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.