As suggested by ycc2106, Highwireart & elibby, in the comments of our last fine set of new seamless patterns, and liddle_r in the forum post August 2010: Fabulous pattern discoveries, here are (only) some of the great recent patterns coming out of Seamless.

For some more original patterns follow along and post your own in the forum thread Original Pattern Designs! started by ManiacPlz or follow the real-time fun by browsing the most recent patterns to watch for those new designs popping up periodically amongst the always dazzling color variations of the already created patterns.

"The minute I saw this blog, I was like HEY! Real life versions of our patterns. =)" - leslie

We recently came across the inspiring work of Megan Geckler, and ycc2106's Seamless interpretation of I can tell you how this ends, 2007, it's fantastic, and what's even more fantastic is the group Interpretation Fun focused on that very exercise of interpreting inspiring photos into new patterns.

Original Pattern By: ycc2106

Historically interesting and well designed letterheads collected on Leterheady make up today's color inspiration. Leterheady was started by Shaun Usher, and is an "online homage to offline correspondence; specifically letters. However, at Letterheady they don't care about the letter's content. Just its design."

Walt Disney

Tonight Show with Johnny Carson

A young company "driven by their passion for travel and software," Explorra is a travel site that offers a range of travel inspiration tools, social features, a full service API for developers, and a Travel by Color tool.

Pick your favorite color, or take your chances with a random selection, and if you need more color inspiration to narrow down the hue for your next holiday check out 1000 (Colorful) Places to see Before you Die or these travel and location inspired COLOURlovers groups: Location Location Location, Travel & Around the World.

Hit Pink

The Color Strata was created by Weather Sealed. Weather Sealed (whose informative work has been mentioned here once before) is Steven Von Worley who "finds inspiration at the fringes of art, science, photography, and life" and turns it into "quality over quantity, original content, and the occasional chuckle." See it all here. The Color Strata is based on data from XKCD color survey.

The self described "incorrigible data hound" Von over at Weather Sealed who like all good hounds for interesting information keeps his nose up for new work by  XKCD, another person (Randall Munroe) of the interesting sorts, who has a hilarious archive of "romance, sarcasm, math and language" comics, and a knack for research. Recently XKCD released the findings from his color study.

The Color Study

Here's a snippet from the color study results page:

Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey.  Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions.  If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.

First, a few basic discoveries:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
• A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
• Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

If you're looking for some vintage color inspiration, or a little from the unusual category, check out the progress of Lisa Congdon and her project, A Collection a Day. Today is only day 155 so we still have plenty look forward from the 365 day project.

From her collection page:

This is a blog documenting a project that will span exactly one year, from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010. On each of those 365 days, I will photograph or draw (and occasionally paint) one collection. Most of the collections are real and exist in my home or studio; those I will photograph. Some are imagined; those I will draw or (occasionally) paint.

My love for bikes of all kinds has been documented well on my other blog, so of course I was excited when I introduced to Scraper Bikes via this amazing short documentary, Scrapertown:

Scrapertown from California is a place. on Vimeo.

Coming out of Oakland, CA the Scraper Bike kids trick out their bikes in rainbows of color with cardboard, tinfoil, spray paint, and found objects. Two years ago they became a YouTube phenomenon and since then, they've continued to expand, and are still trying to green up Oakland, keep kids in school, and keep them busy with their bikes so they're staying out of trouble. It's such a great grassroots advocacy for safety on the streets.

You shall never lack for an interesting backdrop on your computer, thanks to Bobby Solomon of Kitsune Noir. I've long been a fan of Bobby's blog and his Desktop Wallpaper Project is no exception. It completely elevates the idea of a computer background into art, and every week features another awesome illustrator or designer. Bobby's been at this awhile so there is a decent archive of work to pick through as well. Seriously, dude brought in some big guns here. Here's a few of my favorites.

It may not be a new idea, among our chromatically-inclined kind, to conjure up a film-inspired color palette or two. But I especially dig the totally awesome pairing of film still photography + their color palettes. It is the peanuts and the M&Ms (sorry chocolate purists).

This totally awesome website, i love hotdogs, is a boon for such stills. And also very handy for updating the netflix queue as well! Mostly cult or independent films from 1940s-1990s, there are lots of images from each of the movies. I picked some neat ones from the various eras and threw in a couple of my own. If you're looking for more inspiration or want to share some of your own fav's check out these movie related groups: Moving Pictures, Movie Themed Group, Movies, Stage and Screen, Cinema! & This is my favorite movie!!

Seeing more and more interesting typography on the web lately is like a huge breath of fresh air, and thankfully it's an area going through rapid evolvement. I'm so used to the same old typefaces everywhere that even a little bit of departure can make such a stand-out difference. There's several ways to make use of dynamic text replacement (read more about the various ways to do it here) and while I haven't attempted it myself yet, I'm definitely curious if anyone has and what their experience has been. In the meantime, check out some of my favorite sites that use font-integration. A lot of these came from The Design Cubicle and siteInspire so head over there for even more web design inspiration.

Frank Chimero

I don't know about you, but I find an empty, sparse palette to be hugely inspiring. Imagine my delight when I discovered this sexy new hyper-minimal tumblr, Erasing.

Bonneville I, archival pigment print by Charles A. Hartman

Tokuro Sakamoto