The 2008 Australian Packaging Awards is organized under the patronage of the Packaging Council of Australia. The Australian Packaging Awards can provide avenues for growth for companies who achieve success at the Awards. The Australian Packaging Awards have helped past winners to attract new clients, reward employees, boost their company profile within the industry and help draw the best talent to their organisation.

With 11 categories to choose from, plus the Best of Show, there are many opportunities for success. The 2008 PCA Awards Presentation Dinner will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Melbourne on Thursday, 9th October 2008. Following the presentation night, photos and details of all winning entries will be featured on the Packaging Council of Australia website www.pca.org.au.

Deadline for entries is 20 June 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

Day after day, when designing PR campaigns or websites, annual reports or brochures, packaging or exhibition concepts you are working on generating the greatest possible attention for your customers or a certain issue. You create visual worlds, soundscapes, worlds of emotions, and worlds of labels – spaces for your messages. With the “red dot award: communication design” you can find a space to present your most innovative and imaginative works to an international, top-level expert committee that knows to evaluate and classify them. This gives you the chance to be awarded in one of the largest and most important design competitions worldwide, the red dot design award. Take this chance because the “red dot” is an impartial quality seal. Due to its distinctive and highly recognisable profile it will finally give you the very attention which otherwise is always directed to your customers.

In addition, on the occasion of the “red dot award: communication design” the title “red dot: design agency of the year” will be awarded for the first time this year. It is a distinction to honour an agency or a design studio for their continuous and innovative design performance in the field of communication design. In future, with this award we want to move a creative team into the focus of public interest every year.

Latecomers’ registration deadline is 13 June 2008 - so hurry! Visit the site to learn more.

ROYGBIV Lab, a leading website that creates and maintains an online “hive” of artists and designers by way of competitions, announces the launch of its second groundbreaking online design competition.

Beginning May 15th, 2008, any aspiring designers or fashion-forward consumers will have the chance to create a men’s t-shirt for the fall 2008 season by submitting their designs at www.Roygbivlab.com. The Roygbiv online community and the public are invited to vote for the top 16 finalists who will see their styles sold at a major retail location. They will also be awarded a preliminary cash prize of $500. The 16 finalists will be narrowed down to 8 winners based on sales popularity and will also be awarded an additional $2,000. The final 8 designs will comprise the Roygbiv Lab fall 2008 collection and will be sold at a major national retailer. The themes for this contest are: Out on a Limb; Shoot for the Moon; One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure. Deadline is 1 July. Good luck!

How would you like to win a cool free G worth of Karmaloop Gear and have your work put in every Karmaloop box they ship? You heard correct, Karmaloop is giving away one $1000 Dollar Gift Certificate to whoever can design the best new Karmaloop Sticker. Get those creative juices flowing, pop open your favorite graphic program and get to work!

One lucky winner will be selected June 6th and have their winning submission actually printed onto stickers that Karmaloop will place in orders. The winner will also take home a fat $1000 Dollar Gift Certificate to Karmaloop.com. Don’t hold back, they really want to see some ground-breaking, no google images, no copying and pasting, just earth-shattering, slam dunk work!

There’s no deadline, but if winners are going to be chosen on 6 June, I would get my work in by the end of May…Visit the entry page to learn more.

Upload your games and win $18,000 in cash and prizes in the XPoser Game Developer Contest 2008. This contest is open to independent game developers, development companies and gamers of all kinds. The contest’s categories are divided in a way that allows participants that have a bank of already developed, sponsored and published games to upload them and compete for 1 of 10 prizes awarded to the best non-exclusive game submissions, chosen by a certified panel of judges via very detailed criteria. In addition, a limited number of participants who upload 3 or more games will be sent a limited edition, 2 gigabyte XPOGames USB flash stick and will be automatically enrolled in the contest’s quantity category which is split into two phases.

There are other rules to abice by, so be sure to check out the Web site. Deadline is 10 August 2008 at 23:59 hours.

The objective is to graphically represent the positive messages behind the jewelry of Diana Warner Studio. Specifically, this company is looking to promote The Ocean Necklace (shown here), which encourages women to be move beyond their comfort zone and “live in the ocean, not the pool.” It seems that designers have misunderstood this competition, and they’ve tried to explain better what they need. They want you to “flex your creative muscle and design ART that’s different to the graphics we supplied on the flickr site. For example, play around in Photoshop and see if you can get a pool to transition into an ocean. Show us something to blow our minds!”

So, get out there and design some artwork that these folks can use to promote this necklace. The prize isn’t shabby - $1,000. Deadline is May 21. Visit the genius rocket site to learn more. And, hurry!

In the Crystal vision competition, you will come up with new products and ideas to fill the new Swarovski concept. You should explore the properties of this unique material and challenge people’s perception of how crystal can be used in the near future. What role could crystal play in an urban lifestyle and make you feel better? How feminine and sensual can crystal pieces be and make you more beautiful? They are looking for innovative product concepts that might be based on pure crystal or that fuse with crystal with new materials or functions. Don’t think about crystal cities, furniture or cars, however, as the product must be ‘packageable’ and should be able to be sold over the counter.

Deadline is 12 June 2008. Participation is open to applicants from every country in the world, to professionals, students, and design-enthusiasts. Free registration required. Visit designboom to learn more.

iSpring Solutions announces the release of version 3.2 of iSpring Free, a no-cost solution for converting PowerPoint presentations into Flash. A few clicks get the job done. The tool makes high quality conversions and helps to publish converted files on the Web right away.

The benefits of converting PowerPoint files to Flash are apparent. Flash makes files smaller in size and with better compatibility, so it’s far more convenient for delivering your projects to a target audience. However, PowerPoint itself doesn’t provide you with such a valuable conversion feature, so you need a separate tool for this purpose. The problem is that many specially developed tools, even those that cost a lot of money, may fail to satisfy you with conversion results. iSpring Solutions invites you to try iSpring Free, a proven PowerPoint to Flash converter that provides outstanding quality conversion at no charge.

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The BraunPrize is an internationally recognised design competition open to young industrial designers who are still studying or who have graduated within the last two years. This year, the BraunPrize 2009’s theme is, “Envision conscious design.” Current industrial design students as well as recent graduates have until January 31, 2009 to submit their product concepts to Braun (the participation is free of charge).

The total prize money amounts to EUR 36,000. The winner of the BraunPrize will receive EUR 12,000 in prize money and a (paid) six-month internship in the Design Department at Braun. The other finalists will each receive a prize of EUR 5,000. The remaining prize money will be distributed in the form of special recognition awards at the discretion of the jury. Visit the site to learn more.

A heads up for those of you in the Los Angeles area - The Second Annual Animation Book Look, a unique author/artist signature book signing event, will be held on Saturday, May 17, 2008 in Sherman Oaks, CA. Co-hosted by Van Eaton Galleries and The Creative Talent Network, Animation Book Look is a gathering of authors and artists from the animation industry. MyToons.com and Animation Magazine are co-sponsoring the event.

Animation Book Look provides an opportunity for professionals from the publishing and animation industries to promote themselves and their art to fans, collectors, and art aficionados. This festival of book signings and art(ist) sightings is the only event of its kind in the country, featuring appearances by well-known visual and literary artists, as well as, “undiscovered” animation authors.

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