Canadian digital artist, james White, runs a studio and blog called SignalNoise. I’m a fan of his retro inspired artwork. He’s been featured in design mags and gives lectures on digital art.

James recently ran a competition giving his readers the chance to design and enter a retro inspired poster. I took part for the fun of it, and because i haven’t created for a personal project for a little while. Their was no big prize or exposure, just a fun and open brief to make something cool and old school. I really enjoyed creating this concept 80′s synthesizer advertising poster. I could imagine this running in New York subways and obscure electronic music magazines circa 1984.

The competition received over 130 entries, so winning was going to be tough. The winning design can be seen over at the SignalNoise blog.

More cool designs will come online as I create them. I want to stock a range of styles to reflect my passions and interests, so there will be type based designs, lots of vector illustrations, and eventually posters and wall art!

Feedback is welcomed and if anyone has any ideas they’d like to see on a Tee or Hoodie, then let me know.

Enjoy…

Yes, it’s an old video, but somehow I missed this demonstration. Using cheap, off the shelf consumer electronics, Jonny Lee has managed to create some amazing new applications and devices. The guy is a genius! If you haven’t seen this demo of his before you’re in for a treat.

Working with a mouse, as a designer, is not the most fluid and creative way to input to your computer. I used the Wacom Intuos tablet a few years ago when I worked in an Ad agency, and really missed the feeling of drawing and navigating with a pen. It was so much more like using a sketchbook rather than the dull point and click experience you get with a mouse. Mice are great for quick repetitive tasks such as data and text input, but quickly become bothersome when trying to retouch photo’s or draw organic shapes.

I really wanted to buy the new Wacom Intuos tablet, but the hefty price tag put me off. A recent trawl around my local Curry’s looking for printer ink introduced me to a brand new offering from Wacom at a third of the price. Tablets have come a long way since I last used one. The Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch is the same spec as my old Wacom Intuos, but now comes with touch sensitive tablet. This means you can also use your fingers on the surface of the tablet just as you would on a laptop touch pad. Multi touch input means it acts just like the new generation MacBook Pro’s. If you have an iPhone you’ll like this; as you can rotate, pinch zoom, 2 finger scroll and much more. You obviously also get the pen for drawing, retouching and handwriting recognition. If you set it up properly you’d actually never need to use your keyboard for text input – simply write with the pen.

I’m loving having a tablet again. It took me a few days to get used to it again. The addition of the touch interface is what sets it apart from other tablets. It isn’t as feature rich, or powerful as the new Intuos 4, but if you’re on a budget but still need a good all round performer, you can’t go wrong.

Six Revisions states that the trend has recently been revived by designer Tim Van Damme. It has spawned some lovely studies in UI design, most of them using smooth, eyecatching jQuery effects. It got me thinking to an old project I had on the backburner for a long time. My first website was setup way back in 2003, I’ve been using it as a bit of a testing ground, and I never really got a proper homepage up I was happy with. This was the exact thing I needed to put up there.

Since colourform is my main site now, things have moved on, but people do still end up at my old domain. This way I can direct them to my latest projects, social networks and have another point of contact besides colourform. The simple, minimal design would therefore serve as a hub to my web presence.

I did my research, learned a bit about jQuery, and came up with a nice simple metallic theme. I’m pleased with how it turned out and had fun designing the icons and skin. The contact icons are actually from my NetBats font which is available as a free download from this site. Here’s the finished design:

Visit antoneycalvert.com to see it in action.

Fontstruct allows designers to create custom typefaces using a web based interface. The app is powered by Flash and is well designed and totally stable.

It was a lot of fun and a real challenge to design these faces. Typography is a science and getting the right balance of forms for each face taught me a lot about constructing typefaces. This is a great learning tool as well as a boon for people wanting to make some cool type.

You can preview the entire set over at my FontStruct Page. There’s also a handy User Input feature that lets you see the font as you type.

Download the entire set of 6 typefaces, to use as you wish,  by clicking the link below:

Pixelounge Free Font Pack

After fiddling around with DJay for Mac, which I reviewed here a few months back, I decided that I needed a control surface. Using the trackpad and keys on my macbook was cool but I found myself wishing I had a physical mixer.

The USB powered X-Session Pro is a small, light unit that plugs into your laptop for instant plug n play goodness. Unfortunately, DJay doesn’t support this mixer at the moment, but it comes bundled with Torq Light Edition for free! The software is really good and works flawlessly with the mixer to give you total control as if you were using regular turntables or a CDJ. It will even beat match – although it still messes up sometimes, so your best off using your ears.

It feels great to have knobs and sliders again! It’s also reasonably priced at under £70. Check out Amazon for the best deals.

Awesome video by Tin Spider. Printer noises become a Drum n Bass track. Great animation married to samples. The way a good music video should be. Reminds me of the old HP LaserJet we had in the office which kept breaking down for no apparent reason.

I used to Dj for fun not so long ago – things like birthdays, house parties and the odd bar. Since moving away from my record collection; which is still crated up in my garage in London, I’ve really missed my decks and the experience of mixing. What I don’t miss is lugging 100 odd records half way across town and back. Thats where DJay caught my attention.

The first thing I noticed was the interface – more like what I was used to when using the real thing. This looks more like a DJ app than a technical sound engineering program. Also, having your entire iTunes library ready to go means bye bye to heavy record or CD cases.

A killer feature is the ability to use your MacBook trackpad to perform scratching, backspins and crossfader cutting. The software can also be paired to a USB hardware controller, although at the moment Algoriddim say that only the Vestax VCI-100 and VCM-100 are supported fully. I’m hoping they will add support for simpler and less expensive kit soon.

I’ll be playing with Djay and posting some mixes created using the software soon. So far it seems stable and responsive. What stands out for me is that you have to use your skill to mix – not rely on auto BPM and cueing functions. Oh, and did I mention it only costs €39.99!

Some dedicated San Franciscan Dj’s and Vinyl Junkies maintain an amazing blog dedicated to one of my favorite types of music. Back in the Late 70′s and early 80′s, the falling star of disco collided with the pioneering new electronic funk and soul to produce a new genre called Boogie!

The guys over at Beat Electric have dug pure gold from the crates. If you’re too young to remember this music or simply an old school record lover like me, then this is an invaluable resource.

Some of these tunes would never see the light of day again if it wasn’t for sites like these. Keep the music alive!