Liquid Treat

Translating your photos from analog to digital is a snap with Lomography's Smartphone Film Scanner. Turn on the portable device's backlight, feed in your 35mm film (remember that?), take a photo of it using your smartphone, and then use your phone's camera or the specially-developed app (iPhone and Android versions available) to edit and share the freshly digitized images. At $59, it's an affordable and speedy solution to film scanning that works for color negative, color slide and black & white films.

We love classic Post-It notes, developed by a 3M researcher who saw opportunity in a chemist colleague's flimsy adhesive, but they're no good for larger tasks -- sticky signs, charts, long lists, bookmarks for giant books. 3M has come to the rescue with Post-It Big Pads, a new line of jumbo sticky notes that top out at a comically large 22 inches square. Part conversation piece, part makeshift whiteboard, these supersized pads are sure to surprise and delight at home and at the office, or wherever a lot of stick–to–itiveness is required.

A 192-member jury of leading creatives and designers gets down to the business of judging the 51st D&AD Awards on April 15, so it's the perfect time to look back on the first five decades of excellence in visual thinking with D&AD 50, new from Taschen. The anniversary tome spotlights the best in design and advertising through the eyes of D&AD presidents and other key figures who each share his or her favorites from one of the last 50 years, from the birth of TV advertising in the '60s through the digital revolution and smartphone-optimized world of today.

The talents of an illustrator, a rock star and an animator come together in "I Have Your Heart," a darkly whimsical animated short by Molly Crabapple, Kim Boekbinder, and Jim Batt. Set to an accordion song about love, loss and open-heart surgery, the film (two years in the making) uses paper puppets and stop motion to create a world of staggering detail. "There's something really beautiful and tactile about physically crafting the sets and characters, the way the light catches the paper," says Batt of the team's decision to forgo software for a more hands-on approach to animation. "You get wonderful moments of serendipity, and everything sort of shimmers with potential life in stop-motion, whereas in the computer it's easy to get bogged down in twiddling settings and keyframes forever."

Nurture a chromo-prodidgy by supplementing the usual numbers and letters flash card regimes with this newly released set from the color authorities at Pantone. Illustrated by Andrew Gibbs, the oversized cards each feature a solid color -- say "Duckling Yellow" (Pantone 1215) -- on one side; the reverse reveals additional tones of the color in the context of a pattern and challenges the child to pick out the Duckling Yellow in the mix. The colorful fun continues through tonal variations in the nine basic colors, including "Lollipop Purple," "Starfish Orange" and "Grasshopper Green."

Shutterstock is heading upmarket with Offset, a collection of royalty-free imagery from top photographers and illustrators. Announced yesterday, the new brand will offer image buyers a simple, transparent licensing model ($250-$500 buys unlimited print and online usage for a particular image) for assignment-quality work from the likes of National Geographic, illustrator and typographer Rian Hughes, and photographer Maura McEvoy. Be among the first to browse the Offset library of 25,000 images by requesting an invitation to the private beta phase.