It’s that time again! A year has passed since our last Creative Careers special edition, and every graduate we featured went on to secure jobs at top, high-profile agencies. This time round we’ve got tons of seriously impressive work to showcase from fresh grads around the country, along with all the top uni and college courses and a whole load of recruitment advice and support. Oh, and…
Features: Internet Explorer 8: a special developer’s guide to adding next-gen features to your site
Red Bull Flight Lab: We go behind-the-scenes with the team at Less Rain to see how they built a website with wings
Photoshop Trickery: Master blending modes and textures to craft awesome futuristic graphics
The Perfect Portfolio, part 3: AJAX guru Ben Scott shows how to turn your designs into animated reality
AS3’s drawing APIs explained: Darren Richardson explains quick techniques for getting artistic with Flash coding
Effective Exhibitionism: Mark Billen discusses root canals (and how to get your dream job…)
How To…
Create a showcase component in Flash CS3
Build optimised iPhone templates with CSS
Use the AJAX data grid component in ColdFusion 8
Issue 144 hits the shelves on the 8th of May. Get yourself a subscription to get them a day before everyone else and save yourself some mulah in the process!
THIS STORY WAS LOST FROM THE BULLETIN OF ISSUE 144:
Brighton-based Creative Catapult slingshots home-grown talent to the top
Brighton has long been known as an art hub of the UK, with a diverse multicultural population and, of course, the highly esteemed university – a centre of excellence when it comes to art and design. Constantly promoting its status and pushing home-grown talent, digital media support organisation Wired Sussex set up a four-month project called Creative Catapult to encourage entrepreneurialism in young Illustration and Animation graduates.
The project offered 20 young creatives the chance to work on a live brief for the BBC, gaining experience of how to develop and pitch ideas to clients along the way. The winning team’s pitch was so successful that the BBC decided to commission it there and then.
“As soon as we saw the storyboards, we could see it working as a viral promo. A brilliantly simple concept – the team had really thought about their audience and found the right kind of visual and storytelling style to appeal to them,” said the BBC’s Ben Ledden.
Wired Sussex director Phil Jones added, “Creative Catapult has shown once again that Brighton really is a hotbed of young creative talent, particularly within digital media. There’s strong graduate presence and an incredibly diverse and buoyant industry, which helps that talent to grow.” Turn the pages to find out more about the courses on offer at the University of Brighton.
For all of you who are lucky enough to be studying at higher education institutes, NOW is the time to be submitting your work to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. This is a major accolade to have on your CV and guarantees success, basically! Check out the awesome widget below for real-time info on the entries so far.
Share your work by getting it onto the Web Designer cover disc!
Every month we pack the cover CD full of handy fonts, imagery, components, add-ons, tutorial files and a whole wealth of other goodies. We want to do more with it though; we want it to be your digital space. Going forward, we’re going to make the CD a digital forum for our reader’s creativity: a means to get your work published; a space to fill with your own creations and original content. We’re big supporters of the open source and Creative Commons movements, and believe that talent should be shared. So whatever it is that you enjoy producing – be it digital art, web templates, flash components, code snippets, extensions, fonts, photography, textures, brushes or even your own homebrew Rich Internet Applications – send it in to us on webdesigner@imagine-publishing.co.uk and we’ll get it on the disc for all to see and use. If your submissions are over 5mb it’s probably better to upload them and drop us a link. We’re really excited to see what our readers are doing with their time, and can’t wait to share your handiwork!
This Thursday sees the latest issue of Web Designer hit the shelves, so we thought we’d give blog visitors a bit of a cheeky preview of the front cover! Keep your eyes peeled for this…
FEATURES:
World Wide Design: Multicultural web creativity examined, with a look at local laws and professional trends from the globe’s top agency experts.
Nicholas Da Silva special: Flash animation masterclass, Behind the Scenes Q&A, AND free CD content!
Microsoft MIX 2008 show report direct from Las Vegas
If you haven’t already given it a spin, you should definitely check out Adobe’s new Beta RIA - Photoshop Express
This cut down and streamlined version of everyone’s favourite graphics app allows you to perform basic imaging edits - such as crops, red eye removal, retouching, and all manner of colour switches.
It’s an amazing feat of Web 2.0 design and all interested parties should head here now!
On the wander back through Shoreditch on the way from the Squire exhibition I happened across some more great artwork - couldn’t resist snapping, and sharing it so here goes…
Anyone intoxicated by the late 80’s music scene - and specifically the ‘madchester’ sound when House music collided with funky indie guitar - will probably be fond of an iconic act called The Stone Roses.
After an eponymous debut album, a lengthy and litigious hiatus, jinxed comebacks and eventual implosion - the songwriting pair of Ian Brown and John Squire went their separate ways.
The latter has now hung up his guitar and retracted to his first love, art, and specifically a form of abstract expressionism that represents a more mature approach to those early Roses record sleeves.
‘Re-engineered Garments’ has been running at London’s Signal gallery from March 7th until April 6th and is well worth a trip for anyone keen to check out the highly textural efforts in person.
Jamie Oliver and Liam Gallagher are already rumoured to be proud buyers of a few pieces so you might have to shell out an extra few thousand if keen to buy…
Hello everybody, welcome to the Web Designer blog!
It’s been a hectic few weeks on the title since I returned from Nevada and Microsoft’s latest developer conference. It was a great event for us to attend, with plenty of great stuff on Silverlight 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8. You’ll find a more detailed look at the show in issue 143, which hits stores on April 10th.
Steve Ballmer was there and rolled back the clock in his keynote with former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki. Tech fans will remember the outrageous ‘monkey dance’ he did at a previous Microsoft address, and he obliged this time with a spirited rallying call to “WEB developers, developers, developers…”
Anyone who hasn’t seen the original can catch it here
Expect much more MIX-related content across forthcoming issues.
