Christopher is no stranger to the Fuel network. He has contributed several fantastic articles to Fuel Your Blogging, as well as to Fuel Your Writing, and has been an active member of the community for over a year. Moving into his new role, Christopher will join Brandon Cox in overseeing the passionate team and taking Fuel Your Blogging to the next level.

Christopher is an abstract painter and publisher by trade, and sells his artwork online at his gallery. He also spends much of his time on projects focused on helping to bring writers and bloggers together and giving advice on how best to promote their work. These projects include ScribblePlay, a site unleashing the power of collaborative fiction, and CreativeBlogger, a blog dedicated to helping creative artists make a living from their work through social media and the web.

Christopher believes in the importance of adding value, of engaging with people and making personal connections, which makes him a perfect fit in the Fuel family.

Everyone at Fuel wishes Christopher the best of luck in his new role!

All of us in the Fuel team are glad that so many of you continue to gain inspiration and advice from our sites, and we are pleased and proud to fuel your creative endeavors. Hopefully they have all been successful this year and, if not, that you’ve learnt valuable lessons and haven’t given up!

We hope that you have all been able to spend some time with your family and friends this holiday season, and our fingers are crossed for those of you who are having to travel through any bad weather in order to see your loved ones. Take care, relax and enjoy the holidays! Thanks to everyone for being a part of Fuel. Here’s to a great 2010, and an even better 2011!

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

Patrick has been a regular contributor for Fuel Your Photography for several months, writing articles covering a range of topics including working with clients and the importance of getting your work out there. Moving into his new editorial role, Patrick will oversee a passionate team of photographers, and work closely with them to take Fuel Your Photography to the next level.

Based in Arlington, Virginia, Patrick graduated from Johnson and Wales with an Associate’s degree in Culinary Arts and a Bachelor’s degree in Food Service Management, which led to a ten-year-long career in the catering industry. Recently, Patrick left catering behind to live his other passion, photography, and pursue a career as a freelance photographer.

Patrick likes to photograph every-day things, to remind himself and everyone who sees his photos of the beauty that we all encounter in our lives that we may not notice until we stop to look. He also brings his passion for food to his photography, aiming to take “stunning photographs that make you want to eat the picture you’re viewing.” Patrick shares his work and blogs about his experiences on his online portfolio.

Everyone at Fuel wishes Patrick the best of luck in his new role!

The site focuses on industrial design and product development, and the long road that designers walk to bring ideas into reality, from napkin sketch to store shelf. Fuel Your Product Design has articles and interviews to fuel creation, to inspire design and to give readers the tools, advice and drive to bring these designs to life.

Fuel Your Product Design covers a broad range of categories, from toys to trains, from automobiles to architecture, from electronics to education. In all of these areas, there are similar stories. Of inspiration and of ideas being born. Stories of people taking risks. Stories of designing and developing, of investment of time, money, and resources. Stories of passion and belief. And stories of, at the end of it all, a finished product.

These stories are there to be told, and Fuel Your Product Design tell them, to inspire even more stories of of taking an idea and making something amazing from it.

It all happens under the direction of designer Dave Vogler, who joins the Fuel team as its newest editor. Dave has over ten years experience as a product design consultant, working both freelance and for Sparkhouse, a collective of independent creative web professionals producing web solutions.

Dave lives for design and is passionate about creating beautiful, user-friendly websites, especially for small businesses and startups. His expertise and enthusiasm ensures Fuel Your Product Design launches with a bang, and is as awesome as the other sites in our network!

Fuel Your Illustration

Nikki and Rondal are not completely new faces; they have both been regular contributors to Fuel Your Illustration since around the beginning of the year. Both of them will share the editing and running of the site, as well as still contributing articles.

Both are web designers by trade, and certainly know a thing or two about illustrating and making your websites, logos and anything else you like looking awesome. Nikki works from Design Coyote and Rondal through GhostlabDS. Both are self-confessed Twitter addicts, follow them both here and here.

When they’re not creating awesome web design and working on Fuel Your Illustration, Rondal indulges his inner-child at his site Strange Kids Club, and Nikki draws, draws, draws – especially dogs! – over at The Family Menagerie.

Everyone at the FUEL Network wishes them the best of luck in taking Fuel Your Illustration from strength to strength!

Now available for download, the notebooks ‘hit the shelves’ following the launch of Evernote’s Trunk feature – a growing collection of hardware, applications and notebooks to expand upon the basic Evernote app.

