Curzon Decor

strong coffee

Strive Studio

Strength&Conditioning

Occupy

Trojack

Power to the Pencil

Army Gear

Epic Comments

BULLMAN

Protected Legacy

House Hold

Silver Gold Bull

Green Power

Warriors

Ultra Fitness

Zeus Fight Wear

Now Make Me A Sandwich

Praemittias

RAMM

VAQUERO

Picthor

Gans Tatverk

Iron Guerrilla

CHOKLAD BUDET

FLYING STAG

Stronghex

Athletic Performance Academy

Mouthscle

Pump ups

Silverback

Templars

Stargym

atlas

God’s Gym

PRYM8

Wellfit

BODYFORCE

VIKINGOO

Power Impression

Truckers fitness gym

Hanuman Shakti

Globull

Gladiator Fitness

Rhinotes

Prevalent Marketing

Muscle Cloud

Silverback

Gryphonism

Growcase

What’s your favorite pick from this roundup of mighty logos? Maybe it didn’t make the list, share your feedback in the comments below.

It can suggest organic growth to a digital mark and add development, connection, continuity and smooth, subtle transition between individual elements. What’s more, transparency can help to make the design brighter, lighter and create the effect of an illuminating the mark. Not convinced? Take a look at this showcase of creatively applied transparency and overlaying techniques to see what we mean.

This candy-coloured logo is by graphic designed Jared Milam. Look at the way the letters overlap to create new tints of each shade, and the beautiful textures that using transparency adds.

This is a stunning example of transparency applied to a typographic mark. It’s for Paranaiv, a blog and magazine about photography and style and makes excellent use of layering to create depth, interest and colour variation.

Here’s an example by Sean O’Grady for Pangur Glass Craft. It uses transparency to add a sense of perspective to the stacked bowls. It also helps to suggest that the bowls are made from a delicate base material; incredibly appropriate for a company that supplies glassware.

In this example graphic designer Joan Pons Moll uses transparency to create texture on the bird’s feathers and beak.

We love the way that transparency can add a sense of fragility to a digital mark, as can be seen in this example by Mattia Moretto. Check out the way the accent colours are repeated over both the letter I’s for attention to detail.

With a seriously reduced colour palette and clever use of transparency, Firebrand, the designer behind this treatment, creates a metropolis of intensity and a real sense of city-scape perspective.

The company is called wraparound, the designer has used transparency to create a brand that wraps around itself to build depth. Simple, effective and super-smart.

Written by Nicky who works at whoishostingthis

The tablet app development platform Oomph has launched Oomph Marketplace, an app marketplace for self-service customizable app templates. Like Themeforest is to Wordpress templates, designers can create and sell their templates in the Oomph store.

Oomph will be launching new functionality in the coming weeks so Designers can sell templates they have created in store.

Leading up to the release of Marketplace, Oomph has launched a $10,000 app design competition on crowdsourcing website DesignCrowd. The competition comprises of four separate contests focussed on four popular app genres. The interactive template designs should be suitable for organisers of arts or music festivals, industry conferences, travel agencies marketing holiday destinations, retailers who want to build a rich media interactive experience for customers and branded magazines.  (See examples of tablet app covers are below.)

How to Enter

Click here for the DesignCrowd contest page. Read the brief and guidelines. Oomph has included template creation guidelines that are required reading. To help you design an Oomph app template, Oomph is giving away a best practice app template, icons and artwork and a blank template. Register at Oomph Marketplace and you’ll receive the free templates in your account, or take a sneak-peak at the tools and guidelines here.

The Prizes

Each contest offers $2,500 in cash prizes awarded to the top 3 designs in the following contest categories:

1. Event Apps
2. Brochure Apps
3. Retail Catalogue Apps
4. Magazine Apps

Designers designers have until January 19 to submit designs to be in the running to win cash prizes.

The contest closed in August after receiving 5, 845 designs from 1,300 designers from around the world.

On 12-12-12, TimesSquare.com announced the top 5 winners on its site.  Sixty-five designers were awarded cash prizes for their efforts.

A Serbian-based designer who goes by the user name Jovan on DesignCrowd, took out the $5,000 first place prize. The winning design was one of 6 designs the designer submitted to the contest.

