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Crowdsource Designer Interview #9 shoutOut on 28/2/13 by travis.lyle1 in |
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Our Crowdsourcing Designer Report interviews here on Springleap give us an opportunity to dig deep and get feedback from designers and illustrators from around the world on their experience of crowdsourced design platforms. We shoot them some questions, they respond, and you get the lowdown - everyone wins! In today's interview, we put the spotlight on one of the most prolific and highly-awarded designers in the crowdsource game - the legendary Sebasebi! Who are you? I'm Sebastian Govino Where do you live? I live in Rosario, Argentina Describe yourself - likes/ dislikes. Well... I like anything that involves a creative process, painting, digital design, some woodworking as a hobby, play trumpet and sailing (we have a fantastic river here in Rosario). And soccer! Of course. I love the outdoor life - I don’t like the city life, and try to stay away from "chaos". In big cities there's no respect for others.
Which crowdsource platforms do you use? I use DBH, Threadless, La Fraise, Pampling and Springleap of course. How did you hear about them? Some years ago I produced clothes, and looking for inspiration, I found these sites, and slowly began to produce designs, which is what I really like. What do you love about crowdsourcing contests / what don't you? I love the concept of putting a work of art on a shirt. I think if you can carry thousands of songs or books in your bags, why not wear a work of art on a shirt? Many people have the opportunity to have a "painting" on a shirt now - art is not only exhibited in a gallery.
Has it become a sustainable source of income? Sometimes it is more difficult, but generally, yes. What inspires you? Ecology, the innocence of the children - they do all magic! Music, the universe... Describe your design style? It’s difficult - I like surrealism, a lot. But... I don’t know... What design tools / software do you use? Everything always starts the same way: with a pencil and paper, then afterward I use Photoshop and Illustrator. Did you study design? No, I didn’t. Which are your favorite designers and styles? I like the style of Robson Borges, Radiomode, Vcalahan, and many more... and the style of Matihole.
What category of projects are your favorites? (e.g: packaging) Shirts, always. What has been your favorite brief so far? Mmmm...I have none in particular.
There it is ladies and gents - some insights from one of the biggest names in crowdsource design, and a longstanding favourite here on Springleap. Thanks for reading - and thanks to Sebasebi for the interview!
Would you like to read more Crowdsource Designer Interviews? See the growing list of designers we're speaking to here.
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Battle of the Best - voting extended! Vote to win the top tees! shoutOut on 30/1/13 by travis.lyle1 in |
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Battle of the Best: voting extended, top contest tees to be won!You read that right - to give our Springleap designers even more recognition for their amazing work, we've extended voting in our annual Battle of the Best to March 13th! With 55 amazing designs in contest and a top prize of $5000 - our biggest, ever! - the stakes are high, but no way as high as the quality of the amazing designs! Vote, Share and Comment to be in line to win!Raising the bar even further, we're now offering our community of designers and design lovers a great incentive to engage with Battle of the Best - if you vote, share and comment on the designs in contest, you stand to win one of the top tees that takes the crown! Take a look at the awesome submissions, vote for your favourites and share the love with your social network, and you could be in line to take the tee you love home! And here's a tip - the most innovative sharing and commenting gives you the upper hand here, so get creative and get busy, because contest voting is open only until March 13th! Roll up, roll up and share the love by showing our designs the recognition they deserve!
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Video Friday: 'Ursus' shoutOut on 22/2/13 by travis.lyle1 in |
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'Ursus' - charcoal animation with a sweet twist in the taleWelcome backs folks, to another screening of a rare gem here on Video Friday! Today's short takes us down the road that many animators have explored (charcoal on paper), among them the great William Kentridge, whose work will feature here in the not too distant future. 'Ursus' is a brooding tale, but one which has a sweet upshot at the end, and a general cautionary tale woven throughout its length. The image above and the word 'ursus', by the way, should alert you to the fact that the star of this gentle show is in fact a bear, 'ursus' being the Latin for bear. A highly-awarded Latvian animation about...happiness, reallyHe's a circus bear, somewhere in a generally nondescript European town, and it's obvious that he's had his fill of riding around on a motorcycle and generally being on show as an object of fear or humour - there's a realy poignant moment which decribes his feelings really well in one image - he sees his shadow against lamplight, and it makes the outline of a man, which says it all. He's also lonely and misses the great outdoors (there's the nugget of animal rights and the treatment of animals in captivity coming to the fore). One day whilst fixing his bike, a secret admirer sneaks a posie of flowers onto his bike, rekindling his desire to get the hell outta dodge. Which he does, though things don't work out so well. That's enough to give you the basics, but we'll let the Latvian creators of this great animated tale fill you in on the rest. This is an award-winning short - for more on that, click the Vimeo link at the bottom right of the frame. Enjoy!
