FindYourArtSchool.com announced the launch of an innovative and community-driven online art competition. The competition is taking place at: www.findyourartschool.com/contest/

The art contest will allow submissions through June 15, 2008, and is giving away $3,500 in prizes. The online art competition is targeted to younger adults ages 16 - 35, and uses community-based voting to help determine the winner.

“The contest is founded on democratic principles. The more votes and the higher the score of those votes will directly increase the probability of an artist being a finalist,” stated Elliott Easterling, chief judge of the competition. Users can also promote artists they like through social bookmarking services like Digg and reddit.

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In 1988, Mr. l. Ron Hubbard’s vision inspired a contest for new and aspiring illustrators seeking to become speculative fiction artists. The list of judges for the illustrators’ contest is no less impressive than that of the writers’ contest and represents a virtual who’s who of the field including Frank Frazetta, Vincent DiFate, Bob Eggleton, Stephen Hickman and Stephen Youll.

The Writers of the Future and Illustrators of the Future Contests are international in scope and short stories from the yearly winners selected from around the world are published in the annual Writers of the Future anthology. Each quarter, winners receive money from a pool of $1,500, and annually those winners compete for $5,000 additional prize money. The Contest is open to entrants from all nations. (However, entrants should provide themselves with some means for written communication in English.) All themes of science fiction and fantasy illustrations are welcome: every entry is judged on its own merits only. No entry fee is required and all rights in the entry remain the property of the artist.

The contest runs four times per year, and the next deadline is 30 June 2008. Visit the site to learn more!

Sixth biennial competition reunites five generations of ADC Young Guns to select the next wave of creative wunderkinds

March 13, 2008, NEW YORK ­ To all young creative professionals across the map: It’s time to open those portfolios and find the pieces that show you at your freshest and most brilliant. ADC Young Guns 6 is fast approaching and will uncover the best under-30, professional talent throughout today’s multi-disciplinary creative industry.

Since its inception in 1996, ADC Young Guns has identified rising stars in the fields of graphic design (Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore), illustration (Deanne Cheuk), photography (floto+warner), advertising Alexander Gelman), interactive media (Rei Inamoto), film and video (Mike Mills), and animation (Todd St. John), among others. The competition discovers the most promising young creatives across various disciplines and brings these emerging talents into the spotlight.

The sixth class of ADC Young Guns will have their work showcased in a gallery exhibit and published in a limited edition book by Moleskine®. Their work will also reside in the ADC permanent collection online. These new Young Guns will be awarded the iconic ADC Cube and join the ADC’s membership, a veritable Who’s Who of advertising and design that counts Milton Glaser, Yohji Yamamoto, Ivan Chermayeff, Seymour Chwast, and Jay Maisel among its famous names.

This year the ADC has added a twist to Young Guns 6: for the first time, Young Guns alumni from classes 1­5 will serve as the jury and choose the new class to join their ranks. Having once been selected for the same award, these “old” Young Guns bring unique experience to the judges table, where they will evaluate each body of professional and personal work without the constraint of media categories.

In making the competition both for Young Guns and by Young Guns, the Art Directors Club with its singular capacity to connect several generations of visual talent‹has created a rare community characterized by its creative daring, forward-thinking ambitions, and level of prestige.

ADC Young Guns 6 opens its call for entries online on April 3 in conjunction with its launch party, Disclosure, at the Art Directors Club gallery. The launch will coincide with the ADC’s unveiling of The Undiscovered Letter (www.theundiscoveredletter.com).

For more info on this contest, please visit the site.

This is your chance to dazzle the design world and see your work in the pages of HOW.

Just choose your best promotion design work (for yourself, clients, pro-bono and more), download the entry form and send everything to HOW by March 21, 2008.

All winners will be featured in HOW’s October 2008 Self-Promotion Annual, plus they’ll get a $100 discount to the 2009 HOW Design Conference.

One Best of Show winner will even score a free trip to the 2009 HOW Design Conference and an award to be presented at the Conference!

Check out the rules and download an entry form here.

Now accepting entries for the 2008 Regional Design Annual. NEW for 2008: Entering your work is even easier. You can now register and pay for your entries online. Read the complete guidelines or access the official entry form (pdf).

This issue, the Regional Design Annual, is the most comprehensive survey of graphic design in the United States-and one of the biggest issues to hit the graphic design industry each year. All winning work will be organized by region and featured in the December 2008 issue of PRINT. They received more than 20,000 individual entries for the 2007 Regional Annual, from almost every state. The process of selection in all regions of the country was as stringent as ever, and, as always, they feel that the work chosen is first-rate, and that it represents the best design, illustrations, and photography being produced throughout the United States.

NEW: Get inspired with ten year’s worth of Regional Design Annual Winners. Learn more about the Regional Design Annual 10 Year Retrospective DVD and website. Entry form pdf is here.