The top 4 designers were awarded $3,000 in cash prizes and another 60 designers of merit shared in $3,000 in participation payments.

Here is the top 5 roundup.

Winner – Jovan

Top 4 Designs …

REIZZ

OMEE

CTRL+N

LEMONCRUSH

What do you think of the winning designs? You can check out more entries on DesignCrowd.

Angry Birds Star Wars

Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away, the ultimate games app just got a whole load better. Star Wars Angry Birds isn’t just the best incarnation of the game, it’s also the best movie spin off we’ve seen in a long time. Yup, you still shoot birds at pigs, but in this game you get to do it with lightsabres and lasers. What’s not to love?

Fieldrunners 2

The original Fieldrunners was one of the Apple App Store’s first hit games and this version takes to the next level for 2012. It’s a simple premise. Protect your tower and stop the bad guys from getting to the other side of the screen by using a variety of weapons. The more bad guys you kill the more money you get for weapons.

Toca Tailor

The first app from Swedish interactive toy maker Toca Boca, Toca Tailor is a cool game for the over fours. This game lets users dress a variety of characters in an almost endless choice of clothes and is a brilliant game for encouraging creativity.

Toca Band

Hailed as one of the best children’s apps of 2012, Toca Band gets kids to create a song through an easy-to-use interface. All they have to do to make their music is drag and drop the colourful characters across the screen – each one has its own unique sound!

Clash of Clans

Clash of Clans is a cool cross between FarmVille and a war game. Build a village, train your troops and fight with other players. One of the most popular free apps of 2012 on Apple devices.

New Star Soccer

It might not look like much, but New Star Soccer is utterly addictive. Your aim is simple; score as many goals as possible while more obstacles – such as high walls and winds – are put in your way. You need to upgrade from the free version to the 69p incarnation for the real fun though. This version lets you live like a real player, earning wages and building professional relationships with other players and your club manager. Improve your skills and you make more money. You’ll also have to make lifestyle choices to help improve your fitness or, more importantly, attract your very own WAG.

SongPop

SongPop is a free music-trivia app that was named app of the week by ABS News back in July. Guess song clips and challenge your friends – and there are thousands of songs on there, ranging from golden oldies to today’s top tracks.

Rayman Jungle Run

The legendary console platform hero made a successful jump to mobile this year with Rayman Jungle Run. The graphics are gorgeous and the smooth touch-based controls are a pleasure to use. No wonder it was named the App Store’s Game of the Year 2012; it’s an easy game for all ages to get to grips with, but addictively tricky to master.

Waking Mars

This app was one of the biggest smashes of 2012. The narrative is one of the most engaging we’ve seen on this platform and involves the discovery of alien life on Mars and the subsequent mission of first contact. It’s an intelligent, adrenalin-fueled race against the clock to determine the fate of a sleeping planet.

Batman: Arkham City

It may only have been launched last week, but Batman: Arkham City is set to be a last-minute big-hitter of 2012. It’s based on the most popular Batman video game on record and sees Batman fight some of the toughest villains ever – including Catwoman. It’s a hefty download, clocking in at 10.67 GB, so make sure your Mac can handle it before you buy.

This is a guest post contributed by Neeru Pallen who writes on behalf of Print Express UK.

The winner is Studio71, a graphic design studio started by Shane Marchewka who discovered the contest on crowdsourcing site DesignCrowd and submitted six designs to the website’s $1,000 t-shirt design contest.

“I registered with DesignCrowd earlier in the year as a way to boost my exposure as a freelance designer. I am stoked enough to say I have a former Prime Minister as a client however the $1,000 prize money is like a cherry on top of a very sweet cake!” he said.

Mr Rudd tweeted about the contest yesterday and said, “Shane is a great guy who is putting in the effort to start his own small business. He had a range of great ideas and really embraced the spirit of the competition. I wish Shane and Studio71 all the best for taking his business to the next step. I was overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of entries, so thanks a million to DesignCrowd and Australia’s talented graphic design community.”

It’s not everyday designers acquire former Prime Ministers as clients.

