According to its website, Visual Literacy is an “e-learning site focused on a critical, but often neglected skill for business, communication, and engineering students, namely visual literacy, or the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations.”

If this sounds suspiciously like managerial Dilbert-speak, you’re not alone. But there is interesting content there, as evidenced by the wonderfully bizarre “Periodic Table of Visualization Methods“. At first glance, the table seems quirky and fundamentally tongue-in-cheek. But upon closer inspection, the massive amount of detail and serious tone point to
something far more complex. It’s a well-thought out example of one of the visualization methods listed, I’m sure (somewhere in Metaphor Visualization, I’d think.)

If you’re a designer, you owe it to yourself to spend some time with this odd chart.

Pretty Loaded is an online museum of flash preloaders culled from the vast interwebs. Each preloader is handpicked and high-quality, resulting in a wonderful range of inspired flashiness. Enjoy!

Isometric pixel art is an odd sub-niche in the illustration world, a tribute to jaggedy proto-3D video games of the 80s that used the projection. Without pesky vanishing points, you could scroll a background forever, while retaining more depth than a frontal (Duck Hunt) or birds-eye (Spyhunter) projection.

Of course many of these new pieces are taken to the extreme: start with the German collaborative eBoy, and continue on. And if you’re really inspired, try your hand at it. It’s probably the only form of illustration that’s best suited to MSPaint. A couple hints: in Photoshop, lock a guide layer with an isometric grid, and work with the non-anti-aliasing pencil tool (the only good use for that, as well!)

But it does help to really understand the projection, and mechanical illustrator Cody Walker has written two extremely good tutorials on creating isometric illustrations in illustrator. They are non-pixellated, but the same principles apply. Enjoy!

Working with Orthographic Projections and Basic Isometrics

How to Create Advanced Isometric Illustrations Using the SSR Method