American Illustration and American Photography – the award winning, large format, beautifully designed and printed hardcover annuals offer high visibility and recognition where it matters most. Both are the exclusive source for assignment and commissioned work.

Your work will be seen by a jury made up of top creative professionals, art directors, photo editors, art buyers, gallerists, and publishers.

Selected images appear in the books one-image-per-page with an index that includes all creative credits and contact information. In addition to the annuals, juried images appear on the AI-AP web site, which attracts over 200 unique visitors per day.

Images remain on the site for life, allowing artists to create an archived portfolio of winning images that can be viewed by potential clients. And we can quickly update your contact information at no extra charge.

Inclusion in the book places you in the highest ranks of your profession.

For entry details, please visit the site.

Call For Entries
By: American Design Awards

SAN DIEGO, California, January 10, 2008 - The American Design Awards is inviting graphic and web designers from around the world to participate in its 2008 Winter Semi-Annual Design Contest. The Winter and Summer Semi-Annual Design Contests which are now in their sixth year, are the flagship of the American Design Awards which attract an average of five thousand participants annually.

Deadline to submit entries for the 2008 Winter Semi-Annual Design Contest is February 15, 2008. Applications must be submitted online through the American Design Awards website.

The top three entries in each of the twenty-two design categories will be considered for the Award of Design Excellence – this award is presented to designers or design firms who display outstanding design and creative abilities, while maintaining high ethical standards.

The American Design Awards mission is to provide a fair and ethical platform for all graphic and web designers of varying experience levels and disciplines to compete on, while providing a worldwide audience to showcase to.

With the ever-changing landscape of the design industry, the American Design Awards is also expanding its code of ethics by which designers are graded and judged. “Ethical standards have always been valued and exercised in our competitions; this is by far the most important qualification of any designer entering the awards program” said Kevin Javid, Vice President of the American Design Awards.

“Our organization’s mission and the purpose of our events are to strengthen and emphasize ethical practices in our participants, benefiting both the designer as well as the design industry as a whole.”

For more information regarding the entry process, including the various design categories, entry fees, and timelines, please click here.

At Left: 3×3 Illustration Annual No. 4 will be in bookstores in mid-January, cover illustration by Jay Vollmar.

This is your invitation to enter the fifth annual 3×3 illustration competition. This year you’ll find they’ve simplified the entry process, with less paperwork to send in, fewer forms to fill out and you can enter and pay for your entries online. So if you’ve entered before, you’ll notice a dramatic difference in the process. But what haunt changed is their selection of judges–the very best as always. 3×3 has assembled some of the top illustrators working today to judge their student show. Not only are these judges great illustrators - there also educators who hold a high standard when it comes to illustration.

All entries must be uploaded to the contest site or your package must be postmarked no later than 14 February. The deadline for the professional show, which includes judges such as Steven Heller and Isabel Warren Lynch, is 14 March. Visit the site to learn more.

If you think you can predict Apple’s “Next Big Thing,” as in an “i” product (iPhone, iPod, etc.), then you might want to enter the “Next Big Thing” contest. Mac|Life, Maxon, and the Academy of Art University are co sponsoring a contest to find the best fictional product prototypes (aka “fauxtotypes”) laced with Apple design DNA. They don’t care if your ideas are visionary or absurd. They want to see how you interpret the future of Apple product design.

According to the contest site, “The best submissions will appear in Mac|Life magazine and on Maclife.com. Our grand prize winner will receive a scholarship for the Academy of Art University, and a boxed copy of Maxon Cinema 4D. Four runners-up, plus our grand prize winner, will each receive $100 gift cards for Newegg.com.”

So, if you’re an industrial designer, a 2D artist, or a 3D illustrator (or all three), decide if you want to win any of these items before you jump into the contest. Remember - Apple isn’t involved in the contest at all. Hence, the “fauxtotypes” deal. Deadline is 31 January, 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

Via: Core77

Ballistic Publishing is now calling all artists to submit digital images for consideration to be included in ELEMENTAL 3. Images should be predominantly created using Autodesk products. They are interested in digitally-created fine art for commercial use, or personal satisfaction, in the following categories: Architectural Interior, Architectural Exterior, Architectural Reconstruction, Character in Repose, Character in Action, Creature in Repose, Environment, Conflict, Product Design, Abstract & Commercial Design, Cinematics & Visual Effects, and Transport.

There is no cost or limit to enter work for inclusion in ELEMENTAL 3. In the legacy of all Ballistic Publishing showcase publications, all artists with work published in ELEMENTAL 3 will receive a complimentary copy of the book and will enjoy worldwide exposure in the premier collection of Autodesk-created artwork to ever be published.

ELEMENTAL 3 Entry Deadline: 24th March 2008, Midnight GMT. Visit the site to learn more.