In partnership with Evernote, Fuel created the three Notebooks to help ‘inspire Evernote’s users with their creative passions’.  The Notebooks have been compiled by the editors of Fuel Your Writing, Fuel Your Creativity and Fuel Your Photography, with notebooks from other sites across the network coming soon.

Evernote say: “The Fuel family of websites are the perfect resource for creative people of all types. From writers to photographers to designers, Fuel’s editors provide great ideas and insights to help you make the most of your inspirations. The notebooks below are full of tips from Fuel Your Creativity, Fuel Your Writing and Fuel Your Photography.”

If you aren’t one of the four million(!) people on the Evernote bandwagon yet, you can download it for your platform of choice here, and then be sure to grab Fuel’s brand-spanking new Notebooks here.

The project team is made up from various volunteers who all desire to see jQuery, a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML documents traversing, event handling and animating, become the best JavaScript tool possible.

Doug specializes in jQuery enhancements and front-end design, recently sharing his expert advice on the jQuery Widget Factory UI on Microsoft’s new Script Junkie blog. He joins the jQuery Project as part of their Infrastructure and Design Team. He will be helping to design and maintain the jQuery online properties, which include http://jquery.com and http://jqueryui.com.

In Doug’s own words: “I just really respect the team, so to be a part of it is so tremendously awesome!”

Doug with most of the team at JQCon

There is no question that his love of all things jQuery put him in excellent company. Congratulations Doug!

In the article Doug explains how to build a stateful plugin,a plugin that maintains its own state and often acts to trigger certain events, using the jQuery UI Widget Factory. This tool works as a framework to assist the development of a plugin, creating helpful, consistent structure within which to work.

The Widget Factory, like many frameworks, is a tool to assist in rapid, maintainable development. Doug goes through a specific example, creating a countdown timer for a Content Management System, to show how to set and use options, initialize and destroy the widget as well as trigger custom events.

In Doug’s own words: “[Widget Factory] is really an amazing tool available to jQuery plugin developers and the best way to learn to use it is by… you guessed it… just using it!”

Look out for more Doug’s articles over at Script Junkie, and be sure to check out his more regular coding advice at Fuel Your Coding. Congratulations on the article, Doug!

The idea was first thrown into the ring by Fuel Your Coding Editor Jerod Santo, in an effort to help establish and maintain the FUEL brand across the Internet. With the increase in social media there is a need to condense often incredibly long urls, especially with Permalinks to specific articles, into as short as space as possible. This need is especially true for anyone sharing links over Twitter. Which we do, all of the FUEL Brand sites run their own Twitter accounts.

Jerod offered up not just the idea but also his expertise. Just over a week after the initial idea (and the overwhelmingly positive response from other members of the FUEL editing team) he had written the custom url shortener, able to integrate with our custom WordPress theme (thanks Doug!) and dashboard, so that (as you can see from the screenshot) the short url is generated upon hitting the Publish button.

Now all that was left was for a suitable domain to be found and bought! Turns out FUEL already owned fuelify.me and fuelifyme.com, but more were looked into. After many suggestions from the FUEL team (some good, some not so good… Fuel Your Blogging Editor Brandon Cox suggested fuelbrandnetworkshorturl.co.uk!) it was announced that Fuel.bz had been purchased.

Keep your eyes on Fuel Your Coding, where Jerod will hopefully be featuring the workings of the url shortener in an upcoming article. It was, in his words, “… a fun little project, and clocks in at under 70 lines of code…”.

The Fuel.bz service went live at the beginning of June. Look out for Fuel.bz “shortys” out roaming the wilds of the Internet, and be sure to click on them for some awesome articles on all that the FUEL brand has to offer!

The Fuel Brand Network launched its 11th online magazine yesterday – Fuel Your Venture is a place where you can explore the entrepreneurial you and flex your start-up muscles. This newest FUEL site is dedicated to the world of startups, funding, partnerships, business & entrepreneurial thought. Run on over and check it out, Subscribe to the feed or Follow the team on Twitter.

The event is a look at the juiciest happenings of 2009 across the various industries represented by the FUEL Brand Network.  Posts on each site cover industry specific books, sites & tools that were released, awards won, companies created, Best articles across the web and hot up and coming people etc which were relevant for 2009.

Click the link below to see what all the fuss is about!

Excerpt below:

Lisa Kribs, a freelance brand strategist for This is Epidemic (www.thisisepidemic.com) and co-editor of Fuel Your Branding (www.fuelyourbranding.com), sees things differently. “I think that traditional structure is based on some negative things — intimidation, hierarchy — and it ends up restricting productivity,” says the 26-year-old Rochester resident. “I think the corporate environment is evolving big time and the whole mentality is shifting.”

