news

Appreciation Streams and Creative Portfolio Analytics. on Behance

abduzeedo — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:55:02 +0000

We are huge fans of Behance and the amazing work that Scott Belsky and his team have done in creating a design driven community with simply the best designers and digital artists out there with profiles showcasing their work. Behance is a great source of inspiration for us here at Abduzeedo and we are really promote some of the new Behance features like Statistics and Appreciation Stream.

Launch Of "Appreciation Streams" - The Creative Community Can Now Curate Itself

Creatives can now track who "appreciates" their work, as well as browse the "Appreciation Streams" of other members of the network. By leveraging the data and curation of millions of people, this new feature helps Behance members and visitors discover the latest (and trending) published projects by creatives around the world.

Announcing "Creative Portfolio Analytics" - Tracking Your Portfolio Stats Across Many Sites, In One Central Place

With our new Analytics Dashboard, users can track how their portfolios are performing on Behance.net and across the web on sites like LinkedIn, AdWeek.com, their own personal portfolio sites powered by ProSite.com, as well as 20+ other creative networks powered by Behance.

For more information visit http://behance.net and start using these new features right now.

About the author

Abduzeedo is a blog about design. There are all sorts of articles for those who want to look for inspiration. Also you will find very useful tutorials for the most used applications out there, with a special selection of Photoshop Tutorials and Illustrator Tutorials. You can get in follow us via Twitter at @abduzeedo

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Abduzeedo Gets a Facelift

abduzeedo — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:16:35 +0000

After almost a year, we have a new design! As web designers we’re always thinking about what to change in order to make the site more friendly for those who are looking for inspiration and tutorials.

Our main goal was to simplify the design and also add more white-space. The images of the articles have and always will be the main asset of the blog so we wanted to drive the user’s attention to the images and text, and less to the interface itself. That’s why we have removed the stars on the header but still kept them on the footer. Also we were very inspired by magazine designs, that explains the text overlapping the images.

New Features

Among the main changes on the new design we could list:

Bigger images
Preview image at the top of the articles
More white-space
Thumbnail view on the home-page
Threaded conversations on the comments
CSS 3 for effects (sorry IE users)

Big preview image with text overlapping

Thumbnails view

Reply to comments

Navigation

In terms of navigation, we split the menu in two. The main menu consists of the most important categories on the blog:

Tutorials
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Pixelmator
- Fireworks
- Quick Tips
- Case Studies
Inspiration
- Architecture
- Illustration
- Photography
- Daily Inspiration
- Sites of the Week
- Best of the Week
- Popular Post
Wallpapers
Inspiration

Meebo Bar

Another great feature we added (and that we're really excited about!) is the Meebo Bar! The Meebo Bar allows you to drag and share any images of the site via Twitter, Facebook or email. Also we will be able to chat while navigating on Abduzeedo. That way we might even be able to help you guys on tutorials or any questions you might have regarding posts and so on.

Meebo Bar

It doesn't just stop there. Abduzeedo is always under development. We try to learn as much as we can from you and we’re always open to suggestions. Our idea is always to make the experience as better and simpler as possible. We still have some features up our sleeves that will be released very soon! One thing I can reveal right now is that our iPhone app is 95% done ;)

iPhone app is coming

Also we want to mention and thank our hosting (mt) Media Temple for the great support during the redesign process, we were working with the 2 versions and sometimes doing crazy things but they guys over at Media Temple kept Abduzeedo up and running.

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Sikbox the Live search for your site

abduzeedo — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:17:32 +0000

After a few weeks of work with my brother, Eduardo Sasso and my friend/Zee partner Fabiano Meneghetti, we proudly present you with our newest project, a web app called Sikbox. What is Sikbox and what does it do?

Sikbox is the easiest way to have a fancy and useful live search on your blog or website.

Not only is that the tagline for our app, but it is exactly what Sikbox does. It's a fully customizable live search script for your site. Features include:

Easy to install and use

No programming required

Extremely lightweight

Fully customizable via skins or CSS

Lightning fast

Sikbox uses the new Yahoo BOSS service and the almighty jQuery to do the work. The coolest thing is the simplicity. Just enter the domain you want Sikbox to search on, get the code, and put it on your site. It works with all CMS’s: Wordpress, Drupal, Textpattern, etc.. In addition, it works with static sites as well.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start- ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

Of course we've added some nice features such like eye candy themes and the ability to choose how many results you want to show.