Here is the winning design:

Crowdsourcing design is a proven way to generate creative ideas – from logo design to t-shirt design – and now, in an innovative twist, Greenpeace are applying crowdsourcing to environmental activism by asking people to enter an’ad contest’ for Shell Oil via a spoof website ArcticReady.com. Greenpeace’s campaign has generated hundreds of entries and a firestorm on social media.

Here are some of the funnier and more popular advertisements created by the crowd:

It’s not the first time Greenpeace have used crowdsourcing to target an oil company. In 2010, Greenpeace ran a logo design contest to re-design BP’s logo (shortly after the BP Oil Spill) with hilarious results and a big social media impact. Thus, the current Shell Oil ad contest appears to be Greenpeace’s second attempt at crowdsourcing and (given the success they’ve achieved) probably not their last.

It’s unclear what Shell can do in response. It’s probably less an issue related to crowdsourcing and more of a legal question related to using a logo or brand to ridicule that brand (i.e. whether the crowd created these or Greenpeace it doesn’t matter – as soon as they’re published and become popular, Shell will get upset).

What is clear is that the power of the crowd to act fast and generate creative ideas is compelling. While the message is serious, some of the entries are downright funny. It will be interesting to see how the Greenpeace crowdsourcing initiative plays out (while the site be taken down or not). In the meantime, crowdsourcing remains a powerful tool for a range of organisations from small business and big brands to non-profits and activists. Brands and businesses should consider using professional crowdsourcing websites and services (such as DesignCrowd) to manage their crowdsourcing initiatives.

Penn

Grebban

MuscleFire

Nobtaka Nukui

Renhand

Angelis

Ross

Color-Blossom

Mediastudio

Fitwise Training

Mile Deep Films & Television

formgarten

Vladislav Malkovick

Pivotshare

Sommelier

The Argonaut Hotel

Nili Studios

Emporium Pies

Grit Creative Co.

Darlene Dewell

Möbeldesign

Mackey Saturday

Joonas Paloheimo

Privax

Bright Edge Painting

Webshocker

Contreforme

Strahlend

Milky

Radity

Olivier Pineda

iPhone

Business Cards 2012

Which were your favorite business cards and why? Tell us in the comments below.

Symbolism plays a significant part in logo design and extracting inspiration from friendly, trustworthy and sometimes funny looking domesticated animals is a natural place to seek creative inspiration. Although the featured animals in this post are familiar, the logos display a memorable and one-of-a-kind visual appearance. Without further ado, feel free to fuel your creativity with 50 logo designs inspired by these cute, sometimes fierce and often furry domestic animals.

Top dog training

Sheepington

oinky

Las Cabras de Mexicali

Gray Bull

Curly Cat

Great

Buffalo

Rum Donkey

Good Duck

Horses Kingdom

Pis’moved

Goosey Gander

Happy Lama

Yak Works

goldfish inc

Rabbit

Canary

Coy koi

Ratbit

Freebee

Road-Hog

Camel

Elephant Mouse

Selecore

Mack Wack the Duck

Alpine Goat Project

DogCat

White Rabbit

Midnight Donkey

truffle seeker

EMAG

Bullocked

Fatcat Coffee

Bee

Work Horse

Sheep

carrier pigeon

buffalo

Imperial Horses

Store logo in progress

Barcamp Litoral

Bravo Game

Mary Sheep

Nualz

Llama

fold dog

Burro Bar Variant

Laura Bee

Pet Nest

Bull

Which was your favorite design and why? Do you look at animals for design inspiration when you receive a logo brief? Let us know in the comments!

According to Galitsyn’s LinkedIn profile, he studied book drawing in the early 1980s at the Higher Polygraphic Institute in Kiev (known as the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute) during the twilight years of Soviet ruled Ukraine.

Galitsyn’s body of work was extensive  with a distinct style that incorporated line drawing and animal motifs giving his work a contemporary ’neo-gothic’ feel with the effective use of line weight and shadow to create depth and feeling to his designs.

He was an active member of the online design community. Galitsyn’s Dribble profile displays  more than 2,000 followers and 20,000 ‘likes’ for his designs. His work can be viewed on Dribble.com and LogoMoose (see links at end of post).

As a well-liked and respected member of this community, designers from around the world have publicly shared their feelings about Galitsyn’s death.

