I had some time over the last month or so when I finished some freelance projects and I decided that a personal project was in order.

It's nice to do something purely for yourself, to challenge your creativity and explore new techniques (or modify old ones) and to work on something you really like.

This is a Photoshop illustration of Deckard's Offworld blaster from my favorite film "Blade Runner". It was about a month long "labor of love" that was quite a refreshing project to work on.

I have more extensive details on the research and process of this illustration on my blog: toddcoleman.tumblr.com/post/21337422100/…

The newest Creative Mornings presentation by Aaron James Draplin is a must see.

Draplin is a talented graphic designer & an opinionated and honest guy. Most importantly, he minces no words when it comes to learning from the past of graphic design and his worries for the future of it.

This is a great presentation. He's funny, honest and inspiring. I highly recommend it.

With the widespread implementation and support of web fonts typography on the web keeps improving. One thing we have always been missing is a good tool for optical kerning.

Developer David Hudson is aiming to change this with the release of his jQuery plugin for optical kerning: TypeButter.

I think this looks very promising and am going to try it out as soon as possible.

This is an excellent resource for all things related to mobile web design. UX, UI tips and best practices, links to blogs, opinions and presentations and more.

Although the site is already very comprehensive it looks like much more information and best practices will be coming.

Tito Bottitta of Upstatement has written a great article about how to approach a responsive design.

Upstatement is part of the team that worked on the Boston Globe responsive design.

The big surprise (for me) in the article is how and why the team used Adobe's InDesign to do the design work. I have never considered using it for a website design but after reading Tito's reasoning behind it, I have to say that it's an intriguing idea.

This gallery of iOS icons is very comprehensive. Some of these may be familiar but there are quite a number I have never seen before.

One of the best things about this gallery is that each icon is displayed very large on the individual pages. It's great to see some of the detail that goes into each one.

This is a great resource for iOS icon designers.

Google has launched Android Design, a resource center for learning to design Android apps.

I think this is a great idea. One thing that has frustrated me whenever I have played with various Android devices is the lack of consistency in the UI and UX. Hopefully this site will remedy this.

While working on an article about trying to predict the future of technology I was reminded on Back to the Future II. If you remember, the height of home communication in the film (which takes place in 2015) was video phone and a fax machine.

It's interesting how the future of the movie is 3 years away and back when it was made in 1989 the filmmakers thought that a fax machine would be one of the home's main communication methods. Here we are in the 2012 and the fax machine is almost obsolete.

I wanted to find a photo of the fax machine from the film but was only able to find very poor screen shots. This turned out to be good because it provided the opportunity to practice some Photoshop skills and create an illustrated version of it for the article.

It's constructed of all vector shapes, with various layer styles, masks and shading techniques. I decided to use a great pattern from Subtle Patters for the wallpaper effect. I thought it would created a nice contrast while at the same time reinforcing the "retro" style of a device from a movie about the future.

If anyone has any comments or critiques I would love to hear them.

Solid advice for all graphic designers, web designers, developers or anyone in a creative field. Number 9 is especially important: Love what you do or leave.

Whether you love him, hate him or think he's a maniac Mike Monteiro is a smart man and an advocate for great design (and getting paid for it).

Mike has a new article at .net magazine entitled "10 New Year's resolutions for designers." As usual for Mike, it is well written, funny and to the point. There is a lot of good advice in here and as always, I think discussion about some of the points will definitely get designers thinking.