’ve found (and made!) over the last month 👇
Mood Camera 📸
As a MacBook-owning, oat-milk-drinking designer, it’s an inevitability that I love the aesthetic of analogue photography. But, with the greatest respect to those who shoot on film, it’s an expensive and time-consuming hobby. This is where mood.camera comes in, an app I’ve been testing daily this year.
It’s the best ‘film look’ photography experience I’ve seen on mobile so far. Rather than just applying a filter, it rewrites the image processing, injecting some much-needed charm and imperfection into the iPhone’s otherwise flat, evenly exposed images.
I was provided with a review code for the purposes of this newsletter feature, but I discovered the app independently and it’s a genuine recommendation.
Pixel Peepin’ 🌈
You might know Good Boy Ninja for their awesome After Effects plugins, but their latest project, ColorMatch, is a Wordle-style daily minigame where you match three random colours using a colour picker. I’m pretty smug about my score of 98.5% — can you do any better?
Rust & Type ⚙️
Creative Director Chris Clarke shared a fun typography experiment a few weeks ago, created by masking sections of a steel plate and etching it with chemicals. The rust/patina then reveals the letters beneath. Very metal 🤘
Printed animation 🖨️
FLASHING IMAGE WARNING
I came across this brilliant risograph animation from Ellis Tolsma of Studio Misprint.
Check out their behind-the-scenes look at how they sliced up the frames to create a richly textured, lo-fi halftone effect that highlights riso’s distinctive grain and misalignment.
Earlier this month, I interviewed Katherine Bjelke about designing emblems for space missions, which may interest you if you haven’t seen it. I’m experimenting with Q&A/interview content and would love your feedback — do you want more of this kind of thing?
And as a bonus after publishing the interview, David Mendes shared this space patch passion project by designer Patricia Klein with me, too.
Goblin Tools 🧙
Like with burritos, it’s hard for us to break stuff down sometimes; large tasks can often feel too daunting to start.
Goblin.tools is a suite of simple online tools, including an AI-enhanced app that breaks your to-dos into smaller steps with adjustable verbosity. Try it with a task you’ve been putting off, and it might just give you the inspiration to start.
Thanks for reading ☺️
I hope you have a lovely month filled with visual inspiration, exciting new ideas, and appropriately spiced meals. As always, get in touch if you have anything cool to share.
Best wishes,
Tom 🐢
(Apologies for the poor quality voiceover this month. I definitely didn’t record my MacBook audio instead of my audio interface for my microphone 😅)
