Netdiver Mag

Amy Guip is the consumate photographer whose specialties include photo illustrations for magazine articles, book jackets, and music CD packaging, with the occasional ad thrown in the mix. Her photomontages have both edge and elegance.

This powagirrrl rocks!

Imago created ths one minute advertisement for the launch of Turkish Edition of The New York Times. The result is 60 seconds of typographic goodness, mastered in 2K cinema resolution.

Must see!

Noah Woods is an illustrator with a unique style. By using very bold contrasting colors, quirky and simplified flat 2d characters that look right out of children’ books, the message is always at the forefront.

No Days Off is a creative studio and they’ve produced deliriously creative LP covers and promo CD boxes for Paloma Faith and Sonny J, amongst others. Check the music section for more.

Have a peak into the marvelously eccentric, ecclectic and ethereally beautiful work produced by the design studio FriedaMaria who cater concept, design and styling of… all kinds of spaces such as shops, meeting rooms, party spaces, shop windows and magazines.

Totally delightful and uber creative stagings all rendered with great photography.

UT CANNES LIONS GRAND PRIX 2010 call for submissions. The theme is inspiration. Cannes Liones International Advertising Festival that developed as a venue to judge advertising ideas from around the world will select as the UT Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2010 T-shirt design one of the various values that can be said to be the Cannes brand. No age, gender, nationality, or other requirements apply. Anyone, anywhere in the world can apply.

Prize: US$10,000 (gold)
The top 20 works will be made into UNIQLO products. Of those, gold, silver, and bronze prizes will be awarded.

Extended deadline: October 18

Chuckled and smiled watching these videos: JK Divorce Entrance Dance. There is also the alternate: JK Wedding Entrance Dance.

Laughter is a good therapy.

Jeffrey Decoster illustrations are very powerful visually. His drawing skills and line arts are depicting accurate and emotional situations with a mix of lightness and hyper density concepts.

Greg Lamarche has a positive fixation with piling up typography and doing paper collages with it or geometrical forms.

Katrin Schacke tickles our perceptions and imagination with this photographic collection of simili food montages all constructed with clothes and staged on drawn plates and cutlery.

Brilliant!

Another packaging tour de force: “When approached by an independent beverage company to rebrand their line of 100% natural, carbonated juices, BBDK responded with a simple question. “Why not call it 100%?” It only makes sense.”

Jaw dropping photographic concepts by Maak Roberts who is attracted to unusual, sometimes absurd and comical stuff while staging believable trompe l’oeil. The kind of pictures that makes you look twice and then perhaps, smile.

Philipp Zurmoehle is a graphic designer currently working for the apparel department at Adidas in Germany. He has put together a nice collection of illustrations, print and design works.

Mr Irony AKA The Rainboner’ handmade sculpture Remed is a clever toy and packaging by Billy Jr. Productions aka Toykyo who does wacky monsterism illustrations too.

Nazario Graziano is an extra talented individual and I’ve been following his work for a number of years now. His style has been evolving becoming more and more elegant yet still funky, eclectic and personal. He does illustration collages, graphic design, art direction, clouds, rain and rainbows and just relaunched his new portfolio.

He is also the founder of RevolverLover and ANTI magazine.

There you go! Can’t get enough of your favorite commands (Crtl + Alt + Del) available as very cool throw pillows and designed by diffractionfiber. Also available, Esc(ape). Expressing just how I feel right now. Can I get my right thumb back please.

Cut&Paste is proud to present the culmination of Digital Design Tournament 2009 —the first-ever Global Championship. With the broad geographical reach of an Olympic event and the nervy psychological gamesmanship of the X Games, the championship takes the tournament’s international approach to design as spectator sport and amps it up like never before.

Upcoming: October 16 in NYC

Smile On Your Brother is an art show centered around the original shape of skateboards. Bringing together contemporary artists both in, and affected by the skateboard industry to help raise funds to go towards the first goal of Contributor, which is to donate 100 skateboards to disadvantaged youth across Canada in 2009/2010.

Boards on auction, we are contributors.

Online auction ends: Oct 25

Upcoming: Toronto – Sept 25-27
Upcoming: Montreal – Oct 2-4
Upcoming: Quebec – Oct 16-19

In my quest for the perfect sans-serif font for a new project I asked if there were tasty typographic knowledge designers who knew some because I really needed help. Follows fonts they suggested that you may want to check out too.

