This is the first of a bunch of posts I’ll be writing on architecture and design for ChurchCreate. Although they won’t be directly related to church media or web design, they’ll hopefully serve to expand visual vocabulary and give some insight into different movements and historical ways of solving creative challenges.

I’m starting things off with an overview of some great blogs I follow for this stuff – they’re all great resources for new ideas and images if you’re stuck on something and need a break.

Follow me follow them…

Designboom

Although primarily an industrial design site, DesignBoom features well-written articles on international architecture projects, and has an incredibly encouraging ‘Interviews’ section full of conversations with prominent and up-and-coming architects and designers about their methods, work, and ideology.

ArchDaily

ArchDaily is a straightforward architecture blog with profiles of a wide range of recent projects, encompassing the latest high profile buildings from greats like MAD and Rem Koolhaas to obscure, thought-provoking student work.

Boasts a relatively active, insightful, and often critical commenting community.

ISO50

Easily one of the highest quality blogs online for both design and music, Scott Hansen’s ISO50 brings some of the most inspiring modernist-nostalgic imagery to the surface, as well as the best of hard-to-find electronic and ambient. Highly recommended!

If you caught Thursday’s post on tiled backgrounds, this site’s an amazing example.

but does it float

Stream of inspiring, cutting-edge, and often bizarre fine art, graphic design, photography, and other media; layout is blank except for the content, a tiny sidebar, and the quotes that serve as titles for each post. Runs off Cargo.

Love the simplicity of ButDoesItFloat!

Kitsune Noir

Blog of LA designer Bobby Solomon, Kitsune Noir provides regular posts on art, design, fashion, and music, and serves as a platform for collaborations such as the Desktop Wallpaper Project and pseudo-weekly Mixcasts.

NOTCOT

Encompasses notcot.com, a traditional blog with articles on travel and design backed up with solid photography, as well as notcot.org and notcouture.com, which both use grids of photos+blurbs to present a massive range of links on design and fashion, respectively.