Kribs sports her own edge, with half of her bleach blonde hair shaved off. “It’s been widely accepted,” she says of her hairstyle. “I think my clients welcome change and that kind of a style. My hope is that they view it as a creative expression.”

Millennials like Kribs are the newest generation to join the workforce. They can text, talk and Tweet all at once and want work to revolve around them, not the other way around. More than anything, these 20-somethings want to be themselves at work — and that includes maintaining their personal styles and not being forced to cover up tattoos and piercings.

Read the full article here.

About the Site

Mographics move us. There are some things that can only be communicated in motion. Cue Fuel Your Motionography, a site dedicated to everything mographics. We know that motionography goes beyond animation and flipbooks. We’re here to give you the tips and tools to nail that title sequence and to take your show reels to the next level. Looking for ways to add a new spin to post effects or VFX? You’ve rolled into the right place. FYM features articles on the latest trends and the hottest programs to check out to make you the motion master you’re meant to be. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Michael John, Co-Editor

When not making music under the moniker Masmöd, Michael John, a.k.a. The Sage That Drips the Flava, is hard at work bringing you the creative content you are looking for in order to be on top of your motionography game. As the Co-founder, Creative Director, Developer and Photographer at Colorcubic, a multidisciplinary design studio based in Portland, OR, Michael eagerly brings his years of experience in creative arts to the position of Co-Editor of Fuel Your Motionography. He’s one of the creative geniuses bringing you relevant articles, tips and tricks, reviews of the hottest tools and apps as well as interviews with the top creatives in your craft, picking their brains to give you insight into what makes them the motion masters that they are.

Follow on Twitter: @mjohn_motion | @fuelyourmotion

Christy Lai, Co-Editor

It’s almost easier to list the creative things that Christy Lai doesn’t have experience in… Okay, we’re done. This classically trained artist boasts a mile-long list of artistic endeavors that include drawing, oil, acrylic, watercolor painting, sculpture, typeface design, violin, piano and breakfast. When not partaking in one of those genres, Christy can be found creating eye-catching designs for clients in many industries through her job as Co-founder and Creative Director at the multidisciplinary design studio Colorcubic, which she founded with Fuel Your Motionography Co-Editor Michael John. As Co-Editor of FYM, Christy is charged with posting the mograph content you want to see: reviews of the latest and greatest apps, articles on what’s hot in the field as well as interviews of the geniuses who create those hot things.

Follow on Twitter: @clai_motion | @fuelyourmotion

A Round up of New Articles to Check Out

• Curated: Typography In Motion – part 1
• An Untapped Market
• 3D Movies: The Good, The Bad, The Future?
• The Little Station That Could
• The Most Expensive Music Videos Ever Made
• Curated: Top Motion Reels for October
• Using the Canon T1i for Asset Gathering
• There’s a Credit Crunch, Not a Creative Crunch

Visit the Site or Subscribe to the Feed.

We enjoyed getting to know the GoMedia team and hearing more about their campaign and the ideas behind it. Since GoMedia and FUEL are both about supporting the creative community we thought this was a perfect event to attend and support. Needless to say we are really excited to see the outcome!

Details of the event:

We invited top artists, illustrators, print designers, and web designers from all over the country to come to our studio in Cleveland to participate in a photo shoot for the art campaign “Weapons of Mass Creation”. The purpose of the campaign is to give artists and designers we respect the opportunity to showcase their own work and send a positive, unified message to the community. The final ad will appear with an incredible shot of the designer standing in front of his or her own work next to the headline “I am a Weapon of Mass Creation”.

To kick off the campaign, we hosted a photo shoot with rock ‘n roll photographer Chris Casella. Chris is a great photographer known for his photo shoots with Slash, Slipknot, Disturbed, and a whole load of other mainstream bands – and he made us look like rock star designers!

When not getting the rock star treatment in front of the lens, designers were trading merch & business cards, eating pizza, filming video interviews with Go Media information architect Liz Hunt, or playing Wii bowling. It was a great time, and we really hope to host a sequel with an even larger crowd!

Attendees:

Some behind the scenes photos:

Well, the top 27 finalists were announced last week and we were shocked and flattered that we had made that round of cuts- out of almost 300 nominations! Yesterday the winners were announced…AND WE MADE THE LIST AT #10! While this is flattering and exciting in and of itself, to be *only* 3 1/2 months old and on the list with some of the most popular and highly-read writing blogs on the web is absolutely amazing.