Akkurat — Lineto

Akzidenz-Grotesk — MyFonts

Benton Sans — Font Bureau

DadaGrotesk — Optimo

FF DIN — Font Shop

FF Fago — MyFonts

FF Meta — MyFonts

Fedra Sans Condensed — Typotheque

Fonce Sans Pro — MyFonts

Frutiger — Adobe

GalaxiePolaris — Village

Gotham — Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Italic 2.0 — (lots of them)

Klavika — Process Type Foundry

Officina sans — Adobe

Sans Serif Fonts — Font Squirrel

Swiss font family — FontHaus

Theinhardt — Optimo

Trade Gothic — Adobe

Tungsten — Hoefler & Frere-Jones

NBGrostesk — Neubau. Available at a discount now.

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Thanks you are awesome: Karen Oh, Marc Leza Jasikovic, Simone Catania, Adolfo Correa Nanco, Wilman Guevara, Grey Cremer, Mark Sanders, Luis Vieira, Norman Nimer, Dani Navarro, Sébastien Truchet, Jason Chesebrough, Derek Kinsman, David Snyder, Ian O’Phelan

Cricket Cola awesome packaging and typographic treatment by Neil Powell.

Project: Jugando con números – Play with numbers (1/17 so far) is an explorative and personal visual experiment initiated by Jader Quiroga aka mymonxter.

Showing: excerpt of #9

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Showing: excerpt of #8

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Showing: excerpt of #15

Pierpaolo Ferrari was born and raised in Milan and specializes in advertising photography. Conceptually strong, he can capture the essence of a campaign by adding sometimes, unusual staging and props to get the message across.

Exceptional eye!

Wouldn’t it be the dream of any artist to have free reign in imagining a TV id spot? Julien Vallée was invited to do so for Artv, a Quebec based television channel. They asked Montreal artists to represent the logo in the way they want.

He used around 15 pieces of plywood with a mirror on the backside that were disposed precisely to create the shape of the logo front the front angle.

Excerpt from The Courage to Create (1975) book borrowed from Sshhh. This is a working library, a project by Mandy Brown is a Creative Director at W. W. Norton & Company, an independent publisher.

“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.

They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”

Elegant photography and dramatic staging to showcase the jewelry designed by Majo Fruithof on her website.

Johny Kelly is London based an illustrator who did some fantastic paper sculptures.

Network Osaka as a graphic designer, “strives to engineer form and function in complete harmony. Removing unnecessary design elements and having a concise and direct approach to design problems will ultimately create a successful product valued for both its content and its design.”

Luv his print work!

Would you like to spend a full hour one on one with me for free? Would you like to pick my brain and find out what I’ve learned by being editor of ND, judging multiple design award shows and having reviewed over 150k portfolios in the past 15 yrs?

No problem! Let’s do it! Grab a tall fav drink and set some quality time aside to get loads of insights as to why your talent is primordial, how to use, exploit, present it and cash on it. Definitely aiming to empower and inspire rather than show. There are no ‘visual’ examples provided.

Make it an even better experience download and print the .pdf to follow and add your personal notes as we go along. Now, how do we go about doing this?

Head on to and pick the Online the Brand is You video (1 hour) of the session I did at FITC Toronto ’09, and we’re all set. Would luv to hear your comments or questions.

Poster designed by Joshua Davis

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Caught into the moment during my session.

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Photo by Lillian Xia

Henning Wagenbreth is an independent graphic design professional based in Germany. He uses pixel based illustrations to carry out his satirical survey of socio-political issues. More punch to the pixel than most, the Plastic Dog comic strip like project is delivering witty commentaries on the state of the world.

To see larger details – hit the e-cards section.

Wanna see how far design has penetrated what would have been considered off-limits in a very conservative industry? Check out the All City collection which intends to re-interpret classical Portuguese porcelain sets, with improbable graffiti motifs. Initiated by Hugo Tornelo.

With such design, porcelain could make a come back!

Alex Ostrowski is an idea led graphic designer and very-very creative who luvs prints and funky projects. He’s taking on projects in art direction and illustration and has spent time with a number of London studios from Big Active to NB: Studio.

Now that’s a portfolio you don’t want to miss.

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He also has a band called Kotki Dwa for which he does all promo material and does album covers for others as well.

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He is half of the core that initiated The Yellow Revolution; the goal was to generate creative interaction between disciplines. Having now graduated, others are now sustaining the collective projects.

As many others doing same, Gavin Potenza who works on design and communication mandates, also pursue self-initiated projects that lead to collective exhibits and collaboration which make the bulk of his portfolio.

Is there less and less divide between design and art? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Coco is an illustrator which background gives her a unique insight into fashion. Forget me not is a series of Art mode digital prints on scarves and turban, all 100% silk and is an extension of her work as an illustrator.

All designs are based exclusively on personal compositions and all elements have been hand-drawn.

