Here is another lovely #musicmonday spotify playlist for you to share and play. This week its valentines themed, so find lots of old classic love songs on there to woo that special someone with. I’m an old romantic and heart and love a good smoochy number. Send me your valentines playlists too so I can have a good listen!

What are you doing for Valentines day? I will be cooking up a nice big dinner for Matt Cox and watching a nice film with a bottle of red. This weeks playlist features loved up tunes from the likes of Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder and The Shirelles.

Have a listen to it here.

Follow me on spotify. 

Add me on Last.fm. 

I love a ruddy good font, be that a nice readable serif or some wacky illustrated thing thats bordering on really being called a font at all. I used to be a comic sans hater but recently I have to hold up my hands and say, it ain’t so bad when its used correctly. Check out this blog which comic sans-ifies famous logos. Its pretty good. Oooh also, when I was in London the other week, I saw a Comic Sans church, painted in classic primary colours. Very etheral, it looked great!

1. Bree This friendly upright italic is the serif cousin of TypeTogether’s award winning font Bree. Designed by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, Bree was originally released in 2008 and it became an immediate success because of its originality, charming appearance and versatility. Bree Serif was initiated with the help of Google webfonts and will be expanded with more font styles later this year. The new serif style adds some extra flavour to this tasty font… and is for FREE.

Download bree here.

 2. OtamaI love the high fashion look of this one and the ampersand’s awesome. You may have noticed that this is the font that I use for all the headlines on my site. Thats how much I’m in love with it. Tim Donaldsons other type work is also excellent, and I like him becuase he is also a tea fanatic, much like myself.

Download Otama here.

3. JunctionJunction is a a humanist sans-serif, and the first open-source type project started by The League of Moveable Type. They’re expanding Junction to include additional non-English characters and also plan to expand Junction to include different weights, to make a complete family. I like this because its looks very modern but still quite elegant. So, you can use Junction to give an organic feel to your text while at the same time allowing it to display crisply & cleanly on a computer screen.

Download junction here. 

4. DukeThis is a typeface inspired by the sign for The Cup & Saucer, a coffee shop in Manhattan. It is designed by James T Edmonson and the free download comes with three versions of the font for all your designing needs. Actually, this one is possibly better suited to print design, but what the hey, I will stick it on my list becuase its very pretty.

Download duke here.

5. Wisdom Script 

Another great great font from James T Edmonson, availiable for free from the Lost Type Co-op. Wisdom Script was originally designed for Woods of Wisdom, a 50 part poster series on bad advice. Wisdom script is designed to be on a thirty degree incline to get perfectly vertical strokes.

Download Wisdom Script here. 

Have you found any other great free or otherwise fonts recently? Let me know. I love finding new fonts to buy and play with.

Here is yet another banging #musicmonday spotify playlist for you to share and play. It’s another themed one, I like themes! This time I am celebrating the mostly bearded and wooly jumper-ed norwegian music scene. I have found quite a lot of awesome bands since I started living in this cold cold country  almost 2 years ago, and it would only be right to share my findings with you.

If you ever get a chance to visit Oslo you must try brown cheese – it’s very strange but lovely and sweet! The best venues to see music from the likes of these bands is The Villa, Parteatret, John Dee and Sound of Mu. My favourite record shop here is Tiger Records, they sell lots of stuff from my favourite record labels back home as well as Metronomicon who are a really great label over here.

This weeks playlist features a lot of bleeps and pretty vocals from the likes of Casiokids, Kakkmaddafakka, Philter, Razika, Center of the Universe, and The Whitest Boy Alive. Do you know of any other norwegian or scandinavian artists you think I might like?

Have a listen to it here.

Follow me on spotify. 

Add me on Last.fm. 

Here is another lovely #musicmonday spotify playlist for you to share and play. I’m just trying to make Monday a little less painful for everyone!

This weeks playlist features nice chilled music from the likes of Com Truise, M83, Tennis, Astronaughtalis and James Brown.

Have a listen to it here.

Follow me on spotify. 

Add me on Last.fm. 

