We don’t do many links to non-animation websites but I wanted to share a few of my favorite visual blogs along with a couple other online finds that I’ve enjoyed recently. Feel free to share the visual blogs and sites that inspire you in the comments section. After all, it’s hardly a secret that the best animation is produced by those who have the broadest visual education.

Background layout and production design in the real world
BldgBlog

Great design is great design regardless of medium
Ace Jet 170

America when it was truly retro
Shorpy

Assorted bits of visual goodness
NotCot

To be used in conjunction with NetFlix
Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

Inspiring video talks from some of the world’s greatest thinkers
TED conference

The video below, Reyner Banham Love Los Angeles, is an awesome 52-minute BBC documentary by the British architecture critic who wrote THE book on the city: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.

Regular readers of Cartoon Brew will get a kick out of this. Bob “BobServo” Mackey of SomethingAwful.com has concocted a thorough and thoroughly hilarious parody of Cartoon Brew. It’s funny because, dare I say, it’s true. Apparently we’re pretty hardcore about this whole animation thing. Be sure to check out page two of the parody for a snort-inducing commentary by “John K.”

This is an entertaining Flash-animated website for DUBOIS meets FUGGER, an advertising and marketing agency. The design of the site is very Cartoon Modern and includes thirty animated transitions and five clickable hotspots. Flash development is by Belgian studio Studio Plum; design and animation from Eugene & Louise.

(via FWA)

The Internet is home to a wealth of classic animation goodness nowadays. It’s hard to keep up with all the wonderful material that people are posting everyday but here’s a few things that have caught my attention recently:

Kevin Langley has posted animation scenes from two of my favorite animators: Pat Matthews animation from the Shamus Culhane short The Greatest Man in Siam (1944) and Bobe Cannon animation from the Tex Avery short Wags to Riches (1949).

Animator Colin Giles put up video clips of Marc Davis and Ward Kimball from “Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life,” a 1981 documentary which aired on the Wonderful World of Disney.

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is featuring a Yogi Bear storyboard drawn by animation great Warren Foster.

Joe Campana, a film editor who works in animation, recently started a blog called Animation — Who and Where, and it has already become an indispensable daily read for me. Joe has done an incredible amount of detective work when it comes to biographical research on artists and their families, and now he’s sharing that info with everybody. Right now, he’s writing about the lives of artists who would have been celebrating their 100th birthdays this month if they were still alive. They include Johnny Cannon, Tom McKimson, Tom Johnson and Disney composer Leigh Harline. He also promises to identify the Disney animation artists playing softball in the footage recenly included on the “More Silly Symphoniesâ€? dvd. I can’t wait!

On a sidenote, wouldn’t it be amazing to have this biographical info available someday on a wiki, and to have it cross-referenced with a list of scenes and cartoons that the artists worked on, similar to what Alberto Becattini has started here. There are dozens of people out there, myself included, who have compiled plenty of original research, and if we pooled it together, it would amount to an unprecedented animation reference.

(website found via Hans Perk’s A. Film LA)

French illustrator, designer and 2D animator Quentin Tavernier (aka Kant-1) has a cool new website worth checking out. It’s as much fun to navigate as his drawings and animations are to look at. He’s also a guitarist for a rock band, Ace Out. Good stuff.

The “Unholy Marriage of Art and Comics” is back!

Craig Yoe has redesigned his Arf Lovers blog with new features like an rss feed, perma-links, comments and lots of new links. Yoe’s posts are often hilarious and eye opening - and certainly of interest to Brew readers. Yoe’s new Arf book, Arf Forum is now at the printer and can be pre-ordered at a discount price on Amazon. Based on his previous two Arf collections we highly recommend the latest edition sight unseen.

Craig is also compiling a book full of Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings, raunchy comics and cartoons by cartoonists known for their
mainstream wholesome stuff (Milton Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Will Eisner, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Mort Walker, Dr. Seuss, etc.). Previews of this book and Arf Forum will be posted regularly on Yoe’s blog.

There have been many cartoon characters based upon… uhh, shall we say, doo-doo.

From Spumco’s Nutty, the Friendly Dump to South Park’s Mr. Hankey, and not forgetting doodie.com, Burgerlog and Winnie the Pooh (Winnie is a doo-doo, take my word for it).

Now Manny Galan (who in real life is Director of Animation for Nickelodeon’s on-air promotions) has just created Dookie-Poo, and it’s a real contender for biggest brown lump of the year. (I mean that in a good way). Galan says:

This whole endeavor is just my way of keeping as much control over one of my own creations as possible. And doing something outside of the NICKELODEON system.

His characters are charming and the website is a lot of good clean fun. There’s a CG music video by upstate NY studio Virtual Persuasion, a cool Theatre section filled with small animations and short films, an interactive fun page and of course, a blog. Give it a look.