FatCap – I have never seen such a comprehensive resource of graffiti online that is also beautifully designed, regularly updated and full of inspiration such as that called FatCap. What started out as a simple photo gallery site gradually evolved into the global resource FatCap is today, dedicated to providing “a top-notch yet simple product, to give an exhaustive snapshot of the street-art culture all over the world.”
I recommend diving right into the site’s Pictures section, but if you’d like a quick taste, here are a couple of photos taken by Chip Thomas that appeared in FatCap’s article called No Reservation. It’s simply stunning.
card karma – I ditched the idea of sending e-cards online a while ago, mostly due to poor quality and originality of the free cards offered by major e-card providers. But here we have card karma, an exceptional website that offers e-card customization for free with beautiful images (including your own photos), videos and visuals that will persuade the most stubborn e-card haters to reconsider.
Create your e-card by picking an occasion, an image or browse the popular categories. You can edit the text of course, change colors, add images, videos, and decide if you wish to keep your e-card private or public. Here’s the Thank You e-card I created for a very special person in my life.
Image by babasteve on flickr
Pummelvision – This rather simple yet powerful tool lets you import your photos from Flickr, Tumblr, or Facebook accounts, and pack them all into a fast forward slide show of the visual memories making up your life and social network.
Although the uploading process takes way too long in my view (hours to days), apparently it’s worth the wait. See the embedded video as a cool example of the end result.
Nuji – The idea behind Nuji is simple; “a free service where you can share and discover products you love with like-minded people.” How does it work? Use the Facebook Connect to log in, install the Nuji bookmarklet (a simple drag and drop installation), download the iPhone app if you wish, and start tagging. The Nuji innovation is simple, yet so powerful and useful I fell in love with it at first tag! See the screen shot below of one of my Nuji tags I did over at Urban Outfitters.
Once you’re all set up with the bookmarklet, you simply surf the Web as you would normally do, and when you stumble upon an interesting product of any kind, you click the ‘Tag with Nuji’ toolbar in your browser and select the tag location. After you have made some tags you can then proceed to start following other Nuji users with your line of taste, be it fashion and style, technology or any other field. I had a terrific time using Nuji, and I’ve already found several Nuji users to be inspired by.Here are but a few products I added to my Nuji list.
Moment Garden – Sites celebrating your new baby’s birth and first years in life aren’t a digital novelty. Excited parents and 1st time parents-to-be can make use of an abundance of baby related resources online that combine photos, videos, family newsletters and invitations.
Moment Garden is playing in the same overall baby celebration field, only in national rather than little league. According to the website’s About, Moment Garden is about collecting, documenting and sharing special moments with loved ones, capturing that “something you can re-live everyday. Something that celebrates your child’s life and keeps your family and friends updated of everything that’s happening.
How does Moment Garden compare to the other baby-childhood visual documenters out there? Decide for yourself.
Why Did You Buy Me That? – We’ve all been there before; a nicely wrapped box with your name on it makes its way to your end of the table, you open it up and find out it’s…. your least favorite thing in the world or the ugliest thing you have ever seen. Let us celebrate that awkward gift receiving moment that unites all people across the universe -bad gifts- with Why Did You Buy Me That.
Do you have a horrible gift you received from your in-law and have no idea what to do with it? Submit it here. To get you in the mood of the things you’ll find on this cool Weekly Blog winner, see the two photos below.
And my favorite…
Little People – Here’s a super cute blog, a Weekly Blog winner from earlier this month. As opposed to many of the art blogs out there -however beautiful and inspiring they may be- this particular one is entirely different. The art itself (and the artist behind it) is guided by a simple yet revolutionary concept: “little hand-painted people, left in London to tend for themselves.”
The result? See for yourself with the spectacular images below. Who is behind these lovely creations? He or she wishes to remain anonymous. The only thing we can learn about Little People’s creator is that he or she has another blog celebrating a similar concept of art.
Nikon’s This Day – This site could best be described as a “web content page that shows what happened on that day in the past, at some place in the world.” So if for instance, today’s date is December 19, 2010, This Day displays an important past event that took place on that date sometime in the past decades or centuries. Each entry is accompanied by an HD image, and the background music will make you feel as if you’re strolling around a futuristic yet peaceful museum.
Explore Nikon’s This Day and learn a bit of history along the way. Below is the entry for Dec 19, 1851, which marked the death of a famous English painter. Guess who?
TripWow – This super cute tool by TripAdvisor, my #1 travel guide and rating place, is an absolute must feature to make use of when you have returned from your vacation and wish to share your photos in a fun way with friends and family.
The TripWow interface is attractive and easy to navigate through. Start by uploading your photos (you can choose between several photo storage providers such as Facebook, flickr and Picasa as well as uploading pics from your PC or Mac). Next, customize your sideshow by selecting a theme, background music, and related text (your name, your vacation destination and more). See a solid example of TripWow’s whole nine yards via my sideshow, titled “My Crete Getaway,” a trip I had last summer.
Totally Cool Pix – The Weekly Blog winner from earlier this month made it to last week’s Weekly Faves collection, and for an evidently good reason. Totally Cool Pix is an amazing resource of phenomenal photography, capturing compelling, surprising and inspiring photos from around the world showing current affairs and news in image form. The anonymous creators of Totally Cool Pix select only the absolute best photographs out there, offering semi-professionals to submit their work in exchange for $100-$150, and proper credit on the site.
To explore the visual wonders of Totally Cool Pix, I suggest starting with the two photo galleries, Top Pictures of 2010 Part 1 and Part 2. Please note that some photos show graphic images of real people, but then again, the true power of story telling often entails such depictions. Below I have included a beautiful photo* by Adam Hunger I found on Totally Cool Pix which he had taken for Reuters, showing what Black Friday was like for many of Americans last month.
*The photo has been re-sized to fit the dimensions of this blog. To see its original size and annotation, please click here.
Minus – It was Leonardo Da Vinci who said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and in the case of Minus this couldn’t be more true. This amazingly simple free service let you create photo galleries in just one click – simply drag photos from your desktop or anywhere else on your computer to the Minus tab (browser mode), and use the short link Minus assigns to you to share your gallery with friends. That’s it.
Why the name Minus? Well, creators Carl and John wanted the name of the service to embody its minimalistic approach, so there you go. By the way, Minus promises that very soon it will offer the option of adding docs, music and videos to your Minus gallery, not just photos. Once these are possible Minus will be my 1st choice content sharing tool. The screen shot below shows a glimpse of my photo gallery on Minus. Click on it to see the rest of the pics.
Daily Infographic -The sharp rise of infogrpahics (short for information graphics) attests to the growing trend of consuming complicated data in a visual way, which makes the understanding part both fast and more memorable, as opposed to simple numerical statistics. Infographics are particular handy when it comes to complex processes (such as financial, geo-political scenarios, etc.). Daily Infographic vows to post an interesting infographic every day, and they certainly keep that promise.
What kind of infographics will you find on this Weekly Blog winner? See the two interesting posts below, 16 Facts About Sleep and Colors of the Web. Enjoy.