When young designers attend design schools or collages, they are required to provide assessments and exams that measure their skills and how did they benefit from their study. However, these tests have other hidden benefits. These exams are like a challenge that stimulates all your energy and mind power to achieve the success in this test.

In the real career life, things are different. No one is that lucky to have a daily challenging project or a client that can motivate you to get the most out of your creative mind. Actually, it may be rare to face such a client. However, designers should have a challenge from time to time to be able to keep their creative curve is going up or at least stable through the career as a designer.

However, the internet is full of design contests that got updated from time to time and held by different organizations. So, the question is why I should submit my work to the contest? And how will these contests help me improving my career and skills?

Here, we are not looking to the prize you can get if you win. We are talking about contests as a method to fuel your creativity and improve your skills after you left your design school tests and assignments.

In this article, we will see the different benefits of submitting your design work or digital art to design contests.

Self motivation

When you submit your design or digital art to a contest, you actually put yourself in front of a challenge that stimulates your experience and energy to create artwork that got the chance to win in the contest and beat other designers’ work.

Some contests accept design works you did before for clients or agencies. When you plan to submit your work in such contest, you actually, do not do the work for only client satisfaction, but also for your own challenge to submit this work to the contests.

However, this becomes like a continuous influence to create unique and one of a kind design that can hit a first prize or so.

In addition to the above, contests puts you in an always need to flow of new ideas and techniques. This can motivate you to study new tools and tips to be able to achieve your new ideas.

Self Confidence

Some design projects can really kill your creativity, especially when its requirements are below your skills, and you work in it due to your employer needs of business needs to gain a client or build new business.

On the other hand, working in regular projects for long time can affect your creativity skills since creativity requires diversity of task and projects to allow you to think in new ideas and solutions.

I doubt that any designer did not face at least one of the above tasks. Thus, contests help you retain yourself confidence of your creativity skills by providing new challenges from time to time.

When you got the chance to win in a contest, this will give you a great push to more confidence in your creativity and ideas since your ideas got the acknowledgement of the contest judgment which is in most cases more experienced designers or design tycoons.

Build Your Own Vision

When you prepare an idea or project for a contest, you put in your mind to make it unique and differ from other submitted works or ordinary work in the industry. So, your own styles and vision starts to grow to form special design lines and styles.

When you try different design styles and techniques, you can apply it in your projects and instead of sticking with a couple of design styles that may be common between designers; you will bring your own style and get distinguished between other designers.

Also, you will be able to direct projects to other creative ideas that best fit for the project.

Proof of Skills

When you win in contests and gain prizes and winner logos, you can publish these prizes and winning logos to your website, which give a proof of skills to your clients. When most clients know that they are dealing with an award winner designer, they put confidence in you and relay on your opinions and consultations instead of just telling you what to do.

Most clients are not expert in design. However, when they know you as a skillful design that they can relay on you, they will be able to take your advices with trust.

On the other hand, when you mention your awards in your resume, you can get a more attraction from companies and employers, which can put your resume at the first of the list.

This does not grantee getting the job, but at least it can be helpful to recommend you for the job.

Career Improvement

All the above skills are sharing the same aim. These tips can help building a better career life for you.When you got the self motivation, confidence, your own vision and the proof of skills, this can get more projects and complete these projects as an award winning designer with the satisfaction of the clients.

Many contests publish a book or a site with the winners’ artwork; this will be giving you the visibility and the client attraction, which is more powerful than providing your resume of business service through a phone or email.

Building your own career as a professional creative design from the first steps can help you achieve your aim in design industry faster and can help making you different and disguised from other designs. This unified profile and identity will attract more clients and improve your business in an indirect way.

Conclusion

Building your career and identity does not take a day or two, it is a long term plan, and you have to consider all the methods to reach this plan. Submitting your design and artwork in a contest can give you the visibility that can help you get more clients and better business. However, there are many places and groups on the web that provide design contests but Graphic Competitions is a good site that provides updates about recent contests.

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For many of us, classic cartoon characters have formed initial part of our life for long years. Characters like Micky Mouse, Donald Duck and Tom and Jerry have been our source for amusement and fun for years regardless how old we are. Classic cartoons have a special magic that affects both old and new generations, but have you ever thought in the efforts that done to make this magic come true?

A couple of days ago, I was very glad to receive an email reply from Stephen Worth, director of ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. He is very generous to allow me to share some of his huge classic cartoons and illustration collection with you. ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is the place where you can find historical information and resource about any classic cartoon you can imagine through the history of the 2D cartoon production in United States.

In Burbank California, ASIFA- Hollywood Animation Archive (A-HAA) has a museum that allows students, researchers, and classic cartoon fans to view the hard work done in the shadow before the final cartoon animation see the light.

In this post, I divided the resources into two sections. The classic cartoon model sheets and classic illustrations. But first, I would like to thank and deeply appreciate Stepehen for this permission to show some of his collections here.

Note: Please do not copy or redistribute any of the model sheets and illustration images from this post without prior permission from Stephen Worth.

Classic Cartoon Model Sheets

The cartoon animation production industry includes a large number of stages that start with the characters’ model sheets, story boarding and end with final production. Although the new technologies turn the cartoon industry to a new trend, easy process and fast workflow, the cartoon process includes that same concept but with different tools. Generally, the cartoon production steps include:

• Preparation, which includes creating the model sheet and story board of the animation.
• Production, which includes creating the animation, backgrounds and sound effects.

Below is a collection of well-known cartoon characters model sheets from different producers such as MGM, United Production, Disney and Tarrytoons.