The bottom line is that we wouldn’t be here-and winning contests-without our community of contributors and supporters. Right from the beginning on June 8th, we’ve had a dedicated and super-talented team of writers providing content that keeps the readers coming back. A huge THANK YOU to these contributors, especially our regulars who are featured on our About page. You should congratulate yourselves on a job well done! And of course, a big thank you to those of you who nominated us and those who support us through visits, links, RTs and recommendations!

Best,

Michelle Krasniak Oxman

Managing Editor | Fuel Your Writing

P.S. We’re always looking for new writers. If you’re interested in joining our team, check us out here or send us an email at editor@fuelyourwriting.com. We looking forward to hearing from you!

Top 10 blogs for writers for 2009/2010

If you’re a writer, you’ll find daily doses of inspiration and discovery at these excellent blogs:

1. Copyblogger: This site is the heavyweight champion of the world four years running (and one of the top blogs on the planet)!  The brain-child of Brian Clark, his blog keeps winning because of its insightful articles.
2. Men With Pens: James Chartrand and Harry McLeod maintain the number two slot with their inspiring content and rich community discussion.
3. Write to Done: This blog nearly always delivers a home run with its excellent articles for all writers and is the product of top blogger Leo Babauta.
4. Editor Unleashed: Inspired by the former Editor-in-Chief of Writer’s Digest, Maria Schneider explores writing, social media and community on her excellent blog.
5. Freelance Writing Jobs: This site is the first stop for freelance writers seeking new work and great articles (and it remains a top winner since this contest began).  Congrats Deb Ng!
6. Confident Writing: Joanna Young delivers rich and useful articles that will help you take your writing to the next level.
7. Urban Muse: Susan Johnston covers a wide range of excellent topics that all writers will enjoy.
8. WordCount: Journalist Michelle Vranizan Rafter explores the challenges freelance writers face on her excellent blog.
9. Quips & Tips for Successful Writers: A true cornucopia of ideas for writers, Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen provides endless content and freelancing tips.
10. Fuel Your Writing: This site will certainly fuel you! Michelle Krasniak Oxman and her huge team of contributors provide great content for writers.

Another fantastic site has been added to the Network today with the official launch of Fuel Your Blogging.

About the Site

Your loyal readers hang on your every word. You have a bunch of subscribers who think you’re great and can’t wait to get your next post in their inbox. Heck, WE think you’re great. Fuel Your Blogging is here to make you even better. We know, we know, you’re already a kick-butt blogger who knows your stuff. We’re here to make any new blogging stuff even easier to come by. The latest news and trends, the advice on how to increase your already impressive readership. Both of them. Chats with fellow bloggers who have made it big. Done. We bet we’re going to be BBFFs (Blogging Best Friends Forever) in no time.

Tim Smith, Editor

The beauty about the world of blogging is that you can do it from anywhere and it can be about anything. Just ask Tim Smith, Editor of Fuel Your Blogging, who provides you with relevant, up-to-date and must-have content for every blogger. He’s got tons of stuff up his sleeve, including the hottest tips to improve your content and readership, write-ups on the best apps and platforms and interviews with blog royalty. Starting with an extensive background in graphic design, Tim has made a name for himself through his freelance design business and his own blogs such as “The Creative Lab.” Tim plays basketball and watches movies during the day, but at night becomes his alter ego: a dancing machine.

Follow on Twitter: @timothybsmith | @fuelblogging

A Round up of New Articles to Check Out

• Fuel Yourself Wallpaper
• Quit. Or be great.
• Create Content That Your Readers Will Care About
• Twitter Rolodex: 15 Blogger Tweeps & Tweets
• Balancing Blogging and the Rest of Your Life; a Student’s Perspective
• To Blog or Not To Blog
• Non-UX Designers Can Pay Attention to User Experience Too!
• What Is Fuel Your Blogging?

Visit the Site or Subscribe to the Feed.

You’re masters at visualization. Magicians, if you will. Illustration is an art form unlike any others and we recognize that. Fuel Your Illustration is here to pay homage to those folks who take this genre to the next level. You want the latest news and interviews with the hottest talent. We’ve got that covered. You want inspiration. Consider it our gift to you. How about the coolest apps and other tools to help you bring your illustrations to life? Here they are. Now go and work your magic.