But that’s not everything. We are working on some very cool new features such as statistics and another killer feature that I can't tell you right now. So take a look at http://sikbox.com/, test it on your site and let us know what you think. Suggestions and critics are always welcome.

Oh and we've been using it here on Abduzeedo for a few days already and it's been working better than the Drupal search engine.

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October Announcements

abduzeedo — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:22:37 +0000

September has past. Incredibly fast in my opinion, but it was a really good month for the Blog. We have increased our traffic considerably. We started a new series of posts, the Daily Inspiration. There is the user news section. We had the contest, and some really nice giveaways. In addition, we now have an editor for some of our featured articles.

Before the news, I’d like to thank our sponsors:

Also, we were featured in Web Designer Magazine, and I wrote another tutorial for Digital Arts Magazine. Always nice to mention ;)

Job Board

Abduzeedo has grown from a simple design blog to a vibrant design community and a reference in design tutorials, receiving a great number of site visitors each month, and more than 10k+ RSS readers. We think that its the perfect place to find talented people in the right audience.

With that idea in mind we've built the Abduzeedo Job Board as a way to help companies to find their next "Rock Star Designer".

As a launching promotion we've set the symbolic price of just 9.99 formposting a job. Each job will run for 30 days, and all the payments are securely processed by PayPal. We guarantee that the whole process won’t take more than 5 minutes.

And there is more! We are going to give one uber cool Abduzeedo t-shirt to one lucky guy that posts a job during this month. So go ahead and lets flood our job board with great job opportunities for designers.

New Tutorials

We have posted tutorials weekly on Abduzeedo, and also opened the blog to guest tutorials like the Basic Animation in Photoshop and the Fireworks 101. So if you want to promote your tutorial on abduzeedo just send it to us via email.

We have new tutorials coming; tutorials from Pixelmator, Illustrator, Fireworks, GIMP, and Photoshop of course. So, stay tuned ;)

New Design

We have started working on a new design for the blog. There is so much content that we think we have to, somehow, find a way to get the right content in the right place.

As opposed to the other redesigns, we really want to hear from you for this new one. We would love to know your ideas and suggestions for the new design. Also, point out to us the good and bad things about the current design. That will prevent us from making the same mistakes again.

As you can see we really want to keep offering nice content and services to the design community, and your opinion and suggestions are really important to us.

Editor: David Parrott

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The iStockphoto Awards

PauloGabriel — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:44:28 +0000

In a double whammy for the Australian creative industry, iStockphoto announced back in August that Australian designer, Anthony McGovern won the design of the year in its second annual international Punctum Day awards competition and that Australian photographer, Amanda Rohde, was inducted into the iStockphoto Hall of Fame. Rohde is one of the leading iStock photographers, whose images have been downloaded more than 400.000 times.

The 50 finalists for five of the categories were selected from over one million international photos, vectors, videos, Flash files and design submissions newly uploaded in the last year. Anthony is one of ten winners of the Punctum Day awards.

The finalists were short listed by the three and a half million-strong global iStock community and a panel of guest judges selected the winners, who hail from seven different countries.

"It is a great honour to be nominated in the top 10 designs for the year and very humbling to be chosen as the best," said Anthony McGovern, Atomic Designs. I was blown away as there are hundreds of entries.

"Having a royalty free creative community like iStock, where design, photography, illustration and video artists, and flash programmers, can go to show their work, is a vital resource to everyone," said McGoverrn.

Each of the Punctum Day awards category winners will each receive $5,000 USD, with the exception of the winner of 'Most Deserving of a New Camera' award, who receives a Canon EOS 5D with lenses valued at $5,000.

'Punctum' refers to a profound reaction an excellent image creates. The moment an image arrests your attention, triggering a strong emotional reaction — that's punctum, says the late philosopher Roland Barthes.

Punctum Day, August 19, was declared in 2007 by iStockphoto as a special day to celebrate creative excellence. The day holds dual significance for iStock because it was August 19, 1839, that Louis Daguerre first introduced an early type of photograph, the Daguerreotype, to the world.

The winning contributors included:

Photo of the Year: Trent Bell (TrentBell) of the US with Late Trash
Design of the Year: Anthony McGovern (Atomic77) of Australia with Adobe Online eSeminars.
Vector of the Year: Bekir Gürgen (begur) of Turkey with cat and child.
Video of the Year: Tomasz Dega (creativeballs) of Poland with party teddys.
Flash File of the Year: Alexandra Mikhnevich (Mahno) of Russia with Miracle of makeup.
Most Deserving of a New Camera: Danish Khan (danishkhan) of Pakistan.
Most Improved Contributor of the Year: Ronnie Sampson (viridian1) of US.

