Wanderlust

As a professional, you just need to be creative at monday mornings, too. There isn’t time to wait that spark to hit you. No worries! Just relax, make a cup of coffee or tee and take a INSPIRATION BATH.

Inspiration bath is something, where you surf trough some good lookin’ and outstanding graphics/photographs/websites/what ever. Maybe you will get some creative energy out of it, or perhaps catch a few ideas or tricks.

For graphics/photographs DeviantArt or Flickr are one of the best places to start, but how to find good websites? Google? Nah!

CSS Zen Garden used to be the one, but that was like over 6 years ago…

CSS Line is Finland-based, but they accept websites from all over the world. Obviously it’s still mostly just finnish ones.

In Templatemonster.com they sell layouts. It includes a lot of Very neutral/boring looking material, but you can find some good ideas from there.

Vierityspalkki – uudet julkaisut – Finnish (big) companies publish their recent works in here. Campaigns, company websites… everything. Good stuff and a lot of background info (in Finnish, though).

And just to list, don’t know these too well: CSS Lite and CSS Remix

These are of course good galleries to find out trends in modern web design. And then what do you do? You BREAK those trends. Don’t follow what others are doing (that much).

I’ve been getting questions about stock -resources I’m using. I don’t know about the best ones, but these are in my bookmarks.

Free textures (for commersial use also):

• CGTextures
• Mayang Textures

Cheap stock images:

• iStockPhoto.com -also sounds & videos

Free stock images (for commersial use also):

• stock.xchng

Plus! Did you know that in DeviantArt there is a category for stock -images? Usually you can’t use them for commersial works, but it’s a good archive otherwise.

…and yeah, it’s a good thing to own good enough camera. ;-)

My new portfolio is shining!

See it.

How the years go by and so much is gone… I just found an old train-ticket between the pages of “Winnie the Pooh”-book. I was reading it on the way to Turku at summer 2005. It says on the ticket; “Civilian-service card must be presented” (for ticket was free for me). People go to do civilian-service instead of military-service in Finland if they don’t want to join army. It was my last day on service. I bought yellow flowers on the way to the trainstation, from flowershop next to the marketsquare. They were going to close that shop few days afterwards.

In Turku, it was over +20 °C warm in the park of old church of Turku. Cold wind was rising among the river “Aurajoki” and it made corners of our picnic-cloth to dance.

Today it’s -20 °C, though I’m still on my happiest mood!

Finaly I’ll try to write also in english about my wonderful travels and adventures, done mostly by hitchhiking and backbackers -way. I just needed to get over that feeling of… you know, when you don’t feel too comfortable with your language skills. You might be telling always at the beginning of new conversations something like “oh sorry my english isn’t blah blah…”. People notice that anyway, it’s no point telling it. Now I feel comfortable enough.

I would still appreciate you giving a comment when I’m writing something silly. Or I AM a silly person doing grazy stunts sometimes, but just when it comes to misspelling. ;-) That’s how I’m learning, trough feedback. I’m native finnish.

Finnish speaking readers can check my Wanderlust in finnish