Great work and experiments from Petra Cortright.

A design and screen printing studio focused on mentoring students to produce excellent work for the benefit of others is the mission of Ambrose and I couldn’t be more excited about what they’re doing. This is what it’s all about in my opinion and I’m stoked there are people out there doing things like this. If you need to do a run of t-shirts soon why not give these guys a call and help others in the process.

For the month of June, 50% of proceedings of ywft bestseller Black Slabbath will be donated to Justin Van Hoy as he bravely battles leukemia.

Buy Black Slabbath, attend a Dutch party in a city near you or donate directly on his website.

We recently got contacted by a new site that is trying to connect talent with opportunities in a fair and community engaged environment. At first I was a little hesitant about doing this as I hate to see graphic designers exploited for some stupid prize or contest that you have to do hours of work for a client for free.

 

Society6 seems like a great site for monetary, promotion and other grants to be given to artists and designers. All you have to do is have a profile showing your work, nothing more. I think in the future as the site grows there could be some great things that happen at Society6. They asked us if it would be fine for them to start a ‘grant’ for illustrators to apply for a chance to be featured on our site and see where it goes from there. We accepted the offer.

 

The site still seems a little unclear at times, but think that will work itself out as it has only been online for a number of days. Anyway, check out the site and see if it looks like something you want to be a part of. If so, take advantage of the different opportunities posted so far. It is great to see people start projects like this to connect people for the improvement of our profession, not to exploit it.

A repost from Design Observer. Well worth a look. I think the non-anglo labels are the most interesting of the lot.
Ted Staunton’s 78 RPM Labels

Cinco de Mayo is a regional holiday in Mexico, primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, with some limited recognition in other parts of Mexico. The holiday commemorates the Mexican army’s unlikely defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.

 

I thought I would put together a list of essential latin-themed lps that can get you in the mood to celebrate (I know a lot of them are from Puerto Rico but whatever):

 

Joe Bataan - Riot

Eddie Palmieri - Vamonos Pal Monte

Joe Cuba - Bang, Bang, Push, Push, Push

Cal Tjader - Soul Sauce

Pete Rodriguez - I Like It Like That

Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers - Yaina

Charlie Palmieri - Latin Bugalu

Fania All Stars - Live in Puerto Rico

Charlie Haden - Liberation Music Orchestra

Ray Barretto - Barretto Power

I am going to riff a little with the spirit of today’s theme, Earth Day. 

 

First, there is a really nice zine for earth day titled, RRR. You can check the pdf out here and has a lot of really nice work from a lot of players in the illustration-design arena. I think you can only find it here, so feel free to link this post up. Proceeds from future sales of the printed versions of this book or artwork found within will go to benefit the Surfrider Foundation. Don’t forget to check out Steven Harrington’s Earth Day poster. Thanks, Jonathan.

 

I really like themes, collections, etc so thought I would put my top 10 albums to listen to today:

 

David Axelrod - Earth Rot

Marion Brown - Sweet Earth Flying 

Dee Dee Bridgewater - Red Earth

Georgia Anne Muldrow - Olesi: Fragments Of An Earth

Sandoz - Live In The Earth

Augustus Pablo - Earth’s Rightful Ruler 

Madlib - Earth Sounds 

Vangelis - Earth (Essential listen)

Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place

Earth - Hex

Behance just published a new working tool that helps manage your projects both online, mobile and off. It is based on their books with the same name… the Action Method. A great tool for those who have to keep a lot of tasks organized.

Dan McCullough (thecriterion) is the lucky winner of the one-of-a-kind, hand-painted and signed poster from Mike Perry in our first Twitter Giveaway. Congratulations, Dan!

To the rest of you, thanks for adding us on twitter. Keep an eye there for more giveaways and exclusives in the future.

I love posting this application, just after my Google cannot design rant. It makes me love, really love when designers ‘design’ applications, and not engineers and programmers. In this case it was created and designed by mega agency Fallon.

 

This little beauty called Skimmer is an application to help you manage all your time wasting community sites that you love to post on. It runs on Adobe Air, which I haven’t got too much into, but this app has struck a new interest in it. I have to say, this application is very nice and is very well designed. The code gets a little flaky for me sometimes with a black overlay screen hanging on me sometimes, but a quit restart solves that. I assume in due time it will be even smoother, but for a free app this is the hotness!