“I heard about this tragedy. Really liked his unique style. Glad that you guys didn’t forget him. I think that his style should be called by his name, because I don’t know any other designer who designs logos like that, ” said Lithuanian designer Paulius Kairevičius.

We commissioned Felix Diaconu to curate a roundup of Galitsyn’s most recent designs which we’re publishing today. The Romanian designer says, “The following collection of 25 brilliant logo designs belongs to a great man and designer, Yuri Galitsyn.  Our sincere condolences to Yuri’s family and relatives. R.I.P. Gal! Your work will always be remembered in our hearts!”

Bull Restaurant

Lion Football

Shop Honey

Shaman Letterpess

Charterbook

Oldtimer gallery

Cat logo letterpress

Iron elephant

Raccoon

BTS

Happy Lama

Seahunter

Camel

Hockey

STARCOM

City-bike

Guitarshop

Union Express logo

Dachshund

Gorilla

Hopenia

LOMAPOKO

Scherkhan

Dodo Pizza

Logo of Theater Institute

You can view more examples of his work here:

http://www.logomoose.com/members/Gal/
http://logopond.com/members/profile/showcase/35527
https://www.free-lance.ru/users/urag/

Do you know more? If you knew Yuri personally or just admired this prodigiously talented designer from afar, share a link to your favorite designs of his in the comments below.

Season’s Greetings

It’s Santa!

Christmas Ribbon

Simplistic Holiday Card

Present Time!

Christmas Angels

Wrapping Paper

Christmas Spirit

Santa’s Campaign

University Cheer

Retro Santa

Campus Christmas

Stripe Design

Christmas is for the Birds

Santa’s List

Snowy Tree

Cookies, list and coffee?

Christmas Feast

Colorful Christmas

Ring the bells!

Technology Tree

Crack-a-lackin’

Christmas Time!

Christmas and Mistletoe

Reindeers and Trees

Warm Hands

A drop of Christmas

Bells & Charms

We make Christmas

Thanksgiving

Have you spotted others around the web that have inspired you? With all its cliches, good, original seasonal design can be difficult — the more sources of inspiration, the better!

Looking for freelance design work? Participate in Christmas design contests.

The Live Trace option can be great for many things, but can often be misused too. It is often used to achieve many different ends, such as quickly turning a graphic into a vector without having to redraw it by hand and taking a photograph and giving it an illustrative or graphic appearance. To me, these are often the two extremes on the uses of Live Trace, however, sometimes the result is amazing, other times the result requires some work.

Let’s walk through four situations in which Live Trace is often used, and how you can use Live Trace to help you in those situations.

Typography

If you have a raster-based image that has quite a bit of typography that you are wanting to convert to vectors, Live Trace is not your tool. Since often in raster images, any fonts or letters that were originally produced using a font will not keep their crispness and exact lines, even though to our eyes it appears that way.

Take for instance the logo of The New York Times. The left version looks very clean and crisp, however an up-close inspection on the right shows that it actually isn’t as clean and crisp. Live Trace often has a hard time figuring out which of the pixels should be included and which pixels shouldn’t.

Unless you are working with hand-drawn type that you would like to eventually polish on the computer, using Live Trace to capture type that was computer-generated to begin with is only going to cause you headaches. Live Trace will produce uneven results, often resulting in curvy lines that should be perfectly straight, circles and ovals not perfectly symmetrical that should be, and often an overall rough appearance. You can see this in my attempt to vectorize a .jpg version of The New York Times logo.

The top one is the .jpg version and the bottom one is my best attempt to replicate the logo using the basic Live Trace features. In cases with alot of computer-generated type, you are best off finding the font and regenerating the typography yourself.

Let’s try this out using Live Trace. I am using Fuel Your Creativity’s logo (minus the flame) for this example. Opening the bitmap logo in Illustrator, select the logo and look for the option in the option bar at the top for “Live Trace.” For more Live Trace options, we are going to select the down arrow beside the Live Trace button and select “Tracing Options.” You can see this in the example image below. I have two copies of the FYC logo so that the one on the left will be the original as we use Live Trace to vectorize it.

Once you select “Tracing Options,” a dialogue box will appear with several options. To make it easier for you to see what is going on, you can select “Preview” on the right hand side of this dialogue box. Also, for this example it may be best to select “Black and White” from the “Mode” drop box on the left hand side of the dialogue box. You can see a screenshot of what you should be seeing now below.

