Ever since I was a little kid, my grandpa always encouraged me to draw ’cause he said he found “an artist” in me. And a truth that was, I was always carrying around a pack of coloured pencils, drawing books, etc I still remember I was very careful not to draw out of the lines and that kind of meticulousness led me in the end (I think) to be a designer.

And though I was kinda good at it, I always admired those guys who could draw off the top of their heads maintaining volume, dimensions and whatnot only by thinking of it and probably that turned out  in me focusing more as a logo/photo-manip/layout designer instead of an Illustrator. However, for many years I left the graphics path and moved on to audio and video but finally came back to decide this as my main income activity.

So now I’ve been in the industry for a little while now  and I’m trying to match up my illustration skills with the other ones. I’ve come across some beautiful vector sites but one really caught my attention.

Bloodsweatvector was  founded by Brad Mahaffey and Jared Nickerson, it is an artist collective and showcase of the most talented vector artists in the world. The site  has a nice variety of styles and it’s a great place to find inspiration for fresh and new ideas for those loving bezier curves, there’s also vector t-shirt designs and currently a  €1000 design contest.

Be sure to check them out and prepare to be amazed with some beautiful, fresh vector art!

However, something coming from this country has caught my attention in the past days in which I find myself clicking (without knowing) back to the same site over and over again. Studio Psycho is a little creative/design and illustration agency in Ukraine which demonstrates what our business means in times like these: time and creativity.
I have always been a sucker for extremely detailed illustrations, even over “recent” styles that I have come to like so much, more cartoony, more McBess if you may. And images like the one illustrating this post have glamoured me back into realistic-organic design. I have seen a couple of dissectional graphics in the past (i remember one about a shark) but definetely the guys over at Psycho really know what they’re doing. Nice job!

I have read an interesting theory stating that Psycho is responsible for the Smart Grid site. It certainly does keep the same aesthetics. What do you guys think?

Enjoy!

My feedreader has become a real problem due to the vast number of feeds I want to read on so many topics. My ‘design-related’ tab has been growing at least 1 feed a week since I decided to keep netvibes as organized as I could and the constant updating really drives me crazy. One of these constantly updated feeds is the amazing social bookmarking site FFFFound! I have tried to get an invite since forever but these are extremely scarce even in those invite-exchange sites and I’ve never been interested in any other like we heart it, vi.sualize.us, etc.

Anyways, I got some time ago an invite to a similar site called yay!everyday and it served me well for a couple of weeks. Lots of interesting people were posting real nice images and the posibility to like&comment them made the interaction much more attractive. Somehow I began forgetting to log in having tons of work to do (plus the million feed reading i feel compelled to do everymorning) and it became kind of irrelevant as i was already receiving the ffffound! stream to my netvibes and later to my Macbook screensaver to save some time.

But yesterday, i was reading a post @Abduzeedo where Kv3 was talking about yet ANOTHER service like this called Dropular which yesterday had an open signup for the beta version, no invite needed. Being a join-our-beta-now addict, i ran to dropular.net and registered immediately. I found that the place was extremely minimalistic in design and, actually, understood the importance on content and not on design in a site like this. People there are posting real nice images AND video AND complete links to websites (everything nicely tagged) and people have the possibility to follow other posters and favorite their posts. I kinda miss the comments feature as in yay!everyday but one thing that really got my attention and probably the best tool that will prevent me from ditching it as i did with the last visual bookmarking site/hype is this little droplet button you can put on your browser’s toolbar and click it whenever you want to share something on Dropular. A clean&tidy javascript highlights the elements on the current page and asks you what you want to share: an image, a video or the whole site. Nice!

Great work from the guys at Suprb! I have a couple of invites to the site (which i think is closed now to non-invite signups) and will gladly give them to everyone that leaves a comment. If i get more in the future, I’ll keep the order and give them to the following commenters.

Salut!

I’ve been reading Creattica for some time now, they have really interesting events and information for designers or creatives although most of them are too far away from Mexico so I always get all hyped up about them and then kind of frustrated ’cause I can never attend one REAL webdesign (or whatnot) event. Anyways, they have very nice information over there and thy’re improving the blog everyday. Creattica.com is supposed to be a stage in a bigger platform development conducted by Envato, the guys (god bless them) that gave us PSDTuts and FlashDen.

Obviously, Creattica is on Twitter and they have published a nice little contest to spice up their @creattica background, the deadline is Feb. 9th and the prizes are:

1st Prize – 1 Year PSDTUTS Plus Account (or VECTORTUTS Plus) – Value $108
2nd Prize – $50 to spend on any of FlashDen / ThemeForest / AudioJungle / VideoHive – Value $50
3rd Prize – A copy of Rockstar WordPress Designer OR Rockstar Freelancer – Value $29

W00t!

So, everyone open your favorite software and design away ’cause, really, it is only a twitter background! Download the creattica logo and fill out the entry form here now!

Please DO read de terms&conditions before some stockphoto embarassment comes your way.

This is a stacked version of Murray times poster

I meant a stacked version because this is originally a widescreen poster that Nakatomi Inc has got for you . Buy the piece here, there is also a glow in the dark version!!