Christine Seabo is an award winning graphic designer with extensive experience in print and web media, Seabo is a graduate of the Art Institute of Philadelphia and Rutgers School of Business. She is experienced with concept development where typography and imagery combine to create a unified message and generate a response. For example, Seabo designed a more accessible bilingual guide for Servicio Latinos with icons indicating bilingual phone support for social services. This created a 20% increase in participation.

“The application for design is evolving with digital technology, but the classic design
motto of ‘form, follow, function,’ still applies,” Seabo said. “We still have to understand the purpose behind the graphic and what response is expected.”

Check out these hauntingly photorealistic paintings by Dan Witz. At a first glance these appear to be photographs, but close scrutiny reveals the idiosyncratic nature of the paintbrush in his work. The choice of a mosh pit as subject matter is an interesting one – something that we never get to see frozen in time. Next to his other work, mostly revolving around night scenes, portraits, and still lifes, these mosh pit paintings are totally unique and, let’s be honest, kick serious ass. Beautiful light is the through-thread in all of his work.

Laura Lewis has a BFA in Jewelry/Metal/CAD-CAM from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. After a year of living abroad, she recently exhibited her handmade jewelry, Bunnies Love Cheese, at Design Fest in Tokyo, Japan. Her freelance experience includes creating custom holiday cards that were featured in Philadelphia Magazine.

Although jewelry is traditionally made of precious metals, Lewis finds learning new processes to be inspirational. When presented with a new medium, she wants to learn how it works and how she can personalize the process. She chooses to create pieces using 3-D printers, enamels or drawing on plastic. “I also tend to branch outside of jewelry and enjoy creating both graphic and product designs using the computer.”

by: Hinda Schuman
www.hindaschuman.net

Almost all digital images are photographed in color. It makes good sense to do so as then there is always the option of converting to black and white. In the old tri x days what was shot in black and white stayed in black and white unless you were interested in hand coloring. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 offers an easy way to make the conversion, and keep the color original while comparing the two images side by side.

by: Anthony Schull

The one addition to HTML5 that should excite designers and front-end developers the most is the canvas element. Canvas allows you to draw and animate 2D vectors in the browser without the use of Flash. The canvas itself is HTML and you manipulate it with JavaScript. It’s free to develop and users don’t need any software other than a browser to view it.

With Canvas, you can draw shapes, fills, gradients and strokes. You can even place bitmap images on the canvas and manipulate those. For more technical information you should check out Mark Pilgrim’s (free!) book Dive Into HTML5.

Conducted by Rob Craig

The Guggenheim Museum announced a shortlist of 125 YouTube videos that will be considered for inclusion in YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video.

This week, I was lucky enough to visit the studio of Kristin Kozlowski (or as I like to say, “Kristin Koz“) to peruse her new work and talk about upcoming projects. Kristin is a graduate of the University of the Arts in Painting and Drawing and she is working on her MFA at Pafa. Kristin Koz is teaching the watercolor class this fall in the Saturday School program and she currently has work up at Cafe Estelle in Northern Liberties.

Christina Hess graduated with a BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts and has been a freelance illustrator in the publication field for over 10 years. Specializing in digital illustration, both her professional and personal work currently reflect her education in traditional oils and collage mixed with her in-house experience in digital applications. She has experience in magazine, book and institutional markets.

“I strive to create an interesting image that is complex enough to bring people back for a second look,” she said. “I am always trying to find new and exciting ways to convey ideas and stories through my work.”