Industrial design

I happened upon two excellent websites featuring reader-tagged web pictures. Much as Google or Yahoo allows for word searches, these sites allow for searches of visual material. Many of the tagged photos were commercially designed material for greeting cards, graphic books, product labels and the like. The pages are excellent resources for marketers, art students and those of us who are frustrated artists with some semblance of aesthetics. I will be using many of those images throughout my blogs and presentations from now on.

The first site is http://www.vi.sualize.us/ Registered members need only tag pictures as they troll the web and they are saved on the site. Members may also tag favorites on the site. Commercially available images are linked to the creator's site for ease of purchase.





The other site is http://www.ffffound.com (yes, that's four f's in a row). The Japanese site is grittier than the former, with more comics/manga graphics, old posters, and East European images.





This is an example, I think, of the wisdom of crowds, where it is posited that the collective decision of the general populace will be the most optimal. The aggregation of global tastes and aesthetic sensibilities works very well.