As you can see, you will need to make some tweaks to the default settings in order to get close to the original on the left hand side. We now know that Live Trace isn’t very good at handling typography, however, adjusting settings on the Live Trace dialogue box (hovering over each option will tell you what each one does) will allow you to get close. Once you have changed the options to produce a result you are ok with, then press “Trace” in the top right corner of the box. To make the tracing a vector, you will need to select “Expand” in the top options box in order to see the vectors. There may be some needed clean up after doing the Live Trace.

Basic and Simple Shapes

Live Trace is ideal for turning bitmap simple shapes into vector shapes that can then be manipulated using other Illustrator tools. Taking the idea of using Live Trace to take bitmap images and making them into vector images, let’s use the flame portion of Fuel Your Creativity’s logo and go about the same process we did above.

Going to the Live Trace options dialogue box and doing the same above, you can see that you can get closer to the actual flame shape than you can with typography. I followed the same idea above and below is my result:

You can see that I was able to get fairly close, although not exact, to the original flame that is on the left. More vector manipulating using the direct select tools and pen tools may be needed to make it exact, but as you can imagine, doing this can save time compared to using the pen tool to just simply trace it.

REAL Hand Drawn Elements

I hinted at this above, but if you have something hand-drawn that you are wanting to convert to vectors, then Live Trace is a great starting place to do this. Although it won’t give you an exact replica of your hand-drawn masterpiece, it is a great way to get all the vectors in place so that you can then go in and make changes as you need.

In order to do this, you will need to scan in your artwork and open it in Illustrator before you can use Live Trace. You can then follow the same steps above for “simple shapes” to help you save time in converting your handwork into vector art that you can use in your designs.

Some tips to make this much easier for you:

• If at all possible, make your artwork as contrasted as you can. Draw your work on a white sheet of paper and draw in a black marker or Sharpie to allow for maximum contrast. The higher the contrast you use, the better your scanner can scan it for you.
• Take your scanned image into Photoshop to clean up things such as stray scan marks and anything else you may not want Live Trace to find. You can also up the contrast here as well.
• When using Live Trace on your hand-draw image, select “ignore white” so that Live Trace does not unintentionally trace large areas of white space.

Manipulating Photographs

If you are needing to change an original photograph to give it a more graphic or illustrative look, Live Trace can help you with that. Since the object is not to produce an exactly replica, some minor changes are acceptable in this process. Live Trace is often used as well to achieve many different effects instead of using things such as Photoshop and Illustrator effects, with the added benefit of being able to manipulate the pieces later.

My favorite thing to do is to take a photograph and manipulate it using Live Trace to give it a nice, illustrative feel. Let’s take for instance the below sunrise (in which you can download for free here)

Opening in Illustrator and the Tracing Options dialogue box, some notable changes you can make includes switching to “Color” for the mode and changing the “Max Colors” count to achieve the effect you want. You can also change other options in that dialogue box, but I find that the color options are the best ones to change to achieve great effects. You can see what I was able to do with the above image below:

It is worth noting that different options produce different results. For instance in the above example, I changed the max colors from 20 to 40 and it produced a drastically different image. The one on the left is with 20 max colors, the one on the right is with 40 max colors.

Conclusion

Live Trace is one of those tools that takes practice before you can really know what all it is capable of. However, with the above examples, you can not only get started using Live Trace, but also know what its expectations and limitations are when working with this powerful tool.

A word of caution: lots of designers get in trouble for taking others’ works and using it with little to no change. Live Trace is often the tool behind such problems, as they feel that if they replicated it through Live Trace than it is theirs. It should be said that you should only use Live Trace on your own elements. I used bitmap images in this example, but to avoid possible copyright claims, you should use your own elements.

What software/hardware do you use daily?

I exclusively use Adobe Fireworks CS6 as my design tool. I look more and more at Sketch 2 which is very promising but still a bit young to make the complete switch in my humble opinion. When I design for iOS, I also use quite a lot of LiveView and — surprisingly — iPhoto to quickly import screenshots to the Mac through Photo Stream.

