Glenn Kenny describes The Eastwood Pass:

…certain critics, so thoroughly enamored of Eastwood—not just Eastwood the director, but Eastwood the man, the myth, the legend—are just so thoroughly enamored that they’ll ignore his films’ many, many, many shortcomings. To this accusation I can only personally respond: Okay, you caught me. Red handed, and dead to rights.

I’m a big Clint Eastwood fan, but there are many films that I just can’t make it through.  Hell, my first date was seeing “The Dead Pool.”  But despite that, he still gets a big pass here, as well.

Smashing Magazine showcases “Sweet Chocolate Websites.”

As one would expect, chocolate website often use an appetizing brown dominant color. If you take time to look at the panel of colors associated with it, you will find out that there is a lot of combination working really well. Apart from this component, each site is unique and features an original identity, depending on product presentation and given information.

Despite the grammatical issues with this article, it points out some beautiful design techniques and color combinations.  I love the hoizontal layouts as well (memo to myself, create a horizontally divided WP theme some time.)

See All Eight Arcade Fire Album Covers at Pitchfork.

Maybe the whole thing is a commentary on how similar and interchangeable all these different suburban scenes are? Whatever the case, the album arrives August 2 in the UK/Europe and August 3 in the U.S. via Merge.

Comes out in the U.S. just 2 days after my birthday!!

After watching, I spent a good part of this week thinking about the powerful and incredibly sad movie “The Stoning of Soraya M.”  See the iTunes trailer.

I also want the themes on this site to be fully tested and high quality, so I plan on deleting some of the older ones because I don’t really like them enough to redesign them for the latest version of WP and I’d rather work on new ideas.

I’m especially excited now because WordPress.org has accepted one of my themes!  So I submitted two more this morning and will continue to try to make interesting, free themes both for this site and for Savvy Web Design, where I post niche themes for more business-type sites.

I’m using a series of cupcakes in the shirt design, but am offering two of them here as free cupcake clip art – since these will be used for our shirts, they are permitted for personal use only.  And if you do use them on your website, all I require is that you provide a link back to http://fyrewurks.com somewhere on the page(s) that they are used on.

Free Clip Art Cupcakes with White and Black Backgrounds:

KalaaLog provided a great tutorial on creating a vector feather which really helped me get going with vectors.  I hope you enjoy – now I’m off to play with more vector images!