Hall of Fame:

August 25th also marked a significant day for Australian iStockphoto contributor, Amanda Rohde – screen name Hidesy – as she was inducted into the iStockphoto Hall of Fame.

The reason 'Hidesy' has been included in the iStock Hall of Fame is all around people. No matter what city or country they live in, Amanda's images are probably on one of their favourite restaurant menus or on their local bus shelter's billboard. Amanda captures the essence of the Australian sunshine perfectly.

'Hidesy' is the blueprint of iStock success. A self-taught photographer who, through trial and error changed the way the world looks. She made it brighter, crisper and sexier. She’s an inspiration to tens of thousands of photographers.

iStockphoto's Hall of Fame was introduced in 2007 and Lise Gagné was the first inductee for her loyalty and amazing feat of securing 500,000 downloads. Hall of Famers are members who have left an indelible stamp on the history of iStock.

About the author

Hello, everyone! I'm Paulo Gabriel, designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil, born in 1984. I have worked as a webdesigner since 2006, but websites and blogs have been a hobby for me since 1999. Here in Abduzeedo, I try to bring only the hot stuff for you... and hope that all of you enjoy my posts! For more cool stuff, you may also follow me on Twitter.

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4mations.tv goes LIVE

abduzeedo — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:01:00 +0000

4mations.tv is a collaboration between Channel 4, Aardman Animations, Reality Digital and Lupus Films and has a strong focus on rewarding animators who upload their work - offering
cash rewards of up to £1000 for popular content, competitions, opportunities to pitch for commissions, and even the potential to get on TV.

Channel 4 have launched 4mations.tv, a new video-sharing site aimed at bringing together the best animation from around the world.

The 4mations website is based around a video-sharing platform, allowing users to upload, rate and comment on content. Additional functionality includes the "Thinks" application,
that allows users to quickly and easily create their own personalised animations. Thinks has been developed by the guys behind the cult web-app "Fuzzwich" (www.Fuzzwich.com).

The site was designed by Oscar-winning Aardman Animations (based in Bristol UK) and built by Reality Digital (based in San Francisco USA), and is based on Reality's "Opus" video
sharing platform.

4mations' visual design is based around an iconic kitten-skull character called "General Tiddles", created by designer Gavin Strange and the Aardman creative team.

4mations launches with a whole host of specially commissioned content from the UK animation community, including animated series, virals and games. The site launches with the
series "Hate" - an animated spoof of celeb magazine Heat - and the "General Tiddles" series.

Overall 35 individual films and 2 interactive games from 14 animators were commissioned for the launch of the site. Animators include The Brothers McLeod, James Harris & Gus
Hughes, and Richard Barnett & Steve Smith from Trunk. Camilla Deakin, Director of Lupus Films and 4mations.tv’s Executive Producer, comments "We put the word out to the animation
community that we wanted ideas for funny stuff to run on 4mations around launch, and we were blown away by the great response we got. We are now working with 14 different teams
on some really funny and often very dark material. One thing this has proved to me once and for all is that UK animators are very talented but also very sick and twisted!”

Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s Director of New Media and Technology, said “4mations will enable us to meet the needs of an audience that is increasingly online. It’s also the logical
next step in working with the great creators of animation and we’re thrilled to provide an online home for such a vibrant community. This is another example of Channel 4 working
with its partners to reinvent itself for a fully digital future”

Links to the site and content:

About the team

Channel 4 - Channel 4 is a UK-based public-service broadcaster, originally set up as the fourth television service in the UK. Channel 4 has now expanded to include multiple digital TV channels, Film 4 (its film making arm) and numerous websites including Channel4.com and E4.com. http://www.Channel4.com

Aardman Animations - Aardman, based in Bristol (UK) and co-founded and run by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, is a world leader in animation, and the company behind
Oscar-winning animation Wallace and Gromit. It produces feature films, television series and television commercials for both the domestic and international market. Their
multi-award winning productions are novel, entertaining, brilliantly characterised and full of charm that reflects the unique talent, energy and personal commitment of the very
special people who make up the Aardman team. The studio’s work is often imitated and yet the company continues to lead the field producing a rare brand of visually stunning and
amusing independent and commercials productions.