Motion Graphics Festival 2009 (New Motion + New Sound + New Code) showcases explosive artists and motion picture creators including: Shepard Fairey, Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, Chuck D of Public Enemy, KRS-One, Addictive TV, Digital Kitchen, The Mill, Passion Pictures, Animal Logic, Post Panic, Dvein, David Lobser and more.

Upcoming: November 18-22 in Washington DC

Dinero Mag. Outsourcing illustration by Typozon.

Thonik specializes in visual communication with an emphasis on graphic design and are currently presenting 12 projects by superimposing each page as if in a book.

You can choose from over a 1,000 images from over a 100 projects to create and order your own catalog.

Interesting aproach isn’t it?

Saffron Brand Consulting has done a tour de force in building the Litro brand. The brief: “How can you succeed in the über-competitive European service station market?”

Check the solution! The droplet is a versatile symbol with a modern tech feel to it creating immediate recognition. Wow!

Frankfurt based Martin Anderle is a freelance interactive designer and developer and his new website is showing off his expertise. He specializes in concepting and developing micro and portfolio sites.

I know some will find it noisy and busy, but I support his attempt to differentiate himself. Well done!

dn&co work “with visionary international developers, funds and architects that have a healthy irreverence for the industry standard, providing them with branding and production across all media.”

Now that’s the attitude that can raise the bar.

Nice shorts one a visual eye candy and the other explorative both designed, directed and animated by xtra talented Marco Vinicio Morales Aburto aka Kultnation.

Video Vinyl

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All that is solid

Another talented illustrator to discover: Gaetan Billault who uses a lot of black spots and penned outlines sometimes mixed with colors to cast a strange company of characters.

Mario Wagner creates mix-media illustrations for a roster of prestigious clients. His retro kitschy cut-outs are often applied to acrylic based canvas and yield somewhat trippy and enigmatic compositions.

Art & Design Montréal mettra en valeur dans une même exposition une sélection de créateurs en communications visuelles. On y trouvera une quinzaine de photographes, de designers graphiques et d’illustrateurs qui mettent habituellement leur talent au profit de clients commerciaux.

Upcoming: September 11

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Ghee, if you attended yesterday, you discovered as I, how packaging can be deceptive. It turns out that the best of show was really the campaign posters of the artists (as advertised on their website) which was no where to be seen on location?!?! If the show had delivered to equal part with their promotional material, it would have been nothing short of outstanding.

For all the hooplah and buzz, the exhibit was quite disappointing. Featured work had (for the most part) already been published (and readily available for free on the artists websites). Quite a throwback that there was no curating direction. Nothing fresh and unique was prepared by the artists for the A&E premiere.

Some people I talked to were quite upset of having had (like I) to pay an entry fee and waited in line for over 45 min. It was in the end, a well organized big ego back-slapping event and a lure for another Friday night party.

The endorsement was spectacular by Montreal’s standards, and for me, raises a big question: How far and remoted is the media from what is really going on in the design culture community? Clueless it seems. To their benefit, they were sold, as I, an empty package.

Julien De Repentigny aka Visualadvice is based in Montreal and soaring his career by generating high-profile projects. Definitely someone to watch for.

He has created this self-initiated project called the Lightbox using acrylic and neon lights.

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He art directed and did the montage for this upcoming Art Design Montreal exhibit taking place at la SAT tonite.

Take a journey into the world of Diftype the playground of Niklas Lundberg. This young (21) graphic designer and illustrator is slowly ascending to become one of the best of his generation. Gotta luv his conceptual approach whereas integrated bits and pieces of photography, lines and colors into each design project, yield very strong visual statements.

Excellent design portfolio!

Floating navigation to show their projects on the website of FIRMA a Moscow based design studio, who “at the time of global changes and instability China gives us confidence in the future. We are inspired by courage of the Chinese pirates, the wise attitude of inhabitants of Empire of the Dragon to copyright and unity of the Chinese mafia. China teaches us to be courageous and diligent which helps us to follow the chosen path confidently.”

That’s quite an extreme statement to convey that they will provide unique solutions don’t you think?

That’s an interesting concept! Nope, these are not illusrations neither a curious assemblage of iconic characters; these are paintings created by Andy Awesome and their size is huge!

Showing: ID03 – Series Nº1 acrylic paint on canvas 4 x [100cm x 100cm (40 x 40″)]

Great White Shark illustration by Ryan Berkley

“Once a popular jazz pianist, this shark has most recently become a song and dance showman. His voice has been described as a cross between Louis Armstrong and Kenny Rogers. Unfortunately his fierce temper has limited his gigs to biker bars and convict picnics.”

Anyone that knows me, knows that I have this fascination for everything miniature. Like the little Dinosaurs book (fully printed and readable with a lense) that is sitting by a pile of book. I like the contrast and perspective these little figurines afford in comparison with real life size objects that populates the studio.

