Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you had a lovely week and are looking forward to an even better weekend. I managed to get a cold, but am recovering and looking forward to a relaxing and rewarding weekend. But before we get there, I want to share some ideas and resources for designing in this new year. “Designing in the New Year” could mean so many things: interior design in our libraries and homes, designing more effective time management in our unending work-life balance struggles, website design as we throw out the old and bring on the new, and so on. Today, I want to talk a bit about graphic design and libraries and share some fun resources I’ve come across.

To get you in the mood for a bit about graphic design and libraries, I highly recommend looking through 50 best images on books, reading, and libraries. These are lovely pieces of design and quite wonderful. They should make you smile and everyone could use a smile on a Friday. I’m totally with the reader: “Yeah, so what if I rather read than go to a bar? Deal with it.” That is totally me. Also, these sayings and designs make me want to design something new for my library, too!

I may be on a design kick this year as my research time finally opened up (or so I thought) so I would have time to look into librarians and graphic design. Many other research projects have also come up this year, already, but I’m not giving up on my design research because librarians design all the time and I’m rather interested in it all. I mean, look around any library and you can see dozens of handouts, bookmarks, flyers, event posters, newsletters, and webpages. There are so many examples of graphic design in libraries and very often librarians, who have a dozen other duties to do, turn into de facto graphic designers for their libraries. So if we are designing stuff for our libraries, which can be both a joy and a burden, let’s at least design some nifty things.

So this year, expect some more posts about design in libraries, specifically graphic design, on this blog as I work through my research and some fun examples, too. For now though I just want to share some fun icon sets. Because, really, it’s time to step away from the clip art, put down the Comic Sans, and get into the big leagues with our designs. So go check out these two icon sets available via Smashing Magazine: free Dashel Icon set and free tourism and travel icon set. So fun! Doesn’t it just make you want to create something?

I’ll be back next week with some more news and notes. Oh, and if anyone is coming to Online Northwest in February–and I do hope you do– I’ll be there and presenting on graphic design. I’m in the first session, so stop on by my talk and say hi. Allons-y!