Happy Halloween from Hosting Nation
Surfing the web is especially fun this time of year. Halloween is my favorite fall holiday (over and above the Thanksgiving Turkeys and the November Remembrances).
For me, and I imagine for many of us, Halloween is the last hurrah before jumping head first into the commercial cacophony of the Christmas Holidays. It’s also a time where you get to feel a little bit like a kid again – whether you’re dressing up for work or joining in the fun with your own children.
As the director of marketing and communications for Hosting Nation, I spend a lot of my time writing official communication and documentation. Sometimes that means developing our support infrastructure, sometimes it means an official announcement or release to our clients. Often it involves policy decisions
and implementation. All of the designs we’re working on are for official product releases or commercial projects, so my usual eclectic aesthetic tastes will often take a back seat to what appeals to a broad audience.
Not today though, today convention (and maybe a witch or two if we’re lucky) will go flying out the window. Today I’ll be traversing the interwebs like a spooky Halloween spider, digging up my favourite Halloween resources and sharing them all with you.
Search Engine Spooksters.
All the major search engines are in on the game. Google has, once again, dressed up their logo for Halloween with a nice rendition of a carved pumpkin. Yahoo is in on the game as well with a spooky little flash header that animates some blinking creepy eyes and a few Fledermauses. MSN did the minimum with a pumpkin image in the header. My favourite Halloween imagery probably came from my least favourite search engine, Ask. Ask did a full page autumnal spread that you can view in full screen here.
Other search engines I’ve been keeping my eye on such as Cuil and Hakia didn’t appear to do anything, hardly surprising as I imagine they’re focused on market share rather than fun designs that don’t last more than a day (still, I think it’s important to embrace the spirit of the season). Hopefully as they gain some market share we’ll see them becoming a bit more creative.
Design
PSDtuts is a great site to learn some pretty neat Photoshop techniques. If you ignore the comments of the jaded few who chastise PSDtuts for low quality tutorials, you can glean some pretty helpful tips and tools for designing your own materials. For the Halloween season, they’ve done a series of 40 Spine-chilling Horror Photoshop Effects, many of which are pretty cool.
Smashing Magazine has proffered a nice roundup of various Halloween wallpapers and some decent Halloween Vector Images that you can check out in their post on Beautiful Halloween Wallpapers And Halloween DIY-Tutorials.
iStock Photos offers a taste of Halloween eye-candy with a free themed image just in time for the holiday. You can probably still grab the image if you hurry.
Other Media
Gizmodo has a gallery of the 25 Best Geek-o’-Lanterns in the World, as did Wired (Erik likes the Death Star most of all)
BluAlien on Flickr has started a competition for the best 2008 Halloween photo, some of them are already up and you can view them here.
Worth 1000 has some wickedly awesome photoshopped jack-o-lanterns in a series of 6 contests, (you can view results of this contest, and many more on Worth 1000, by clicking here) . Some of them are pretty awesome – but keep in mind they’re all photoshopped so it’s not likely you’ll see any of these on your neighbour’s porch tonight.
And finally, before I leave you to your pumpkin spiced lattes and trick-or-treaters, the legendary town of Sleepy Hollow (home to the famous headless horseman) reports that all is quiet, the Horseman is at rest and the town is focused on fun and festivities rather than headless Halloween hijinks. You can visit the Village of Sleepy Hollow on their official website.
Happy Halloween everyone, from the hoots at Hosting Nation!