I’m not doing a lot of front-end development anymore but when I do, I still use the dying TextMate. I gave Coda 2 a quick try but I felt it wasn’t the right tool for me as I’m usually looking for extremely light text editors. I’ve heard great things about Sublime Text and Chocolat but since I lost some interest in coding, I must admit I haven’t found the motivation to properly try those apps yet.

As for the hardware part, I work on a MacBook Air 11″ (always closed) connected to a Thunderbolt Display 27″. I should probably mention my iPad too as I work quite a lot on it. For example, I do most of the email stuff there and I truly enjoy the experience. Many people find it difficult to type on the iPad but it’s not the case for me. Editing text still feels complicated to me (I hope Apple’s working on improving the loupe or an alternative to it) but typing works just fine with me. I wouldn’t say I’m as fast as I’m on a real keyboard but I’m honestly close to it and I love the feeling of my fingers on the glass. :)

Where do you get your inspiration from?

It may sound cliché but I look at everything Apple makes, from their website (the iPad’s feature page is still amazing) to their device boxes. I honestly still haven’t found another company where the attention to every detail feels so important. I guess I should also mention Dribbble. While I have mixed feelings about it (showing some graphics out of context rarely makes sense), it’s still a great resource if you want to get inspiration on execution.

What triggered your passion of design and development?

Showing things to people and see those people actually using your creations has always been fascinating to me. Designing something exclusively for me wouldn’t be motivating at all. With the web, I have this amazing opportunity to easily share my work with so many people around the world so it was a no-brainer.

As for the development part of the process, I must clarify I’m not a developer at all. I’m very comfortable with HTML and CSS (which is definitely not what I call “development”) and I also do some JavaScript but that’s everything I know. I always wanted to understand how things technically work but I’m not really interested in implementation details. It also feels important to me to be able to prototype some of my UI ideas to see if they can actually work. I think every software designer should have at least some notion of the technical side of the apps they’re designing.

What’s a typical day look like for you?

I usually start the day around 9am by answering the important emails on my iPad and checking some RSS feeds and tweets before moving to my office. I try to then focus exclusively on designing things, hiding all kinds of notifications that could disturb me. I repeat the same scenario after lunch and I usually leave my office around 6pm to take care of my son.

What would you recommend to anyone wanting to get started in the world of design?

I’m a huge believer in practice. Trying to replicate existing graphics is a good way to start learning your design software and to see how the original designer made all the details. Learning to make many iterations of the same mockup is very important too. We, as designers, are often too connected with the graphics we create. Trial and error is a frustrating but essential workflow to reach something really good. Experience is king.

Thanks a lot for your time – keep up the great work!

Thanks for having me Daniel!

Given that it’s one of the biggest holiday events of the year, beating out the popularity even of Easter in many locations, we’ve put together a special for our readers: two inspiration pieces packed with the best Halloween-inspired designs, both for those who like it creepy and those who like things a little more conservative.

44 Fun Pumpkin & Candy Inspired Logos

Felix Diaconu has collected 44 fun and playful designs using pumpkins, candy and other Halloween motifs. This is great for clients with brands for children or those who just don’t want to get too ghoulish.

30 Ghastly Ghouls & Other Halloween Designs

Jean-Pierre Gassin has collected 30 awesome designs, mostly illustrated, that use skeletons, zombies, ghouls and other creatures to spook viewers out and really get into the Halloween spirit. If you’re looking for the best design scares this holiday has to offer, this is the piece for you!

Happy Halloween, readers!

Party Skelly

Pumpkin

Skull Candy

Zombie Dude

Tricky Princess

Skull-n-Rattles

Pumpkin 2

Pumpkin 3

Little Pumpkin

The Thing

Bride of Frankenstein

Rahmstein

Sugar Mouse

Wicked Jack

Boo!

Witch

History Lesson?

The Ghost

Hellraiser

Spider vs Walking Dead

The Witches Desk

Mickey Mouse

Victorian Skelly

Beetlejuice

Grandpa Bones

Trick or Treat

Twin Pumpkins

Skeleton Hands

Ribcage

Mr Jack ‘o’ Lantern

Looking for freelance design work?

Participate in holiday-themed design contests and provide quotes for logo design jobs at DesignCrowd.