Color is a cool little colour matching game designed by interaction designers Maria Munuera and Mark MacKay for Method of Action. Your task is to mirror the displayed color by locating its position on the color wheel with your mouse. Easy as pie at first,  but after the first challenge you have to pick out complementary, analogous, ternary, and even quaternary combinations. There’s also a colorblind-friendly version! I couldn’t imagine how this would work at first, but it uses shapes as a substitute for primary colors and changes their appearance as you move along the wheel.

I managed to score an 8.3 out of 10, as I started to get rather confused towards the end! Test your colour skills and see if you can do better!

Method of Action have a number of ther similar web apps, developed as part of their peer-to-peer course. They will cover three subjects — design, entrepreneurship, and gardening — when it launches this spring. Each subject will have a number of different missions to be completed and judged by more experienced community members. As you progress, you will eventually become an experienced community member yourself and able to judge too.

This all sounds very exciting and I cannot wait to hear more. These games are very addictive, I’m just going to have a coffee and play the shape type game. Hoping for a high score!

— when it launches this spring. Each subject will have a number of different missions to be completed and judged by more experienced community members. As you progress, you will eventually become an experienced community member yourself and able to judge too.

It may seem like it, but the fight is not over, we still need to protect our online freedom from the US government. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyright material, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Today I found this Hitler on SOPA video. This is by far the funniest and best anti-SOPA thing on the internet.

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia, Reddit, my company’s website N4G and an estimated 7,000 other smaller websites coordinated a service blackout, or posted links and images in protest against SOPA and the Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), in an effort to raise awareness. In excess of 160 million people saw Wikipedia’s banner. A number of other protest actions were organized, including petition drives, with Google saying it collected over 7 million signatures, boycotts of companies that support the legislation, and a rally held in New York City.

I worked fast and in 10 minutes designed a blackout webpage for N4G and our other Newsboiler sites:

The reaction to us blacking out our sites for a day was really positive and it raised a lot of awareness to SOPA and PIPA and hopefully some of our users got involved in signing the petition.

Find out more about SOPA here. 

Welcome to a new blog thingybob that I’m starting to do. Every Monday I will be popping a #musicmonday spotify playlist on here for you to share and play. I think that listening to the right type of music is vital to producing good illustrations and design work and I listen to a lot of music in my studio, so I thought I would share a selection of nice tunes to get creative to each week. Get this in your ears and make Monday a happy day.

This weeks playlist features nice chilled music from the likes of Adem, Minnie Riperton, Elvis Perkins, Dirty Gold and my favourite song ‘The Old Days’ by Dr. Dog.

Have a listen to it here.

Follow me on spotify. 

Add me on Last.fm. 

Heres what Maria Frey has to say about my design:

“What I love most about this site is that it’s clean and well designed for the sake of immediately grasping the artist’s style and personality. The work is front and center and presented in a way that lets you engage with several pieces of work all at once. Although there’s not a ton of copy, what is there has a fun personal tone. When you get into the page for a specific work or project there are nice large images that cycle through and the copy again is brief and out of the way, but still concise and relevant. For more insight into the purpose and thought that went into designing this site, check out the “Terms & Conditions” link in the footer. Way to personalize the legal mumbo jumbo! Overall, nicely designed/laid out site.”

When I read this it made me so happy. I got my job as a web designer with Hava Media about a year ago with only a basic knowledge of web design, being primarily an illustrator. I quickly learned there is so much more to web design than just making something look pretty and you cant apply the same rules to designing a website as you would an illustration. You need to think about the way it is coded, usability, content, browser compatability and thats just to name a few. There has been many times this year that I’ve just felt lost in a sea of geek jargon but I’ve pressed on and I’ve been learning really hard, in and out of the office and now I’m starting to feel really good at it!

Look at all these little chicks! Are they called chicks if they’re from ducks? Im not sure. Best go and check wikipedia… They’re called Ducklings. I shall start again.

Look at all these lovely ducklings hanging out with the big ol’ momma duck on a nice patch of grass. I love animals. And, yes that grass did take a very long time to draw.

If you know me, you’ll know that I love drawing, cooking, cleaning and good ol storage solutions. I bloody well love a good kitchen gadget and adore all of the tupperware, stain removers, and other crap in those catalogs that your Mum and your Nan get through the post. Just ask my boyfriend, as I’m usually dragging him around House of Oslo and spending all the money we have. Its his fault for letting us live 2 streets away from that mall of delicious house wares.  Hmm, maybe I’m not coming across as a particulary interesting person here, but who cares. Cleanliness is king in my gaff mate.