Classic Illustrations

Illustrations were always there in magazines, posters and comics, here are some examples of the classic illustrations by different artists and styles in both black and white and color drawings.

Artzybasheff’s Diablerie

Coronet Magazine 1945

Lawson Wood- The Monkey Painter

Propaganda

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The last tutorial I showed how to to create a simple flash based login just using actionscript. A visitor has asked “how do I modify this to go to a web page instead of a different scene?” So this is the topic of today’ s tutorial, and the solution is very simple!

I could of course use all the graphics on the last tutorial, but instead I am going to use a different set.

If you are not familiar with the URL Request from the flash.net package, please see the flash docs

open flash CS 4, create a new AS 3 file

First lets create all our layers (notice the layers are bottom to top)

• background
• display
• input
• button
• labels
• actions

Your layers should look like this

background player – I changed the stage to 240 px X 125 px with a gray background (#CCCCCC). On the background layer, use take the rounded rectangle tool and create a background covering most of the stage. I am using black for the fill. The size is 220px for the width and 110 for the height, centered on the stage to leave some of the gray background as a boarder. Convert to a movieclip and call it background. lock the background layer.

display layer -  Use the text tool and create a dynamic text field for the message (either error or success), give it an instance name of display_txt. I am just using Verdana text so you should this text on your machine. I am us a blue font color (#0099CC). yes I know it is for an error message as well, but nobody says it has to be red. I just like this color, but feel free to change it. Don’t forget to embed your font!

button layer – using the rounded rectangle tool create a box for the button. I used a size of 50 px X 16.7 and used a gray gradient fill. Use the text tool and in the center write “LOGIN”. convert to a movieclip and call it login_mc. This movie clip is your button, and give it an instance name of login_mc.

input layer – take a text input component (username field) and drag it to the stage, the dimensions will be Width-135 Height-16.4 and a X location- 86.05 and a Y location-40.05 give the input field an instance name of name_txt. Leave as single line in the behavior option. Take another text input component(pssword field) and drag it to the stage, the dimensions will be Width-135 Height-16.4 and a X location- 86.05 and a Y location-61.05 give the input field an instance name of pass_txt. Also be sure to pick the password type in the behavior option.

labels layer - Using the Text tool write a header for the application “Client Login” the dimensions will be Width-153.95 Height-19.0 and X location- 67.05 and Y location-18.8. Using the Text tool write “username” to the left of the username text input the dimensions will be Width-65.0 Height-16.0 and a X location- 20.05 and Y location-40.25. Using the Text tool write “password” to the left of the password text input the dimensions will be Width-73.0 Height-16.0 and X location- 10.05 and Y location-61.25.

The interface is now done and you should have

actions layer - (right click in the first frame and open actions panel)

first we will be adding a stop action so the movie does not continuous play, then setting up the event listener for the button.
so when the user clicks on the button a loginUser function is called.

Now in the loginUser we checked to see if the user entered the correct username/password combo, and if this is is true, a success message is displayed,
and the website is launched.
I am using:
usename -graphic
password -mania

On success the main page of graphic mania is launched.

I think that navigateToURL is clear, but ask any questions if not.
In general it is of the form:

navigateToURL( new URLRequest(”some web page”), “opening options”);

Check to see if the username/password was not entered correctly, and display a error message to the user.

that is it, if you have any questions about this tutorial, please leave a comment or contact me. By the way if you are looking for a much more advance login tutorial I am working on one for my blog, which involves flash remoting & Coldfusion, there will be a link to this example later and will update the article with it.

you can download the source by clicking on the folder above!

Happy Flashing`-`

Johnny

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While the digital art uses the computer tools to produce artwork and visualize the artist’s ideas. Mixed media art free the artist hand by giving the ability to merge different types of tools and materials to reach the desired effect and artwork impression.

The mixed media art was used in the traditional art by merging different types of media such as oil painting, graphic drawing via pencils. Also, working with different sculpture materials or use new materials such as metal gears and tools. However, the digital mixed media art can merge between different digital design tools and traditional art tools such as using drawing or painting over digital printed materials.

One of the resources that can help designers to get inspired and learn how to use mixed media is to see others’ artwork and how they implemented the mixed media technique to reach the desired artwork effect.  However, below are a collection of both mixed media and digital artwork by different artists that can help you get inspired and learn how new ideas.

If you like this post, then you may like to see these posts as well:

• Six Artists, Six Revolutions in the Digital Surreal Art History
• Inspirational Digital Art Collection

Do not forget to join our RSS feed to receive updates about new design and creative resources

Guardians of Revolution

Mother Nature

05

The Lost Toys

Black

Black Widow

Carmine

Chapter1- A lonely Beginning

Chapter III: Untold Anguish

Creation of Time

Dissolving

Drink Me

Host

Hello..Good Bye

Inner Dynamics

Lens Hounds

Let Their Be Bulb

Lucid Dreams

Post Life

Pressure

Rainy Robot

Self Pruning

Silar

The New Flesh

The Prayers of Thousands Years

To Break Free

Trapped

We Live in The Air

The Slave

Titan

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Now, it is the time to announce the winners of the Flash contest. The winners will receive three free accounts loaded with credits to get free stock Flash templates, components, slideshows, menus and XML Flash content.

And the winners and their twitter accounts are:

First Winner:

@hfug
John Barret

Second Winner:

@hervigil
Neva Flores

Third Winner:

@r_alanis
Roberto Alanís

Flash Scope, the leading stock Flash content provider, will provide three accounts loaded with free credits so you can get any stock Flash of your desire for free as following:

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