Lupus Films - Lupus Films is one of the UK’s leading producers of animation and children’s TV programmes. The company was set up by Camilla Deakin and Ruth Fielding, who
were previously the Arts and Animation commissioning team at Channel 4. Lupus Films has made a variety of animation and live-action shows for the BBC, Five, UKTV and Channel 4,
and are currently in production, in collaboration with Pinky & Perky Enterprises, with a revival of ‘The Pinky & Perky Show’ for CBBC. In addition they manage Channel 4’s
animation short film schemes AnimateTV, run jointly with the Arts Council, and the soon to be launched Animated Digital Shorts with the UK Film Council.

Reality Digital - Founded in 2003, Reality Digital is a San Francisco-based company that provides software products and a hosted service platform for storing sharing, managing, and monetizing user
generated content (video, photos, games, text and more).Reality is a leader in the white-label video-sharing space, providing solutions to clients including MTV, ITV (UK), VH1, Atom and Lonely Planet.In March 2008, Reality secured a $6.3 million in series B funding from Openview venture Partners Finances to help accelerate its growth.

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Video Inspiration: Motion Experiments

gshaw — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:35:16 +0000

I've found a great video done with just skilled motion graphics, and some really nice audio. I always find it Quite impressive how amazing just 2 senses can immerse a person in to a piece of work, even if this is only a few short clips. I've watched it several times over just to try and figure out what techniques were used. You can check out the site http://www.klippoglim.no/

Motion & Audio Experiments - A Minireel from Gustav Espenes on Vimeo.

About the author

Hello,
My name is Garrett Shaw and I am a graphic designer residing in Miami Beach, FL. I am always searching the web for inspiration and knowledge. I am currently a freelance designer creating motion graphics, logos, print, and websites. If you want to know more about me, or see some work, I am on several community sites, Behance, DeviantArt, and my Portfolio

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September news

abduzeedo — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:59 +0000

August has come and gone, and it was a great month for the blog. We’d like to thank you all for visiting the site, and for sharing your thoughts and opinions with us on the articles we've published. It was, as Steve Jobs says, phenomenal. We can’t forget to thank our sponsors for the support. They've been great!

For September we have some exciting news. Actually we hope we will have tons of news, because now all Abduzeedo members can submit news and links to their blogs or the sites they like. Pretty much anything that is good for the design community. It's very easy, just go to http://abduzeedo.com/user_news/ and click on submit news. We think it’s another step towards the user generated content idea we have for Abduzeedo for the future, and we hope you like it.

Another thing we’d like to mention is the Abduzeedo Card Design Contest. It’s been already one week since we launched the contest and there are already really good contenders for the free cards. You can check out all the entries at http://www.flickr.com/groups/abduzeedo/pool/tags/uprintingcontest/ , and below we’ll list some cards ;). There’s one more week for you to participate, so what are you waiting for?

Also we’re working on other new features, so there’s more to come. About the tutorials, this month we'll have more Pixelmator, Photoshop, Fireworks, and GIMP tutorials. So once again, we’d like to hear from you. Send us suggestions for tutorials, articles, and designers to feature on Abduzeedo.

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New features: Job Board

abduzeedo — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:04:50 +0000

It's been a few months since we started allowing readers to sign up for their own abduzeedo user account, and we are pleased to announce that almost 1,000 readers have signed up. We are very happy and want to continue improving the blog with good content and useful features for the design community.

We have tutorials, wallpapers, interviews, and user accounts, but now I'd like to introduce abduzeedo's latest feature: the job board.

We want to help companies in the design field find the best professionals for the job, and we also want to help readers find the job they're looking for. We hope you can make good use of this new feature and find the job board to be useful in whatever you're looking for.

Besides that, we're also working on other ways to make the site more social, allowing readers to be able to participate more.

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Announcement: Design Update and Abduct Posts

abduzeedo — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:58:00 +0000

I know we had just recently released a new design a few months ago, but the blog has since grown much more than we had expected. Now we have more contributors (which is fantastic!), more posts each day, and much more content in the whole site. And that’s why we had to update the site.

The new design, however, is not much different from the previous one. We just changed some areas we thought had problems like the footer. There is more content shown in that area now. We also removed the stars and reduced the headers height.

There are also some new features. One of them is the “abduct this post” allowing registered users to bookmark pages they like. Through this new feature we have now made it easier for you to find a tutorial or interview you saw and liked a long time ago.

