While the end of the year is quickly approaching I wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays and thank you to all those who took the time to visit my site and view my work this year and in the past.  This has by far been the most successful year for me, I got to work on so many awesome projects, won a couple of awards, and stayed pretty busy through the rough economic times.  If next year is anything close to this one that would be amazing.  If anyone is attending the Mac World Expo in January out in California, I do have a piece that is going to be shown at the Digital Art Gallery there so check it out if you get a chance.  Again, Happy Holidays and New Years to everyone, go eat lots of food, drink some beers and good luck to everyone.
-Adam

I worked on this a while back through Propane Studios, its an online holiday card by Hitachi that is translated into 10 different languages.  You select a couple of their products and it forms a Kaledioscope figure that generates random patterns based off what you have selected. 

I’m not sure how I missed this when it first came out, but I am honored to be featured as Design Taxi’s Website Of The Day back on December 13th.  Big Thanks!

While browsing around the web today, I stumbled across the work of Russian designer Yulia Brodskaya.  This award winning and published designer has some of the most amazing Paper Graphic artwork that I have seen.  Every piece is so intricate and flawless and there’s so many of them, take a look for yourself.

I just came across today and I’m not sure how recent this is but I think its fairly new.  AIGA has a Designers Salary Survey for 2008 that covers yearly salary and total compensation for various design position as well as for owners, developers, producers and copywriters.  Having worked in both Orlando and New York I can say from first hand experience that these numbers are quite close for the most part, but the one category that surprised me the most was the range for freelancers.  Take a look and see where you rank salary wise with your fellow designers in your area.

The Killers are back with their latest album, Day & Age, which reminiscences their first album Hot Fuss, a collection of tracks made up of orchestrated sounds, electrifying synths and poppy beats that you could dance all night to at your local hipster hangout.  After the success of their first debuted album, the Killers seemed to have turned their reputation 180 degrees and released Sam’s Town, a good album but had some critics claiming they were following the lines of Bruce Springsteen maybe just a little too closely.  Many saw their clean cut, fashionista style quickly turn into a western un-groomed cowboy look.  I have to admit I was a fan of their first album more than the other ones, besides the tracks ‘Mr. Brightside’ and ‘Somebody Told Me’ is what first caught my attention and I’m glad they finally decided to lean back towards the style of music that got them noticed in the first place.  This album includes some great tracks including Human, Spaceman and A Dustland Fairytale. 

I’m quite excited to be one of the 25 selected artists to have their work displayed next year at the Macworld Conference in San Fransisco, California.  The expo will be held January 5-9 and is one of the biggest Mac conferences in the world with an estimating 40-50k people in attendance.  The artworks will be blown up and displayed in the Digital Art Gallery as well being printed in catalogs to hand out. 

I’m still trying to decide if I will be attending the event, I have never been out to California so this would definitely be an interesting trip.  I’m Curious if anyone has attended one of these conferences before and how their experience went. 

The Grid System is a very helpful and resourceful site created by Antonio Carusone.  As many designers may know, when used correctly the grid can be a very powerful and useful tool that can improve the visual design layouts for websites, newspapers, magazines and just about anything else in between.  This site includes articles, tools and books about the different types of grids and the best ways to use them.  One of the best features on the site is the collection of free grid templates they have available for download.  These files are made for Adobe InDesign and Photoshop and follows the Rule Of Thirds also known as The Golden Rule. 

Big thanks to the best design magazine, Communication Arts for selecting mtvmusic.com as today’s webpick of the day. 

Underworld Rise Of The Lycans website just went live today, this was the final project that I had the chance to work on while I was at Big Spaceship. The site features the normal cast, story, downloads, etc. but also includes three mini games throughout the site. You can experience the site by scrolling left to right or vice versa in a parallax movement or to go directly to a section there is a quick navigation button. 

Sorry for the lack of posts the past couple of days, I have been busy trying to finish a couple of projects before the upcoming Holidays.  There are two new sites that I worked on that I am pretty excited about and both of those should launch around Thanksgiving or a week later, I will update those as soon as they are live.  Also, I created the illustration above for Hugo’s create contest with the theme “World”.  If you happen to have an extra minute I would really appreciate it if you could vote for my design if you like it. Thanks! 

Click here to download the free vector file of the shapes above.  These are a collection of shapes that I made at some point and intended to use them in one way or another on a project but never got the chance to or ended up coming up with another idea.  These are great and useful for adding swirls, abstract parts, overlays or anything else to a piece of work, also turn them into brushes for more options and different effects.

I first came across this band School of Seven Bells while I was going through my usual daily list of sites that I visit each morning.  What drew me into them was the cover album, for some reason I’m not sure if its the colors, the mountains, the retro look or maybe all of the above combined that I found it fascinating and decided to listen to a sample track.  After listening to the song ‘Conjur’, the track I have listed aboveI immediately thought that it sounded a bit like Ladytron but softer and mixed with some synths that resembled The Postal Service at times.  I decided to download the album and after listening to it, it wasn’t quite what I expected.  Its not a bad album at all but I didn’t realize the other tracks would have a global influence placing them in the World or New Age genre at times. 

This week I was finally able to get some free time and work on a personal design something that I haven’t had a chance to do in a while now. Between client work, administrative stuff, meetings, looking for ways to promote myself, etc.. the normal things most freelancers have to deal with I’m sure, all my time is has been taken up the past couple of months. Its always good to take a step back and do something for yourself or something that reflects your personal style and in my case which got me to where I am today, not that its anything to mention but its a good start.  I sort of got my inspiration on this piece from the OFFF ‘09 Conference which had a theme of “This isn’t flying, This is falling with style”.  Also if anyone lives in Lisbon and has a chance to attend the show next year in May, its definitely a good learning experience and very inspirational plus I hear the parties out there are worth the trip alone.  I was able to attend the one in New York last year and found that the people who I have never heard about and didn’t know anything about their work, they seemed more inspiring then the ones I did know about.  But, everybody was great and it was a well put together conference. 

While known for his famous and amazing prankster like street art and unknown face, Banksy recently had a showing at Greenwich Village in NYC that sent a completely different and strong message to the people who witnessed the exhibit.  The show titled “Village Pet Store and Tavern Grill” had a setting of a small pet store with the most incredible and cleverly thought out animatronics filling up cages and bowls while cheerful farm music looped in the background.  The message was clearly stating the use of animals in today’s society being abused (or eaten for the vegans) for the gratification of oneself. 

Some of the displays included Mcdonald’s style chicken nuggets caged up and dipping their heads in and out of a barbecue sauce, a leopard jacket shaped as the animal while resting on a tree with a wagging tail, a plucked tweety bird locked up in a cage and a monkey with headphones on watching other monkeys in the wild mating on a small television set. I’m not sure where and if this exhibit will go to another place after here but if it does I strongly suggested everyone in that area check it out, its free and its very impressive. As depressing as it was I’m definitely glad I got to see it on its last day.