graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

A couple of Graphic Design Competitions are currently running that I thought may be of interest to some of you:

Helvetica Now Poster Competition
Helvetica Now Poster Contest invites entries for their poster design competition. Works which are published or unpublished may be submitted on the theme of “the role of type in modern day life, and the way that typography – and Helvetica – affects our perception of the environment.” The theme can be interpreted anyway the designer wishes. Submissions (by uploading a jpeg) are being accepted until 4th October. Three winners will win prizes amounting to more than €15,000. See the Linotype site for more details

Arma Queens Gambit Design Competition
Game fans may be interested in taking part in a competition to design a packshot for the game Queens Gambit. The winner will have their packshot on the cover of the game and win a copy of the game signed by the developers. The competition closes on 3rd August, so you need to be quick if you would like to enter. For more details see www.armaqueensgambit.com/

So you want a blog? Most of us either search for a template to adapt to our liking or the technically minded start from scratch and create their layout. So usually you’d start with a header, content area and one or two side bars, sounds pretty logical doesn’t it.

Take a look at the website and blog of Luis Santi Jr. at www.phatterism.com who turns the standard idea of a blog design on its head. This flash based website and blog feature Luis filmed holding out photos, hand writing blog entries and turning them round to show you. Everything is done with originality and humour. Even his biography is an image based version using animation.

Luis’ portfolio is also well worth taking a look at, although the site holding links to his work is very basic, the links to websites he has produced are in great to look at especially www.funshipisland.com

Most people know that these days its fairly straight forward to get a t-shirt, mug or mousemat printed online, but now you can also customise a guitar.

Being a bit of a guitar fan myself when I heard that Peavey Guitars were doing a similar thing that Cafepress did with t-shirts, but with guitars I had to take a look. In a similar way to Cafepress you upload a high resolution design to the site and position it on a guitar with the option to both scale and rotate the design.

The option is currently in beta, but I had an experiment and uploaded the Graphic Design Blog banner image to try, you can see the results above. With the guitars alone costing a minimum of $1599.99 (without the graphic) I daren’t press the submit button.

I will have to see if my boyfriend is feeling incredibly generous this Christmas at the current prices, but hopefully something similar will trickle down to cheaper guitars eventually. My only problem is that unfortunately my graphic would probably be a lot better that my guitar playing .