This is a collection of cool resources give me inspiration and a boost for making things and general creativity. If you find inspiration somewhere on the web or have other inspirational or creative suggestions, please pass them along. I'll try to keep them categorized, as well. Enjoy!
(In alphabetical order...)
Like April Wilkerson, Anne is a maker, a builder of things she needs, farm animal person, baker/cook, and pretty much a Jill-of-all-trades. Er, Anne-of-all-trades, as the case may be. She’s doing the homestead thing, raising animals, building what she needs, etc., but what’s cool about her website (and all her social media feeds), is that she publishes plans for stuff, How-Tos, videos, and fun photos. Check out her website, Instagram (how I found her), and her YouTube channel.
I’ve been following April and her workshop build, woodworking projects, and general antics for many years. Like me, April prefers to build the things she needs, instead of buying them. She’s gone all the way with this maker thing and has a great Instagram feed, YouTube channel, and blog. She’s a maker, builder, doer, raiser of rescue farm animals, and a born and raised Texan. She puts together really great content. According to her About page on her website, she hadn’t picked up a power tool before she started her blog in 2013, but you wouldn’t know it by the things she builds today. 🤔
I’ve been following April and her workshop build, woodworking projects, and general antics for many years. Like me, April prefers to build the things she needs, instead of buying them. She’s gone all the way with this maker thing and has a great Instagram feed, YouTube channel, and blog. She’s a maker, builder, doer, raiser of rescue farm animals, and a born and raised Texan. She puts together really great content. According to her About page on her website, she hadn’t picked up a power tool before she started her blog in 2013, but you wouldn’t know it by the things she builds today. 🤔
I stumbled onto This Old Tony on YouTube. His channel was a suggestion, since I mostly watch welding, maker, DIY, engineering, and psychology (because work) video. His style is hilarious, but his content is super educational if you’re a tinkerer like me. He does machining, welding, tinkering, and he sprinkles his YouTube videos with hilarity. His editing is perfectly matched to this humor. He often cuts himself off when he’s about to say something obvious or maybe just off? It’s no wonder Tony has almost 1,200,000 subscribers on YouTube, as of May of 2025.
If you watch or search the YooToobz for DIY and maker and other terms relating to anything you find on my site, you've no doubt run into Jimmy's amazing maker/DIY YouTube channel. I HIGHLY recommend you watch his stuff. He does fast-speed videos of projects, which are great for my short attention span. Jimmy's one of my maker heroes and is definitely on my list of people I'd love to have coffee with.
I have found my work tribe at Showit Inc. The highly talented people at Showit produce an amazing app for showing off your creativity, super cool design templates, and they are truly a people-first organization. It's a privilege to work with such an amazing group of like-minded people. It's a bonus that the company doesn't discourage the motorizing of office furniture.
Input is a flexible system of fonts designed specifically for code by David Jonathan Ross. It offers both monospaced and proportional fonts, all with a large range of widths, weights, and styles for richer code formatting.
I got a great tip from a reader (thank you, Diana!) about an article that listed 70+ FREE fonts (even free for commercial use) by Jill M. Sheehan over at the WebsitePlanet.com blog. While looking through the list, I saw that some of them come from one of my all-time favorite FREE font sites: FontSquirrel! From their website: “We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format.” Go read the article and give those sites a look.
Lynn is an amazing designer, advocate for design+development overlap and an incredible painter. I commissioned her to make a big version of the famous "Dogs Playing Poker" painting, but instead of dogs, it has all of my favorite cartoon characters.
This is a fantastic magazine and website for maker ideas and general creativity. You should subscribe. I know I do! Boy, howdy!
I try to pin things I find inspirational or that I want to refer to later for ideas. I guess that's what everyone is doing on/with Pinterest. Meh.
Basics on electronics, soldering, projects, and it’s well-written. Lots of material to browse through.
A cool blog about fun and learning with electronics!
A killer website (design- and code-wise) all about why it’s awesome to live and work in the State of Arizona.