If you enjoyed this, you'll love our other featured Video Friday shorts - go here for more.
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3D Printing - the future is speeding towards us! shoutOut on 20/2/13 by travis.lyle1 in |
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3D printers - make anything you need, any time (in your own home)The future has landed, and it looks like a 3D printer. Soon enough, if you need anything from a cog to a clock, you'll be able to create a file with the exact dimensions and colour of an item, load it onto your home-model 3D printer and quicker than you can say 'Holy heck', it will be made. How is this possible? It's all about computing power, liquid plastic, unltraviolet light and one-off manufacturing brought down to a level and cost that will make this revolution in customisation available to the man in the street.
From 1984 to the future - 3D printing takes over the world
The man we have to thank for this amazing technological stride is one Charles Hull. A prolific inventor (he has more than 60 patents, many of which are for sophisticated scientific apparatus and processes), he was the founder of 3D Systems and invented the process which enabled 3D printing to be brought to life - stereolithography. Now, that sounds like a far-fetched scientific name, but in principle it's actually quite simple: a concentrated beam of ultraviolet light is focused onto the surface of a vat filled with liquid photopolymer. The light beam, moving under computer control, draws each layer of the object onto the surface of the liquid. Wherever the beam strikes the surface, the photopolymer polymerizes and changes to a solid. Simple. Combine this process with a moving table which can make the most exact and tiny movements, and you have the basis of a fully functional machine that can be programmed to make absolutely anything you can think of, including food items (there's a company is the USA which creates 3D-printed sweets from granular sugar). Over the past ten years, the Open Source community have added their knowledge and the result is that today, in 2013, we now stand at the threshold of an age when 3D printers are rapidly becoming cheaper and easier to operate. Need a new contact lens? Print it. Lost an essential part of the mechanism of your model airplane engine? Print it. Need a set of Batman cufflinks to round off your Hallowe'en outfit? Maybe a one-off artpiece (like the skull below by Joshua Harker)? You guessed it - soon enough, you'll be able to print it.
3D printer technology - from science to applianceAs the technology of 3D printers becomes more refined, and the limitations of what is possible are exploded by the tinkering of geniuses the world over, so the results are becoming increasingly taken up by a wider range of people and companies. Among these is the enterprising Omote 3D Shashin Kan, developed by Japanese creative studio PARTY - the firm offers a 3D photo studio, which makes use of 3D scanners and printers to create miniature versions of any individual. Like a tiny action figurine of yourself? No problem. It will be printed. Taking the basis of 3D printing into another new direction is the 3Doodler, created by WobbleWorks LLC - this ingenious tool allows you to draw in 3D! It's the first of its kind, and looks a little clunky at this stage, but rest assured the race is on to slim down and perfect the technologies involved. Take a look at the video below for how it works. There's another area in which 3D printers are soon going to prove invaluable - space exploration. Plans are already afoot to ship a printer to the Moon, to produce livin units for explorers. Sounds like the future has landed, with a bang? Too right.
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Photoshop Content Aware Patch - Video Tutorial shoutOut on 19/2/13 by travis.lyle1 in |
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The Content Aware Patch - magic at your fingertips!Anyone interested in graphic design would know by now about Photoshop CS6 and the myriad new tools which it offers that assist in creating and editing images in ways that designers of years gone by would simply be slackjawed at. Among these are a number of updated and improved functions which enable you to take your design images from image zero to hero at breakneck speed. Of all of these, and generating many thanks and praises from the design community, is the mighty Content Aware Patch!
