Sam Spiewak, who will investigate the design of overlooked objects found in West Marin, California, introduced his new online column on 15 June in the Point Reyes Light (Tomales Bay Publishing Company). Each week, Spiewak will choose a “totally ordinary thing or overlooked artwork” to look at more closely. This week he picked a mysterious looking record that he came across on the floor of the West Marin Community Thrift Store for $1. The album cover happened to be designed by Ronald Clyne, a graphic designer who formulated more than 500 album jackets for Moses Asch’s Smithsonian Folkways record label from 1951 to 1981. Spiewak goes into the history of the album cover, the artist, and his legacy (all of which brought me from cluelessness to enlightenment about Clyne) From the gist of this first article, I think I’ll be a regular reader…

This is your chance to steal all the attention and expose your new TV show concept to a panel of broadcasters and over 200 potential buyers, financiers, partners and industry gurus at the Television Animation Conference (TAC) (Sept. 20 - 21). Proposals are accepted until Monday, July 31, 2006 and two winning projects will have a chance to participate. TAC 2006 also features Keynote speaker Michael Ouweleen (Senior Vice President of Development and Creative Direction at Cartoon Network) and a special focus on Brazilian animation. See full submission details here.

A report released on 6 June by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that at a time of rapid globalization, most U.S. states don’t even try to provide young Americans with a solid grounding in world history. That’s why books like Arabic for Designers are more relevant than ever for designers to read and to absorb for today’s globally competitive market. Arabic is currently used in 23 countries and is spoken by over 300 million people. Although feelings about Arabic cultural integration may still be colored by events like 9/11, western businesses have sought to expand brand recognition to appeal to Arabic speaking people. Read the rest of this entry »

StudentFilmmakers.com is proud to announce its 2nd Annual Summer Shorts Contest, which is open to all independent film and video makers. All genres and multiple submissions welcome. Winners will be featured in StudentFilmmakers magazine. Open to All Film and Video Makers. All genres and multiple submissions welcome. Entry Dates: June 10 through September 30, 2006. See site for 2005 winners and for more details.

For the fourth year in a row, Electrolux is encouraging students around the world to fire up their creative minds and design household appliances for the future. In the 2006 edition of the design competition, Electrolux Design Lab, students will develop solutions for food preservation and preparation that promote “healthy eating habits in 2016.

The competition is open to all design students worldwide via the Internet, www.electrolux.com/designlab. Last year’s Electrolux Design Lab competition attracted over 3,000 students from 88 countries. The nine best entries will be invited to Barcelona, Spain, for a final event in late November this year, where the winner of Electrolux Design Lab 2006 will be announced. Deadline: 18 August.

Artlandia, Inc., maker of Artlandia SymmetryWorks, a popular pattern design plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, has released Artlandia SymmetryShop, a new plug-in that makes pattern design in Adobe Photoshop easy and fully automatic.

Similar to its Illustrator counterpart, SymmetryShop relieves the designer from the tedium of manually creating repeat patterns, a painstaking task that involves thousands of precise geometric transformations that used to make interactive experimentation with patterns virtually impossible. Artlandia SymmetryWorks, which solved this problem in Adobe Illustrator, is currently widely used for creating surface designs for wallpaper, fabrics, quilting, tilings, web pages, fine arts, and other applications. With the release of the new plug-in, designers are no longer restricted to the use of Illustrator and can chose to create pattern designs in Photoshop, which has clear advantages for working with larger raster images, for example, sophisticated scanned hand-painted compositions or high-resolution photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

This contest started last October, but there’s still time to enter the monthly contest for the grand prize (twelve monthly winners compete). The Travel + Leisure 35th-Anniversary Photo Contest (the “Contest”) is open to all amateur photographers who are legal U.S. residents and at least 18 years of age. Send them a favorite photo from your travels or your best new shot. The subject matter of your picture is not limited by location but should relate to travel in any of its forms: portraits, landscapes, and cityscapes are welcome. Winning photos will be printed in T+L thoughout the year. See site for details. Last monthly deadline: 10 October.

Shahneshin Foundation invites all artists to submit a poster manifesto “to promote and divulgate the shrinkage in our daily life and professional thoughts and actions.” The word “shrinkage” is defined loosely, and experimentation is promoted. This is an international competition, and all entries are due on 15 September. Read about the contest on this PDF file.

Muji is launching an international design competition. A project calling for entries from all over the world of designs that shake up and stir people, and entries can be supplied by groups or individuals. The results will be announced at the Milan Salone. The first theme is “SUMI,” where the focus of the design is not on major pieces within a room, but on pieces that are in “the extremes of the space, the unexplored areas of consciousness.” Explore the store, explore “sumi,” and enter - the prizes are substantial. Questions are answered at the contest site. Deadline: 31 August.

The Design and Business Catalyst Award takes traditional design competitions a step further by recognizing excellence in market and financial performance as well as strategic and social impact. Created by IDSA and BusinessWeek magazine, the competition rewards management’s foresight in using the power of design beyond the actual design process. The purpose of the Catalyst Award is to recognize winning design’s business success. Calculated to capture data on design impact, the Catalyst will show companies that design is fundamentally woven into business success. The Catalyst Award competition is open to all designers from around the world with one notable exception: jurors, their employees and immediate family members may not enter the competition. Deadline: 10 July 2006, with a late deadline on 17 July.