Discover the Plastic Life series shot by Vincent Bousserez. These are probably the smallest I’ve ever seen.

The staging is strikingly believable.

Resn Web Reel in their own words: “IS NOT A MOTION REEL… ONLY WEB WORK…. The agony and ecstasy of Resn online… candy napalm sticking to your chest hair as you run screaming through a herd of African Water Buffalo.”

Yeah, totally that crazy!

Meredith Dittmar is a freelance character designer / 3d illustrator working on local, national, and international campaigns. Under Corporatepig LLC she sculpts original and cloned characters sold in museum giftshops, art-toy stores.

The delicacy of the intricate details seen in her work speaks amount to her passion for what she does. What about the almost tangible sweetness to the characters she depicts?

Beautiful, simply beautiful.

Oh the mess that cables do. Especially those peripherals wires that dangle often back to the floor. Messy no more with the cool CableDrop design by Bluelounge.

Luv these bamboo trays that serve to teach children appropriate use of dish and cutelry. Designed by FUNFAM.

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via: Minimalissimo

Marcus Eriksson aka Subdisc has come a long way since first being features on ND (when he was using an open CD box as interface). He now works as a creative director and is becoming a talented photographer.

Alvarejo is an illustrator who has carved himself a niche as one who can readily use metal plate like etching that gives some of his work an historical feel as seen with early book illustrators (such as the ones for Jules Verne) and executes them with a moderny twist.

Showing: Murphy’s Law

“Generally, the spirit of Murphy’s law captures the common tendency to emphasize the negative things that occur in everyday life; in this sense, the law is typically formulated as some variant of If anything can go wrong, it will.”

via: Wikipedia

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Showing: Ziggy Stardog

Always fall for cute pixel design. Webtrendmap (Trends from sources we trust) is a product of collaboration between Oliver Reichenstein iA Inc. and Craig Mod in Tokyo. You can build your own and start sharing. Don’t miss the about page that explains the process.

Example: All Things Typographical

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Example: New York Designers

UT CANNES LIONS GRAND PRIX 2010 call for submissions. The theme is inspiration. Cannes Liones International Advertising Festival that developed as a venue to judge advertising ideas from around the world will select as the UT Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2010 T-shirt design one of the various values that can be said to be the Cannes brand. No age, gender, nationality, or other requirements apply. Anyone, anywhere in the world can apply.

Prize: US$10,000 (gold)
The top 20 works will be made into UNIQLO products. Of those, gold, silver, and bronze prizes will be awarded.

Deadline: September 30

Just beautiful! Series of experimental covers for Faber’s new POD film range. Inspired by the phenomena of a visual glitch, the design utilizes a logarithm that translates the title and section into a distinct graphic pattern by Michael Kosmicki.

The Good Web is a conference for Advertisers, Designers, Brands, and Non-Profits to share their ingredients of success for building awareness and participation around the causes they believe in.

Attendees will learn how industry leaders are using online marketing, social media, games, and mobile to build robust advocacy programs that benefit people, planet and profit.

Cancelled: September 25

Johan Prag is a Swedish Art Director living and working in Tokyo, Japan. Before coming to Tokyo, he was part of renowned design agency Stockholm Design Lab where he among other things worked on the rebranding of Scandinavian Airlines System as well as on several award winning television identities.

His work is stellar and compelling! Must see from top to bottom.

Ain’t that a beauty? HU (short for ‘human’) by Ross Lovegrove for Issey Miyake.

From the front Common Thread is a poster exhibition whose primary goal is to explore how identity is influenced by one’s emotional ties with a certain country. Populations are more mobile than ever before and birth in a particular country no longer determines where one might live or settle. This means that the notion of us and them and the awareness of otherness might be more prevalent.

Upcoming: October 7-17

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Organized by Seven25 ran by Isabelle Swiderski (who incidently updated her design and typography website) and Xavier Encinas Studio.

Glen Birchall devised this ingenous 7 construction cards, all describing a different element of the show were designed as part of the promotional material for the Tent London event.

Wonder what that is? It’s an original Up and Down signage system devised by Luciano Marx. Nice!

Jean-Paul Frenay is a Belgian director and visual artist. He just finished a new experimental short film.

Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten… what is he searching for?

Lela Jacobs small victories (mickey mousie like) ad designed by The International Office.

BBC Blast is a website which aims to develop young people’s creativity. But some of these kids don’t even know where to start.

The Blast Studio, a real time interactive installation, gave young people the opportunity to experiment in the Topolski Studio at the Southbank Centre, whilst making the kind of mess they’d never get away with at home. Like never before.