Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you had a lovely week and have a great weekend planned. Today I want to share a quick recap of my experience last week at the fabulous Online Northwest Conference and some links to some tools and articles related to my talk subject: graphic design.

I have a fond spot in my hear for Online Northwest. It was the first conference where I had a proposal accepted after I became a librarian and I think it is a great one day conference. After attending that first conference, I hadn’t been back in years due to budget issues for professional development, etc. So I was excited to make it back this year to speak on a topic near and dear to my heart: graphic design in libraries. I was thrilled that so many people came to my talk and I got some great feedback. If you’d like to see my slides they are here and my resource list is here. I apologize if the slides don’t make a lot of sense. I practice my talks a lot before giving them, but never write out an entire script.

I’m working on some research and other talks on graphic design currently, so expect to see some more information here soon. In other graphic design news, I wanted to share this interesting article on 8 cities that have their own distinctive fonts. I’m quite a fan of Berkeley’s Rennie Mackintosh font.

If you are into design, you’ll probably enjoy viewing the slideshow on 36 visual content creation tools especially if you are looking for a new tool to play with in your next design.

Also, Lifehacker’s post on what creative professionals do that separate them from the amateurs is well worth a read. There are good ideas here even if your job isn’t designated as “creative” or it isn’t your entire job.

I hope you have fun designing some new things for your library or redesigning some old. I’d love to see your designs, so drop me a line in the comments below. Until next time, I hope you have a lovely weekend full of things that delight and inspire you. I’ll be back soon. Allons-y!