Silent Storms

Image from Stock Xchng

Don’t bother just to be bet­ter than your con­tem­po­raries or pre­de­ces­sors.
Try to be bet­ter than your­self. ~ Faulkner

I’ve been work­ing on improv­ing my graph­ics skills through chal­lenges at graph­ics forums, and while I’ve only made new graph­ics con­tain­ing celebrity pic­tures, thus not fit to post here, I believe I’m get­ting bet­ter. I’m cur­rently doing a 100 chal­lenge of Brunettes. I chal­lenge myself to make 100 graph­ics (of any type: icons, blends, ban­ners, etc.) con­tain­ing Brunettes. It’s really help­ing me to improve and I plan on doing another 100 chal­lenge on stock once I’m fin­ished, so that I’ll actu­ally be mak­ing stuff fit for post­ing here.

The peo­ple at graph­ics forums are really help­ful in giv­ing cri­tiques as well, and it’s really help­ing a lot. If you’re look­ing to improve your own graph­ics, I strongly rec­om­mend join­ing some! Some of them also con­tain writ­ing areas, in which you can do writ­ing chal­lenges and have your writ­ing cri­tiqued same as the graph­ics in the graph­ics part of the forum.

My favourite forums are:
Bleed Like Me — Graph­ics
Pandora’s Closet — Graph­ics
Red Car­pet & Rebel­lion — Graph­ics & Writ­ing
Shad­ow­play — Graph­ics & Writing

What is your favourite way of improv­ing your cre­ative works?

Ball­park is yet another one of my favourite fonts to use in big graph­ics such as site head­ers, blends and wallpapers.

Down­load it here.

Image my own

I hope every­one had a great Christ­mas, Han­nukah, Kwan­zaa, Yule or what­ever you celebrate(d)!

It seems every­where there are “best of 2009″ posts pop­ping up. I prob­a­bly would do the same, except I don’t have all that much con­tent to list yet. Nonethe­less, these are the note­wor­thy things from Silent Storms this year:

Tuto­r­ial: Mak­ing Link But­tons
Script: TCG Man­ager
Script: myPend­ing Manager

Because it’s such a short list, I did some pon­der­ing on what I want to do in 2010. I wanted to base it (at least partly) on my sur­vey from a while ago, but the answers were so all over the place it didn’t help as much as I’d hoped.

Based on the sur­vey, you are least inter­ested in my graphics-to-use (icons, wall­pa­pers), so, while I will keep mak­ing graph­ics for my own fun, I prob­a­bly won’t be putting every­thing up. There’s still plenty of other things I can do though. In 2010, I will:
– add to the exist­ing resources (stock pho­tos, tex­tures, but­tons)
– add new resources (pat­terns, lj over­rides, lay­outs, etc.)
– write arti­cles on basic design prin­ci­ples (such as colour the­ory, typog­ra­phy, etc)

I will prob­a­bly also write new tuto­ri­als and scripts, but I cur­rently have no new ideas for those yet. Some of you answered in the sur­vey that you’d like to see new tuto­ri­als and/or scripts, but didn’t let me know what you’d like to see, so I guess the tuto­ri­als and scripts will just be like this year: when­ever I find I or oth­ers need a script or I feel oth­ers could do with a tuto­r­ial for some­thing spe­cific, I will write it if I feel my skills are well enough for it. Requests are wel­come

Have a great New Year’s Eve and see you in 2010!