Besides that, everybody can now register to the site. By doing this you will have a profile page where you can edit and use html code to even create a mini portfolio. You’ll also have your own “abducted” page where it’ll show all the pages you have abducted.

We are still working on these new features, and others. Our idea is to allow users to contribute more to the site, and even write articles. Because of that, now every contributor will have an area of 640x90 pixels in their posts. They will be able to sell that area, place banners, or even Google AdSense. Let us know if you want to be a contributor so we will provide you an account for that.

I hope you like the new design and feel free to send us suggestions and critics. All feedback is very welcome, we’d love to hear from you.

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MTV Engine Room for digital artists

marconi — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:13:52 +0000

This morning I've received an email talking about a new sort of reality show created by MTV and HP, it's called Engine Room. What's cool about this new show is that it's for digital artists from all around the world. So if you are a digital artist you definitely have to check it out, it's a great opportunity to show the world how talented you are . Besides, you will have the chance to become famous and have lots of fans.

"Engine Room" is a new MTV series which will be seen around the world.

Once selected, 16 people will be flown to New York City commencing on or about July 18, 2008 through on or about August 16, 2008 (collectively, the "Filming Dates"). They will compete in teams of 4 participants each for prizes by creating animations, websites, short films, sound mixes and more in the "Engine Room".

For more information visit the Engine Room website at http://www.mtvengineroom.com/.

June Announcements

abduzeedo — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:31:01 +0000

May is gone and we are in the middle of the year already. We’re very happy on how the blog is doing and we are working on some really nice features for the next months. Meanwhile, we have some announcements. First, we’d like to thank our sponsors: Flashloaded, Markup4you, Buytemplates.net, Studio7designs, W3 <markup/>, PSD2HTML, and Eletric Rain Swift3d. They have been great allowing us to keep the blog up and running.

About the tutorials, we have new Photoshop Tutorials coming and bellow we've listed 2 of them. Also we are working on more Illustrator, Pixelmator, Fireworks, and GIMP tutorials.

We also want to talk about the contributors. We’ve been accepting guest writers and we think that’s really good. So if you want to share your work, experiments, or ideas, and you think that might be useful to the design community, feel free to send us via email. We’d love to hear from you.

Besides that, we have a new contributor, and he is truly an amazing addition to our team. He’s Guilherme Marconi. You might already know him, even though, you can check bellow some of his fantastic work.

Thanks for visiting our blog, and we hope you keep coming.

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Round Two of UPrinting Contest Has Begun

abduzeedo — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:42:24 +0000

My friend Gino from youthedesigner.com told me that the round 2 of the UPrinting Contest has begun and the source images are available. It's a very nice contest, which by the way, I will be judging. So what are you waiting for?

Round two has begun and this time photo manipulation is the theme of the contest! Designers will create a poster design using one or more of the provided stock images from iStockphoto.com and text (of your choice) for a chance to win awesome prizes, including an iPhone and the chance to be featured in a full-page ad in PRINT Magazine!

If you would like to enter the poster design contest, please head over to the contest home page at YouTheDesigner.com and make sure to read the rules, then download the source images so you can begin your poster design! The contest is ending in a little over a week so be sure to get your poster designs in on time if you want to win the amazing prizes!

Last call for entries: May 29th, 2008

ENTER THE CONTEST

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News: Flickr group, t-shirt, and new tutorial

abduzeedo — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:05:01 +0000

April was a great month for Abduzeedo, we’ve got new sponsors, and we want to thank them for the support, also we were featured in some best of moth roundups, and our subscribers reached the 5k number, what is really awesome.

One of the news we want to announce for this month is that, as we’ve received some emails requesting a Flickr group, we now have the Abduzeedo’s group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/abduzeedo/pool/) on flickr and we invite you all to participate, showing designs and sharing ideas to the group.

Also we are working on some t-shirts, but as we run with a low budget we’re sort of beta testing this idea and looking for a good service to do the production and distribution. If anybody knows a good service, please let us know. Besides that, we are accepting suggestions for t-shirt designs as well, if you have any cool idea, submit it to the flickr group.

Now the last thing I want to show you is my new tutorial I'm working on, it’s about how to create an atomic explosion in Photoshop. I have to be honest, it’s not an easy task. And I’ve learned a lot from this exercise and hopefully it will be very useful to you as well.