In particular I hate bathroom untidyness. Im not going to go there with toilet cleanliness, and I think everyone has their issues with the orange shit you get in between your tiles in the shower. One thing I hate most is dirty washbasins with toothpaste spit encrusted on them, toenail clippings collected in plug holes and stray bit of hair from shaving (I’m looking at you, Dad). I hate when people keep all of their toothbrushes in a little pot with their ends collecting in some out of sight, out of mind, old colgate squash thats fermented over time at the bottom. Or when they don’t even bother with that and just keep the dental hygeine products laying about on the side, with their bristles laying in dirt. Don’t even get me started on soap juice, There is nothing more gross than the residue left behind by dirty soap, tainted brown after being used to wash makeup off hands. It basically looks like unhealthy poo.

Ok, ok, maybe I’m a little too much of a clean freak. *Takes a few deep breaths* But surely I’m not alone, there must be thousands of others just like me feverishly cleaning up crusty suds and not so minty fresh spills. Surely those clever big wigs and buyers for home shops must realise theres a market for proper bathroom storage solutions that look good and cater to the hygiene crazy.

I found a shop in Oslo called Lucky Duck that sells these toothbrush holders, keeping your bristles dry and the end of your toothbrush gunk free.

So yep I got one of those and no longer get anxious about bacteria on my toothbrushes. The same week I saw a thread on reddit about the most ingenious invention ever.

A soap flake grater and dispenser! 

A truly brilliant young lady designed this soap grater for her degree show from Design Academy Eindhoven. Her name is Nathalie Stämpfli and here is what she has to say about her invention:

“Today, most of the soap we use is liquid soap, which contains a lot of water. Block soap instead is more concentrated and therefore has some ecological benefits: You don’t transport unnecessary water around. In place of plastic bottles you can simply use paper for packaging. The solid blocks can easily be piled and allow a greater space efficiency in a truck.”

This  is one of the reasons I prefer to use block soap to liquid soap, plus you can get it in so many more varieties, especially if you are a fan of Lush and other soap specialists. It can also be really fun to make your own soap from oats and raw shea butter or coconut oil. The internet is full of recipes for soap making.

The other reason I just love this is the fact that you don’t get soap juice mess!  No more dirty soap dishes or rings of soap on your basin. No more squeezing the slippy soap too hard so that it shoots out of your hand and donks you square in the eye.

… Ok that last one might have just happened to me. Anyway, my point is that this is a great little product. The problem is that its not being mass produced, or as far as I can tell, produced at all! Apart from the prototype of course. I spent about an hour scouring far and wide on the internet for this, or at least something similar. There is no soap flake dispensers for me out there. This makes me a little sad.

So I guess this blog post is just to say that this is an amazing invention and will someone please let me know when it is for sale? Come on Nathalie Stämpfli, make it happen love!

The other soap flake dispenser she designed. This one is a bit too 'Mars Attacks' for me.

This is a special holiday illustration of mine. Many of you have been pestering me for years to sell my illustrations so I’m finally making my Etsy debut & as a special christmas treat I’ve had a LIMITED batch of 100 of these cards printed. I will be selling them in packs of three for only $8 excluding shipping costs.

I moved to Norway a year and a half ago and love Christmas time over there. Its not unusual to see reindeer and moose knocking about Norway and many people over there even eat the poor souls. I decided that it might be nice to do a reindeer illustration with fairy lights entangled in his antlers.

The cards are A6, printed on high quality card and come with crisp white envelopes. Each of them are blank inside allowing for your own special holiday message and on the back just say ‘sally renshaw illustration’ in very small print. They are sent out to you individually packaged in a plastic wallet and bundled together in a cute sweetie bag with a heart sticker and a christmas cracker joke for your own amusement.

These are just about in time for the day when we all eat and drink too much and fall asleep to the muppets christmas carol at about 3pm. The kind of cards you would give to your Mum or BFF, a tad nicer than those bumper packs that everyone else buys.

*BUY BEFORE DECEMBER 12TH TO ENSURE YOU RECEIVE THEM BEFORE CHRISTMAS*

Heres the link to my etsy shop.