Alex Eben Meyer, Editor

We’d give you a laundry list of the huge clients that Alex Eben Meyer has in his brag bag, but we think you’d be pretty darn jealous. Let’s just say he knows his stuff when it comes to illustration. As Editor of Fuel Your Illustration, Alex utilizes his BFA in Graphic Communications, extensive drawing experience, curly hair and left-handedness to bring you the latest news from the illustration world. Expect the who’s who and the what’s what. Be prepared to get glimpses into the minds and art of the world’s top illustrators and maybe even some who aren’t at the top but will be in no time at all.

Follow on Twitter: Alex Eben Meyer | Fuel Your Illustration

A roundup of new articles to check out:

• Top 12 Inspirational Pieces [8.21.09]
• Fuel Your Illustration Flickr Group Showcase (1)
• Porkchop
• Tachikawa Dip Pen
• Rhonda 3d Software
• Library of Congress
• Quick Tutorial: Radial Repeat

Visit the Site or Subscribe to the feed.

You interface designers have your work cut out for you. Bigger and better and uber creative websites are cropping up everywhere these days. It always seems as if one form is niftier than the rest, or the typography on one site puts others to shame. How can you even begin to keep up? Why, Fuel Your Interface, of course! It’s here that we bring you the inspiration for those bigger and better and uber creative sites in the form of articles, interviews and galleries. And those other sites that you drool over? Five bucks says they come here too.

Jonathan Cutrell, Editor

Jonathan Cutrell is more than a triple threat, he’s an anomaly, folks. With extensive experience in web, motion and print graphic design as well as branding and copy editing, Jonathan excels at it all…all the while finding time to play anything from folk rock to jazz on his guitar. As Editor of Fuel Your Interface, he’s tackling one his most challenging projects to date: keeping you up to date on the who’s who, the what’s what and everything else that goes into creating uber creative and eye-catching interfaces for your clients and business. Expect things such as interviews with experts and gurus, reviews of today’s hottest apps and galleries from impressive designers like yourself.

FOLLOW ON TWITTER: FUEL YOUR INTERFACE | JONATHAN CUTRELL

A Roundup of Amazing New Articles

• Interview with Zach Klein, Designer of Vimeo.com
• The Importance of Audio Environment to Visual Design
• Interface 101 – Part One: Basic Interfaces
• Pen and Paper – The Forgotten Web Design Tools
• Book Review – Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles Using Grids
• Minimalist Theory and Techniques
• How to Use the F-Pattern Correctly
• Have you gotten your tickets for “An Event Apart”?
• 10 Interface Rockstars You Should Know About

Visit the Site or Subscribe.

So from everyone at FUEL, welcome!

Rob Bowen, Co-Editor

You may already know him as Rob Bowen-Arbenting guru/writer/designer/stage performer/poet/hiker/husband extraordinaire. Okay, so maybe not so much the firsthand knowledge of the husband one…we’ll take Angie’s word on that. What we can attest to is Rob’s talent as a writer and designer and his dedication to bringing FYC readers all of the latest news from the design arena. Count on interviews with the world’s top creatives, reviews of the hottest programs and gadgets and articles on things that make those light bulbs turn on over the heads of our creative comrades.

FOLLOW ROB ON TWITTER: FUEL YOUR CREATIVITY | ROB BOWEN

Angie Bowen, Co-Editor

As one of the genius minds behind the Arbenting sites, freelance web designer Angie Bowen knows a thing or two about creative inspiration. In her position as Co-Editor of FYC with her husband Rob, Angie will share her many years of design experience in exploring creativity with readers in the form of informative posts, in-depth interviews with fellow creative minds and more. If we’re lucky, maybe she’ll treat us to stories about and some pictures of her four furry catkids. After all, we’re one big happy family here at Fuel!

FOLLOW ANGIE ON TWITTER: FUEL YOUR CREATIVITY | ANGIE BOWEN

Guest Writer Guidelines

• Posts must be original pieces, written for FUEL.
• Guest posts cannot be republished.
• Posts must be non-promotional. However, in return we will provide you a 50 word promotional by-line and space for a short bio that can be included at the bottom of Article.
• If you write one article a month you will also get an extended bio under ‘authors’ on the about page with a headshot and fuel avatar.
• Guest posts are unpaid.

How Do I Apply?

Please submit all requests to become a guest writer through our ‘contact’ form dropdown in the top navigation. Check the ‘Question’ box, and include your contact information, the site and the topics you would like to write about. We always try and get back with everyone. If we feel you are a good fit, we will get some more information from you and discuss guest writer opportunities.