Content Aware - now you see it, now you don't
The beauty of this great new tool of course is that the hard work of using your Clone Stamp tool to carefully try and mask an object (or person, as above) with image data imported from similar surrounding areas is now made a million times easier, as the Content Aware function has a powerful image pattern recognition built into it. Working with this, rather than the more manual ways of achieving the same results, produces a virtually seamless image taken from the surrounding area - it's not always 100% perfect, and you may see slight loss of crispness in the newly created fill, but the overall result is much better. If you haven't yet had the pleasure of working with this grewat new tool, you're missing out! But not for much longer, because here's a great tut to take your design to the next level - enjoy!
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Nokia ‘Pimp Our Devs’ – Winners Announced! shoutOut on 30/7/12 by travis.lyle1 in |
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PIMPED AT LAST! The designs were amazing, the votes flooded in and the final selection has been made – yes, it’s true – the three winners of our Nokia ‘Pimp Our Devs’ contest have been chosen!
Massive congratulations go out to nicetomeetyou, for his epic design, Behind The Scenes! It's an awesome design that brings to mind the stealthy ninja skills that Nokia’s devs have, and how their work goes on behind the scenes but makes all the difference to the user experience for Nokia users! It's a design that makes smart reference to the user interface and creates a real sense of creativity through the use of the ninjas - we love it! Runner up at second place was The Light Imagination by one of our rock steady designers, dephedwiputra! This is another in a long line of great designs submitted by our man from Indonesia, and it shows - it's a positively psychedelic vortex that describes the world of possibility a Lumia offers!
Bringing up the rear is our third placed design, Digital Wizard 3, by another of our longstanding submissions champs, kharmazero! Once again it's a characteristically sublime design from our man in France which communicates a great sense of mystery and wizardry, not unlike the world of the developers the design was created for!
Over the past few weeks we've seen a massive number of entries and some seriously fantastic designs! A big shout goes out to all those designers who took the time to participate and submit; it's been a great exercise in seeing how much interest our contests generate from designers all over the world and we’ve seen some incredible work, so THANK YOU TO ALL WHO ENTERED! We look forward to seeing you rise to the challenge of our next branded design contest! |
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Tutorial Tuesday: Guides & rulers shoutOut on 20/11/12 by travis.lyle1 in |
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Guides and rulers: for pro and beginner alikeWe're back with a bing, and a badda and a boom - yes, designers across the length and breadth of the interwebs, today we bring you the lowdown on one of the most used aspects of Photoshop: guides and rulers. For the pro and beginner alike, to get your alignment and proportion dead right, every time, there's no messing around - you need to make these important parts of Photoshop a standard operating procedure.
Every designer knows and loves their guides and rulers: they keep things in check and prevent unnecessary screwups when it comes down to the wire, when you're on deadline, say, and you need to make last-minute adjustments to your artwork. This is a dangerous time: things can get moved and fall off - which is where your guide tools help a lot: using them, it's easy to spot something that's shifted out of place or an element that's not quite in proportion to the rest of your design. If you're designing in pixels, a layer with guides will save your bacon every time, and make life a whole lot easier too. But enough already with the foreplay, let's roll with the main show! Here's PSDTuts+'s Martin Perhiniak delivering the gospel according to CS6!
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KAWS: disrupting the status quo shoutOut on 21/11/12 by travis.lyle1 in |
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(image: Complex.com) KAWSing a commotion with takedown styleIf you're a fan of graffiti, vinyl collectibles or Bape - or the Macy's Parade, for that matter - you know KAWS. If you're not, here's the lowdown - KAWS is Brian Donnelly, an artist based in New York whose work started appearing as graffiti in the city in the 90s. His first works went out as train pieces and as interventions on adverts across NYC, mostly on telephone boxes. As he developed his style, his reputation and range of output exploded, starting with his work for Original Fake (including this great KAWS Vader vinyl, below).
KAWS - a signature style that's progressed in leaps and boundsKAWS's style? A cool-crazy adaptation of iconic cartoon characters who have his signature XX eyes and stumpy crossbones. Some of the classics that have been reinterpreted by him include the Smurfs, Astro Boy, Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons and the Michelin Man. As his style has progressed, his range of work has expanded, and he now shows in galleries across the world, with large-scale artworks being created in different mediums.
Blowing up Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, literally!KAWS's latest and greatest works are those of his 'Companion' series, which consists of an adapted Mickey Mouse figure with the KAWS signature head and eyes, which has its hands over its eyes. The 'Companion' range of works has grown from its first small vinyl toy run of 500 in New York to large-scale sculptures which sell out at top dollar via the man's website. 'Companion' will feature as a 4-foot-long balloon in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York (which takes place, tomorrow!). As a graphic statement of grief, deep thought and sheer artistic liberty, 'Companion' in its various forms is capable of penetrating and communicating great emotion - no surprise that KAWS and his creations have blown up and get more popular by the day. |
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Video Friday: 'One Day' shoutOut on 15/2/13 by travis.lyle1 in |
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Another amazing short from the Gobelins School of the ImageYou have to hand it to the Gobelin School of the Image - they sure do produce some of the most impressive animators in the game. With such standout work such as Oktapodi and French Roast having been produced by students of the school (and in the process giving Pixar a run for their money), the future of French animation is looking very good. Adding further laurels to the already heavily lauded alumni of the school is the charming and entirely Gobelinesque 'One Day'.
'One Day': a great short about 'rien à faire'
At 4:24, 'One Day' isn't an epic story, nor for that matter does it have the breakneck pace and farce of, say, Oktapodi (which we featured a little while back here on Video Friday). It's far more subdued and almost melancholy, with a plot that hinges on the idea of a house that teleports to a new place every day. Its inhabitant, a likeable enough guy for whom the shine of a new destination each day is summed up by the French phrase 'rien à faire' or 'nothing to do', seems adrift literally and figuratively. Until...something wonderful happens. Which is where we'll leave it, for fear of spoiling the whole shebang. Suffice to say, there's a sweet upshot which leaves the end hopeful and optimistic. Enjoy!
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Thanks for reading (and watching) - if you enjoyed this, you'll love our other featured Video Friday shorts - go here for more. |
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Biz Bang 2012 - Winners Announced! shoutOut on 15/10/12 by travis.lyle1 in |
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Designers, design lovers, friends and fans - lend us your eyes! Yes folks, the winner announcement for our Biz Bang 2012 contest is here! The brief for the contest went out on August 1st and gave our community great food for thought - we asked for designs that illustrated and celebrated 11 years of explosive growth for of one of the most diverse, creative and dynamic online communities in Africa: Bizcommunity! In response to the brief, we received 102 designs over an 8-week period, 72 of which were approved for contest, with these generating 1486 votes! Thank you to all designers who took the time to create artworks from scratch that really communicated the essence of the brief; there were some really great and original submissions. OK - on to the all-important announcement. Ready to rumble? Well alright, let's roll!
In first place, and taking home the top prize of $2 000 with a truly original design which really brought to life the many ways in which Bizcommunity's offering positively affects business both online and on the ground - 'Sky's The Limit' by Jomeo187! This is a first win for Jomeo187 here on Springleap: massive respect!
In second place, with another in a ong line of accomplished, slick designs which always show a keen sense of how to interpreting a brief, is '11 Years of Success' by CHUCKY (a.k.a Grant Shepley), one of our most prolific and awarded designers here on The Leap. Another feather in his cap, this time round a $400 feather, for a design that bears all the trademark CHUCKY skill our community has come to know and love.
Aaaand in third place is ryandizzio, with 'Together We Can', a design that highlights the code that makes up the structure of Bizcommunity behind the scenes, and the hard work that brings it all to life. Another great submission from one of our most skilled submitters - ryandizzio scoops third with a prize of $300! Thanks again to all who entered, those who showed their support by voting and sharing the contest, and last but not least to Bizcommunity for their engagement with our community! DESIGNERS: Interested in entering another Springleap contest? Check out 'A New Leaf' - our Hemporium contest, whuich has just been launched!
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